The Many Names and Shapes of Water: Emergent Narratives on a Non-existing Water Body in Latin America

Abstract

In a well-known narrative, a body of water intertwined with a suburban landscape in a town near Bogotá, Colombia's capital, is menaced by an expansive real estate industry. This paper offers a historical view on how the marshlands in and around Bogotá were dried. It examines how certain technologies captured, governed, and instrumentalised water. However, water manages to slip through these technologies, defying colonial relations but also falling into certain technoscientific classifications. Consequently, this work aims to go beyond colonial taxonomies of water and nature by focusing on the entanglements of both human and non-human actors through a multispecies ethnography. This allows us to delve deeper into the ways in which water, as a life force, provides the conditions for a rich and biodiverse assembling, letting us be part and witnesses of narratives that challenge the traditional views of Earth and the relationships between humans and the environment, also known as Gaia stories ( Haraway 2019 ). To conclude, we propose an exercise of political imagination through a situated story that helps us imagine a multispecies flourishing future that provides us clues for knitting a more just future for all of us.