The Sound of Wind Farming: Rethinking Clean Energy with Wayuu Cultural Practices

Abstract

Abstract: This article combines environmental humanities, legal studies, sound studies, and cultural studies to analyze how Wayuu poetry and film challenge conceptions of wind within the context of Colombia's energy transition. Based on an analysis of the poem " Tejiendo sueños " by Livio Suárez Urariyuu and the short film Somos hombres cascabel by Jorge Mario Suárez Iguarán, we discuss wind as a source of electric power in La Guajira. An aural perspective on Wayuu cultural products is adopted to trace links among sound, dreams, wind, and conceptions of cleanliness, renewability, and sustainability in contemporary climate-change discourse. Thinking with the poem and short film by Wayuu cultural producers, we interrogate wind energy's relationship to a neoextractivist logic; harnessed as part of Colombia's energy future, wind-based energy disrupts and pollutes La Guajira's soundscape and the Wayuu people's ability to dream. In so doing, wind turbines pose an existential threat and reinforce the relevance of the soundscape as the site of anticolonial struggles.