From those stories a Colombian hydrology of the past, present, and future emerges. We gather the experience and situated knowledge of local inhabitants of diverse places, from Barú to the Amazon, going through the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, among others. We tell the stories of people, plants, and animals from different regions, generations, and disciplines. We get together to make a multitude of voices resonate in concert for one night. The rivers and bodies of water in Colombia are cemeteries of countless victims, strategic combat zones, and contaminated territories. However, they are also places that keep our collective memory and provide life, sustenance, and resistance. We talk about the political and legal aspects of water; rivers as subjects of law; and the limits of paramos, natural parks, and marshes. We embrace conflicts between amphibious cultures and infrastructure, extractive, and hydroelectric projects. We discuss contemporary and future scenarios without water or situations in which water is dangerously found in the wrong places.
“In a context of national political transition, this artistic initiative is also an invitation to experience the importance of dialogue, the encounter of voices and perspectives, in a society where a profound and transformative exercise of listening has become urgent. The Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge is a model, a social hypothesis: it is a fictional space where people meet each other as if everyone had a burning common interest in the most complex and contradictory experiences of others, listening to each other until we become a community of listening”. Marta Ruiz (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición)