Of all of the major forms of energy generation that have decisively shaped the Earth, hydropower is one of the most elusive. For those unfamiliar with areas submerged for the creation of hydropower dams, these huge artificial lakes do not betray the immediately perceptible, glaring ugliness and devastation of a mining site or an oil field, for example. If it were not for the hydropower plant restructuring the view of the area, dams might be mistakenly seen by uninformed visitors as natural “wonders.” The manufactured blend of natural and technological spectacle they provide becomes more explicit when dams have tourist infrastructure in place — think, for example, of Itaipu dam, which can complement a visit to the popular tourist attraction Iguazu Falls on the border between Brazil and Argentina. The reservoirs behind other dams, such as Três Marias in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, serve recreational purposes such as swimming and kayaking, and yet others, such as Cocorobó in the site where the city of Canudos was destroyed by the army in 1896-1897, during Brazil’s early republican period, provide a politically convenient erasure of historical memory.1 In these and many other cases, dam reservoirs serve a myriad of other activities unrelated to energy generation in a peculiar way that is almost unparalleled by any other extractive industry or renewable source of energy. For those who did not follow the histories of dispossession and devastation that accompany dams, they may not produce repulsion or nostalgia. Even for those concerned about their impact, the immense bodies of water dams create may, in fact, prompt enthusiasm. Herein lies the main aesthetic problem I propose to investigate in this article.

Cheap energy is one of the Four Cheaps that, according to Jason Moore, sustain the capitalist world-ecology. Through a focus on “the forces of capital and empire that have cohered modern world history,”2 Moore questions the notion of “humanity as a collective agent” (Idem) implied by the concept of the Anthropocene and proposes the alternative notion of the Capitalocene.3 Capitalism, Moore argues, “does not have an ecological regime; it isan ecological regime,” and the intrinsic and mutual connection between capitalism and nature provides the double internality on which capitalism, understood as world-ecology, relies. This process is constituted through a constant and necessary expansion of capitalism’s appropriation of nature that turns it into “cheap nature,” i.e., into a component external to society ready to be transformed into resources: “through this praxis [of nature externalization] capitalist and territorialist agencies seek to create new Natures as objects of power and production, and as new and expanded sources of unpaid work/energy” (idem). Water, through the energy it generates as well as through other means, such as irrigation, constitutes one of what Moore calls the “free gifts of Nature” that participate in the dynamics of unpaid work and energy supply on which capitalist expansion is based. Just like oil or wood, water is made external, cheap nature in the Capitalocenic world-ecology.

While being appropriated in the same way as oil or wood, though, water often does not work as part of the same image regimen. Staple images of the current global environmental crisis, whether under Anthropocenic or Capitalocenic paradigms, include logged rainforests, such as clear-cut landscapes in the Amazon, oil spills in the ocean, of which the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an emblematic example, and the concentric circles of excavated land on mining sites. Such images are all immediately legible as signs of disaster, and no one needs to be fully informed about the histories of these particular places prior to their devastation in order to participate in the sense of urgency they mobilize. While being appropriated in the same way as oil or wood, though, water often does not work as part of the same image regimen.4 As already mentioned, for the unfamiliar visitor, dams and their reservoirs may look beautiful. They may be indistinguishable from lakes, including artificial lakes created for entertainment and landscaping. People may flock to dammed reservoirs to admire their serene waters and swim in them. Although the massive structures of concrete surrounding them give a sense of how water has been appropriated, dams may at first look less Capitalocenic than other kinds of cheap nature.

Dams, in fact, constitute a blind spot in Moore’s collapsing of the Four Cheaps, insofar as the infrastructural and cultural nexus within which dams operate make water not necessarily legible as cheap nature — even when it is cheap nature.5 The symbolic weight of water is explored both in modernizing views that appeal to the magnitude of large bodies of water as well as in narratives of resistance that activate local dynamics and non-Western cosmologies. All of these mobilize the larger cultural significance of water beyond the appropriation of nature by capital. In other words, while water is not valued economically if we follow Moore’s understanding of the law of value and the free labor of nature,6 it is culturally valued by those who celebrate as well as those who decry the creation of megadams.

In either case, megadams do cause massive disturbance across an area that, in general, is larger than the place where they are built and the land that they directly submerge. Dams generate what Rob Nixon has called a “spatial amnesia, as communities, under the banner of development, are physically and imaginatively removed” from the areas in which they lived.7 In a country like Brazil, whose electrical supply has been historically and massively generated by hydropower, dams are an integral component of the developmentalist ethos that marks Brazil’s Capitalocene in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The histories of those displaced and dispossessed, the death of wildlife, the destruction of communities, traditions, and forms of life — such effects are all no less drastic than those of the other extractive industries mentioned above. The “free” water filling the reservoirs that power such dams is cheap nature in its fullest expression. For this reason, the fact that dams produce crises while not so often producing images with the dramatic effect associated with crisis poses a crucial problem for those who, through books, cultural production, or media, attempt to convey their impact. This problem is also shared by scholars and critics as they write academic pieces such as the present one.

This article argues that cultural production on hydropower, for the reasons explained above, demands a particular set of critical tools that put into relief the process of narrativization that shapes works denouncing hydropower’s impact.8 In other words, a before-and-after story, or a sequence of events happening in time that express the changes caused by dams, or even a contrast with areas not yet flooded, all are paramount to the ways in which environmentally-engaged cultural expressions become compelling when dams are their subject.9 Max Haiven has argued that there is something sublime about water systems, which go beyond “our capacity for narrative,”10 whereas the megadam, as “the signature icon of Western modernity’s drive to conquer causality and to convince the ‘natural’ world to conform to the dictates of ‘progress,”11 thus constitutes “a poetic and potent moment in the political unconscious” (Idem). If megadams, by conquering causality, aim to overcome the cognitive challenges imposed by water systems, the process of narrativization I discuss here offers a counter-account to the master narrative of modernity fostered by megadam construction. Artists and activists, in presenting before-and-after stories, thus aim to disarm the totalizing narrative that combines a non-negotiable demand for energy with the usual geographical remoteness of megadams to present itself as inescapable. Such a gesture — while indirectly addressing Fredric Jameson’s call to “always historicize” and, in doing so, bringing to light some of the anxieties underlying developmentalist narratives around dams — primarily operates on a rather conscious, basic level. It is composed, quite simply, of acts of storytelling. Their reach may be limited as these narratives tend to circulate in more specialized spaces, such as museums and online niches, which are unlikely to reach the broad audience a massive protest may garner.12 They are, nevertheless, a common resource that aims, more than anything, to make visible. Because dams are most clearly perceived as causing devastation when the area as it was before their construction becomes visible, visual arts, literature, cinema, and other cultural forms tend to highlight the personal and collective narratives of the changes dams impose. Shock thus becomes aesthetically available when images of dams are framed within stories of how such a state of affairs came into being.

In order to investigate and reveal the narrative and aesthetic strategies of cultural production on dams, this article focuses on the work on Colombian visual artist Carolina Caycedo in the context of dam-building in Brazil. Her works explore three key components of the debates about the impact of megadams: the battle for visibility, the national framework underlying political and economic debates, and the exploration of storytelling and the linearity of textual experience as a way of conveying the environmental transformations at stake. I show that, turning away from earlier forms of environmentalism that were prevalent in the 1980s, Caycedo’s work encompasses two distinctive features of the artistic production of the 2010s: greater attention to women’s leadership and the experience of women, signaling a feminist — or rather ecofeminist — turn, and the relativization of the nation as a horizon for thinking about hydropower through the exploration of a continental history of shared violence.13 The work of Caycedo and other visual artists based outside of Brazil, instead of participating directly in grassroots movements and judicial battles, brings these struggles to international art circuits whose viewers are often less acquainted with the realities of dam-building in Latin America. Fully integrated in circuits of activist art, Caycedo’s work and the forms of visibility it activates also expand across multiple scales, ranging from larger networks to highly individual, even intimate engagements with the impact of dams. They circumvent the national framework discussed above by drawing attention to the materiality of rivers beyond national borders and in connection with other forms of sociality. Inversely, this expanded scope is complemented by a focus on personal experience, exploring a parallelism between individual lives and hydric histories. Before delving into her work, this article will provide more context on Brazilian dam-building in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The Brazilian Case

In 1988, the Centro da Memória da Eletricidade (Center for the Memory of Electricity), a research center created two years earlier by Eletrobrás, Brazil’s main electricity agency, published a comprehensive history of electrical production in the country. Titled Panorama do Setor de Energia Elétrica no Brasil(Panorama of the Electrical Energy Sector in Brazil), the book coupled a wealth of data covering about one hundred years of electricity in Brazil with a sober yet unmistakable sense of progress.14 The environmental and social impact of dams was mostly absent from the volume’s content, and the increased level of energy production made possible by the new dams clearly superseded, according to the book’s narrative, the drawbacks it entailed.15 Panorama came out in the midst of a momentous period in the debate about hydropower in Brazil. A few months later, in February of 1989, the I Encontro dos Povos Indígenas do Xingu gathered a number of Indigenous communities in a joint effort to stop a string of dams from being built on the Xingu River; the dams would have submerged hundreds of square miles of rainforest in the Amazon. This conference was widely covered by the media and drew decisive attention to the pause on which the project would be put for more than a decade. The conference was also the subject of an article in a special issue of the Revista Proposta,16 published in September of 1990 by the NGO Fase, which gathered a number of articles exposing the environmental and social impact of dams, interweaving the struggle for land justice with expanding environmentalist movements in Brazil.17

Considered side by side, Proposta and Panorama present some of the key issues at stake, at the time as well as still today, in Brazil’s longstanding reliance on hydropower for most of its energy generation: the narratives of progress fostered by successive waves of developmentalist policies, on one hand, and, on the other, the incommensurable ways in which megadams transformed the region, from the submersion of large areas, the mortality of fish and other animals, and the dispossession of local populations and precarious forms of life, both human and nonhuman. Taken together, thus, these two publications offer a snapshot of this highly consequential moment in Brazil’s contemporary history, which featured both the first free elections held in the country in more than 20 years and the establishment of its new constitution in 1989, from the viewpoint of the larger meaning of dam-building in Brazil, including the maintenance as well as the questioning of such narratives of progress. On one hand, the larger framework of development and its energetic cost continued to dictate environmental policies during and after redemocratization. On the other, the same progressive forces that drove the post-dictatorial years were, to a certain extent, sensitive to the problematic nature of a unilateral view of progress. As such, this moment also marks a crossroad in the history of megadams between those already built by that point, such as Itaipu Binacional, and those whose construction would be postponed until the 2000s, such as Belo Monte.

Current debates on the impact of hydropower megadams, in the environmental humanities and in environmental studies more broadly, have focused primarily on two notions: the issue of visibility and the role of national states which, in Latin America and other parts of the Global South, often embrace a developmentalist mindset. These two terms intersect in Rob Nixon’s foundational Slow Violence(2011), which defines the local populations displaced by publicly funded megadam construction as “unimagined communities” whose struggle tends to be rendered invisible.18 The many movements to make such communities’ situations seen and heard, of which the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (Movement of Dam Victims, MAB) is the most significant example in Brazil, are coupled with the work of activists, artists, and scholars committed to showcasing and giving voice to those displaced and affected by the building of megadams. Caycedo’s engagement with activism through her insertion of activists’ and victims’ perspectives in transnational art circuits, as outlined above, works side by side with the fight for visibility carried out by all these other interventions. In all cases, this struggle takes place alongside the heighted visibility of the dams themselves: unlike other pieces of infrastructure that, as Michael Rubenstein, Bruce Robbins, and Sophia Beal argue, tend to remain invisible,19 megadams are often widely advertised by their governments as symbols of development and imminent progress. This is what happened during Brazil’s military dictatorship when, as Fernanda de Souza Braga notes, hydropower plants were used as advertisements to sell optimistic views of the regime’s economic policies.20 This imperative of development kept being repeated after the transition to democracy: the very authorization for the construction of the Belo Monte dam in the 2000s was legally based on a law reminiscent of the dictatorship, which designated infrastructure projects as matters of national security.21 The many battles over the building of megadams, therefore, tend to highlight the divide between developmentalist politics that, across different governments and during both authoritarian and democratic rule, privilege infrastructure construction at any price, and politics that draw attention to the disproportional burden borne by displaced populations and dying flora and fauna in submerged areas, and to the environmental, economic, and social impacts in neighboring regions outside the most heavily affected places.

While the dams’ physical erasure of these lands through submersion functions as a powerful image of the erasure of multiple forms of life, the action of federal governments tends to remain the horizon against which resistance organizes. Taking a contrasting path, these governments’ publicity for hydropower plants relies instead on an imaginary that David Nye has called the “technological sublime,” a sublime based on feats of engineering.22 Because praise for large-scale public works such as megadams has been primarily sponsored by public funds, either directly or through public-private partnerships, popular forms of resistance have also tended to rely on a national framework that, after redemocratization, became increasingly focused on the action of federal governments. If, as Jason Moore and Raj Patel argue, state intervention and support are key to keeping energy cheap,23 it is only to be expected that federal governments, often even more than the private corporations executing the work, will be the main loci of dispute. This situation became especially dramatic in the case of governments such as those of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), whose historical commitment to social movements and popular representation was at odds with the autocratic legal means required to make a plant like Belo Monte a reality.24 Such a struggle for recognition and visibility is also a struggle to restore Nixon’s “unimagined communities” to Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” — that is, to recover the ability for these communities to participate in the democratic process as citizens instead of being seen as “surplus people,” still in Nixon’s words, whose voice must be erased to cede space to megadams. Furthermore, the many shapes popular environmentalisms have taken in Latin America — from the notion of buen vivirand the attention to the rights of nature to the defense of communal forms of understanding the nexus between humans and nonhumans — constitute the tendency Maristella Svampa defines as “ecoterritorial.”25 Thus, the national framework in which debates about the feasibility, impact, and unequal benefits of megadams in activist movements and related artistic production take place has recently expanded to include a more nuanced notion of citizenship encompassing a variety of cosmopolitical forms.26

Carolina Caycedo: Dams as Constellations

Among contemporary Latin American visual artists who combine artistic practice with environmental concerns and a keen attention to grassroots environmental justice movements, Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo stands out for the critical depth and aesthetic diversity of her engagement with the effects of hydropower across the continent, with special attention to the lives of rivers and the human and nonhuman inhabitants of their surroundings. Born in London in 1978 and now living in Los Angeles, Caycedo made the Colombian Magdalena River the ground zero of her exploration of hydric realities before gradually expanding the reach of her work to a myriad of rivers across the Americas. Together, these explorations constitute the centerpiece of her work: the long and ongoing project titled BE DAMMED.27 Composed of more than a dozen works, including visual arts, performances, videos, and other forms, this project offers a sharp exploration of the importance of increasing visibility, rethinking national frameworks, and providing narratives of change in the context of dams’ impact.

From the walls of the El Quimbo dam on the Magdalena, which inspired her earlier pieces for this project, to the drawings and “geochoreographies” that draw attention to Indigenous cosmogonies that persist and animate local, alternative engagements with the Yuma River (the Indigenous name for the Magdalena) and many other rivers in Mexico, Brazil, and the United States, BE DAMMED is defined on Caycedo’s website as a project that “investigates the effects that large dams have on natural and social landscapes in several American bio-regions.”28 The multiplicity of self-sufficient yet interconnected works that comprise this project invite modes of attention and participation that include both embodied experience and an attention to the stories told by affected populations. Performances such as the aforementioned “geochoreographies,” for example, invite participants to integrate their bodies with the shores of rivers, such as the Yuma or Magdalena, and, surrounded by earth and water, to collectively spell out phrases, such as “Ríos vivos” and “Yuma resiste,” with their bodies. The work YUMA, or the Land of Friends(2014) provides large-scale satellite images that, while at first glance similar to Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism, confront the viewer with the geophysical impact of dams such as those on the Yuma and Itaipu. By relying on large-scale imaging from above, these two works crucially address the urge to make these realities visible — an urge present across activist movements that becomes formally embodied in the magnifying effect on which these works rely and politically meaningful as the stories behind the dams’ creation are told in explanatory subtitles.

Other works operate on a smaller scale in order to focus precisely on the many stories behind the shock that the geochoreographies and satellite images provoke. Videos such as To Stop Being a Threat and to Become a Promise (2017) and A gente rio (2016) explore the realities behind such interventions, either through interviews with local inhabitants affected by dams or through the shock produced by juxtaposing images of affected areas with images of the same landscapes before dam construction, among other strategies. These and other works, as Macarena Gómez-Barris concludes, do “a kind of mapping of power that uncovers the epistemological, material, and bodily violence that thwarts biological violence”29 of the extractive zone, and that, in doing so, brings attention to these “submerged perspectives and movements” (Idem). To bring such submerged perspectives to light, I contend, means foregrounding the nexus between their structural invisibility and their circumstantial submersion as voices resistant to Capitalocenic hydropower dams. It means, in other words, narrativizing them.

Displayed in the 32nd São Paulo Biennial together with the large-scale satellite image of the Itaipu dam, A gente rio blends documentary about victims of dams with a more poetic exploration of their impact. It opens with what would become an iconic poem on hydropower, Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “Adeus a Sete Quedas” (1982), which laments the submersion of the waterfalls known as Seven Falls by the dam. In Caycedo’s work, the poem is read from beginning to end as images of waters flowing, “gelid” interiors of power plants, and a fisherman on his boat alternate in an experimental introduction to the more straightforward style of the rest of the video. For Drummond, the production of electrical energy and Brazil’s developmentalist ethos are fundamentally tied to the loss of the uniqueness of a nature understood in monumentalizing terms. Published in the Jornal do Brasil on September 9, 1982, the day that the dam’s barriers were closed and water began to submerge the falls, the poem activates an elegiac language that refuses to accept the loss of the waterfalls. At the same time, Drummond pays relatively little attention to displaced populations — a neglect that was more common in this period than it is in the early twenty-first century. In “Adeus a Sete Quedas,” the waterfalls themselves occupy the position of the displaced populations who continue to demand recognition of their presence. The poem’s rejection and denunciation of this “dissolution” of the waterfall’s natural sculptures into the fungible resource of water, in this case, is conveyed through an ironic reinvention of technocratic vocabulary at the heart of Drummond’s environmental poetics. It is by affirming the waterfall’s singularity — by assigning it an auratic status — that Drummond is able to lament its submersion “os sete fantasmas” of “a vida / que nunca mais renascerá” (“seven ghosts, seven crimes / of the living pummeling life / that will never be reborn”).30 Caycedo benefits from Drummond’s legacy at the same time as she addresses its limits.

The more dramatic undertones of this poetic opening in A gente rio provide a bridge from the elegiac tone of 1980s environmental art on megadams to the stories and commentaries of those affected, interspersed with images of rivers, fish, and modes of living, that dominate Caycedo’s own 2010s approach in this work. After the fisherman talks about how fishing became nearly impossible after Itaipu (5’08”-6’26”), the video moves to images of and interviews with peoples and places in two other situations. The first is the catastrophic rupture of the Fundão tailings dam on the Rio Doce in Minas Gerais in 2017, which released a flood of toxic mining waste (6’40”-15’43”), and the other is the apprehension surrounding the then still unbuilt dam in the Vale do Ribeira in São Paulo, which would displace quilombola communities, descendants of slaves who ran away to live in forested areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (15’44”-20’43”).Finally, the video concludes with a section on Belo Monte, the megadam built in the Amazonian state of Pará in the 2010s that generated a broad, international public outcry. Images of fishing, instructions on how to use an oar, reflections on the pan-Amazonian myth of the Big Snake, and images of life by the river are replaced with images of a protest by displaced populations, precarious housing, and the dam itself. The narration is mostly provided by Antonia Melo, prominent activist and leader of the Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre (Movement Xingu Alive Forever), who exposes again the disregard for environmental laws that made construction of the dam possible and the dictatorial attitude that guided the process (20’44”-29’08”). Curiously, a sign in one of the images of the protest says “Não ao golpe” (27’29”-27’31”), a rejection of the legally controversial impeachment of then-president Dilma Rousseff, who had, ironically, pushed hard to build Belo Monte because, in her words, “water is free.”31 An objective, almost technical description of the legal hurdles and precarious situation faced by those displaced by and protesting Belo Monte is made more intense through the use of images not only of the dam, but also of the river full of trash and wooden shacks teetering unstably above the water.

A gente rio ostensibly aims to make visible the points of view of those rendered “surplus people,” in Nixon’s words. It aims to give them a voice and, instead of drawing an overarching narrative of their lives, focuses on a few meaningful aspects of how their lives have changed —such as how some of them extracted small amounts of gold from the now dead Doce River or how others used an oar to navigate the Xingu River. By focusing on these small bits of personal experience, the video creates a polyphonic effect that emphasizes human and nonhuman entanglements — that is, the ways rivers become culturally meaningful not as natural wonders to be admired from afar, but as components in larger forms of sociality. In doing so, the story the video aims to tell is not about the effects of the human species as whole, but rather about how certain appropriations of natural resources entail larger impacts. It aims to make visible to viewers the many narratives programmatically erased by the developmentalist ethos that turns energy generation into a national priority capable of offsetting discussions about the human and environmental costs of specific sources of energy that are too easily assumed to be “free.”32

More than that, A gente rio’s structure subtly informs the viewer about the very changes in attitude surrounding debates about hydropower across the decades, thus making space, narratively, for the Capitalocenic framework with which the video concludes. It opens with Itaipu, Brazil’s first megadam, and ends with Belo Monte, one of the country’s most recent and iconic megadams. On one hand, the portion on Itaipu is marked by the elegiac tone of Drummond’s poem and fundamentally rendered through images of large expanses of flowing water, thus relying primarily on an aestheticizing effect that puts viewers at a distance from the water and is only partially broken by the fisherman’s story. On the other, the last part of the video, on Belo Monte, participates in a contemporary production in which technical lingo about the political and energetic rationales — or lack thereof — for dam-building are fully integrated into the narrative, so that the story of dam construction is the story of the humans and nonhumans involved as they are imbricated in the story of the river. By giving voice to Drummond in the opening and to Melo at the end, A gente rio also replicates the historical arc of how representation of hydropower has evolved in Brazilian cultural production from the 1980s to the present. It is, in other words, a history of how the technical vocabulary behind hydropower ceased to be simply ridiculed as empty political parlance in Drummond’s poem, instead becoming enmeshed in how dams are culturally perceived.

The materials collected for A gente rio also reappear in Serpent River Book (2017), which is one of the most intriguing and commented-on components of the BE DAMMED project. A 72-page accordion-fold book, it can be opened, folded, and displayed in numerous ways, but in exhibitions it is usually partially unfolded so as to take the winding shape of a river — or a serpent. Far from random, the folding that gives the book this shape follows the circumference of a map of the Berlin Wall.33 While one side of the book focuses on images and the other one combines images with texts such as poems, short essays, technical texts, and manifesto-like interventions, both sides work together to illustrate a multiplicity of ways in which rivers live and allow other forms of life to thrive in them or along their banks. Both sides thus focus on Indigenous cosmogonies related to rivers, activities such as fishing, and multiple modalities of affective engagement with rivers, at the same time as the book narrates the gradual technical appropriation of the courses of rivers and the consequences of multiplying hydropower projects across the Americas, thus presenting rivers, in Lisa Blackmore’s words, as “multi-temporal ‘organic machines.’”34 By including the Xingu in a larger reflection on the life of rivers and the lives they make possible, as well as by presenting Belo Monte alongside other dams and their impact in the Americas, this work inserts Belo Monte into a broader framework of hydropower and dam-building.

Figure 1. Carolina Caycedo.Serpent River Book. Installation View atA Universal History of Infamy, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: David de Rozas

Therefore, although the book’s accordion shape allows for exhibition of all its pages at once, which privileges a spatial apprehension of its totality akin to the satellite view of a river, the narration of environmental loss and epistemicide that unfolds across its pages takes advantage of the book’s linearity to convey these hydric histories.35 By interspersing individual stories, collective myths, information on rivers, engineering plans, reports, and other pieces of data across the line of pages that composes the work, Caycedo invites a narrative form of engagement with the content that works alongside its spatiality. In doing so, the book draws attention to the very historicity of rivers, understood not merely as bodies of water but as communal sites that shape and are shaped by humans and nonhumans alike. Hydropower is but one factor, albeit a highly impactful one, in these longer histories. The work’s materiality imitates its subject matter, the river, when it is displayed in the linear, open fashion usually adopted in exhibits, while allowing, inversely, for the narratives these rivers encompass to come to the fore when the work is conventionally read as a book, its folds actually or imaginatively turned like pages. Moreover, the temporality of these histories across the Americas, coupled with the materiality of the book-river, make the case for an engagement with the rivers’ geographical materiality that does not conform to national boundaries, but sprawls across the continent. This is one of the main ways in which Caycedo challenges the national framework under which hydropower projects typically treat rivers: she focuses instead on the extra-national courses of rivers as well as on the local and shared histories of hydropower plants’ impacts, regardless of the national boundaries in which they unfold.

The close connection between bodies of water and the bodies of women appears in the book’s closing essay, “Hunger as a Teacher,” in which Caycedo narrates some of her travels to areas affected by dams and describes women she met in her travels who, through a variety of means, have contributed to local forms of resistance. The title is borrowed from the words of Raymunda, a fisherwoman displaced by the construction of Belo Monte. Together with the words, the struggle, and the example of Raymunda and many others, this last essay provides a cohesive sense of closure to a book that, in spite of its clear thematic unity, largely focuses on discursive multiplicity. And such cohesiveness is to be found precisely through the voices of these women and the similar experiences that they share despite their geographical distance and varied sociopolitical positions. The encounters that compose Caycedo’s account suggest the possibility, in the midst of the many conflicting viewpoints found throughout the book, of finding a cogent epistemological position from which an inquiry into the meaning and consequences of the damming of rivers can emerge — a position from which the many voices interilluminate each other rather than simply being juxtaposed, as in the book’s collage of texts and images.

This essay — and, consequently, the book — concludes on a personal note, with a deepening of Caycedo’s reflection on how walls, dams, and flux might be shared by these and many other women. In her words:

When I had my intrauterine device removed in 2013, I felt that any internal or external dam, regardless of its size, can be removed or dismantled. […] When I held the device in my hand, its T-shape evoked certain blueprints for the building of dams. The ‘T’ and its copper sheath reminded me of electricity transmission towers and of the materials and substances which transmit electricity, energy and power in my body. I thought of my body as a field of learning. My body, my territory.36

Although, in their most literal sense, these sentences deal with what we may assume to be a personal choice rather than an imposed destruction of her modes of living, these final remarks promote a multiscalar perspective that, by drawing a metaphoric relationship between her female body and the body of the earth, indirectly alludes to divine female figures of the planet from Andean cosmogonies that remain popular in twenty-first-century environmentalisms, such as Pachamama.37 Caycedo does so by activating the feminist mottos that affirm women’s ownership of their own bodies, now extended to resonate with the territorial struggles involved in the establishment of and resistance to hydropower.

At the same time, the intrauterine device’s resemblance to an electricity transmission tower alludes back to the primary purpose of hydropower — to produce electricity — while drawing attention to the sources of that power, whose existence is made visible to us by the dam but largely precedes the building of it. As such, the meaning of electricity, more than a fact of contemporary life, is expanded to include the vital energy needed to live and reproduce. This passage might point to the limits of Caycedo’s metaphoric gesture, which starts with the work’s very title and ends with what could be read as a puzzling celebration of hydropower through its positive association with an object made to enhance women’s agency over their bodies — the IUD. The alternative interpretation I want to propose, however, points to a resignification of the very concept of energy within Capitalocenic energy regimes — one that stands in productive tension with them. In this case, the reproductive rights implied by the artist’s choice to use the intrauterine device do not merely cast the electricity transmission tower as an index of the technological transformations of a foreign, antagonistic place, but rather breaks with the world-ecology view of energy as one of the four cheaps in order to recuperate a deeper sense of vital energy. The metaphoric reinvention of the IUD as an electricity tower and ultimately as bodily energy, consequently, offers an understanding of energy that goes beyond capitalist appropriation. As such, the integration of the IUD-turned-electricity-tower into Caycedo’s bodily territory allows for an undoing of the Anthropocene as “a gendered concept uncritically reflecting the heteropatriarchical order,”38 which makes possible a non-binary approach, as Stefania Barca proposes, to the forces of reproduction that maintain life and are excluded from the forces of production upon which the Anthropocenic “master narrative of modernity” is predicated.39

Conclusion

Hydropower, as this article has shown, poses challenges to the contemporary imaginative framework surrounding the global environmental crisis. Once dams are built, the transformations they entail are not as immediately apprehensible as in a mining site or oil field, for example. In fact, even cleaner sources of energy, such as solar and wind ones, may be imaginatively more prone to draw attention to the crisis than the serenity of those artificial lakes and rivers. There are, however, many ways of reimagining both the areas submersed by the building of dams and the peoples turned into “surplus people” who are displaced by them. In contemporary cultural production on the Brazilian and largely on South American contexts, these modes of reimagination tend to rely on a process of narrativization that, more than mourning for the loss of natural beauty, as Drummond had done, aim to keep alive the violence dams imposed on the areas in which they are built. Amongst these voices, Caycedo’s stands out as a good example of how these gestures of narrativization, covering a wide geographical and cultural span, can be made visible in circuits of contemporary art. In spite of their limitations, the cases examined in this article show how BE DAMMED inserts the Xingu and other rivers, those who depend on them, and the building of Belo Monte and other dams into multiple layers of signification that amplify movements of resistance to the dam while opening new avenues for critically contextualizing them, from the most intimate scale to a continental one.

1. It must be noted, however, that the Açude de Cocorobó, unlike the others, was built to provide water for irrigation purposes and not for hydropower.
2. Jason Moore, Capitalism and the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2016) 171.
3. In a few words, the Anthropocene is the possible new geological epoch in which humans have become geological agents or, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s well-known formulation, for the moment when “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009) 201. There are many plausible beginnings for the Anthropocene: the industrial revolution, the European colonization of the Americas, and the Great Acceleration, among others. Moore, in contrast, argues that “[h]umans produce intra-species differentiations, which are fundamental to our history: inequalities of class especially, inflected by all manner of gendered and racialized cosmologies” (172). More recently, Chakrabarty responded to Moore by noting, among other things, that “[t]he insights of the proponents of the Capitalocene and the posthumanists are important and have to be taken on board, but we need to go beyond the story of original ‘sins’ of capital/labor and nature/culture distinctions to understand the human attachment to ‘thin descriptions’ of nature and thus to modernization.” Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) 113.Moore, Capitalism 112, Moore’s emphasis.
4. For a study on how literary and other artistic forms bring visibility (or not) to areas such as the Niger Delta, which was greatly affected by oil extraction, see Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).
5. The Four Cheaps are “a rising stream of low-cost food, labor-power, energy, and raw materials to the factory gates.” Capitalism 53.
6. See Capitalism, chapter 2.
7. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011) 151.
8. For a study, from another perspective, of the imbrication of representational practices, cultural history, and the political dimension of the building of megadams, see Corey Byrnes, Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
9. Albeit focusing on a larger temporal span, Lisa Blackmore draws attention to the temporal dimension of hydropower when she states, in dialogue with Martin Heidegger, that, “[I]mplicit in this notion of revealing(poises) is the idea that hydraulic infrastructures materialize aesthetically the temporal affects attached to resource imaginations, as well as evincing the power relations that underpin them.” Lisa Blackmore, “Turbulent River Times: Art and Hydropower in Latin America’s Extractive Zones,” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art, ed. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez (New York: Routledge, 2020) 17.
10. Max Haiven, “The Dammed of the Earth: Reading the Mega-Dam for the Political Unconscious of Globalization,” Thinking with Water, ed. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013) 219.
11. Haiven, “The Dammed” 221.
12. For analyses of other types of narrative engagement with the impact of dams and, more specifically, of Belo Monte, such as the work of arpilleristas in Brazil’s Movement of Dam Victims or Maria José Silveira’s novel Maria Altamira (2020), see my forthcoming article, “Reimagining Hydropower: Ecofeminist and Transnational Perspectives on Belo Monte,” The Environment in Brazilian Culture, ed. Patricia Vieira (Gainsville: University of Florida Press).
13. For further discussion of this ecofeminist turn in the contemporary cultural production on Belo Monte, see Saramago, “Reimagining Hydropower.”
14. See Centro da Memória da Eletricidade no Brasil, Panorama do Setor de Energia Elétrica no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Memória da Eletricidade, 1988).
15. A new and expanded edition published in 2006 devotes some attention to these issues. In the case of Itaipu, for example, the rescue of wild animals, known as Mymba Kuera in the Guarani language, receives a whole paragraph (389), and the submersion of the Sete Quedas waterfalls discussed below is listed as one of the dam’s negative impacts (Idem). The displacement of the Ava-Guarani and other local populations are briefly mentioned with no explanation regarding the process of removal and protests (389-90). See Centro da Memória da Eletricidade no Brasil, Panorama do Setor de Energia Elétrica no Brasil, 2nd edition (Rio de Janeiro: Memória da Eletricidade, 2006).
16. Proposta: Experiências em educação popular. Dossier: “Barragens: Questão ambiental e luta pela terra” Rio de Janeiro. 46 (1990).
17. The special issue gives prominent space to the nascent Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB, Movement of Dam Victims), which was founded in the context of populations displaced by the building of Itaipu and has become one of the largest social movements in Brazil today. The issue’s articles covered a wide geographical range so as to show how widespread the problem was and gave voice to Indigenous and Quilombola communities.
18. See chapter five of Nixon, Slow Violence. Both categories also meet in Sharae Deckard’s analysis of hydrofictions from South Africa, in which she concludes that “[t]he dialectical tension between visibilisation and containment which I have traced in the two hydrofictions in this section can be seen at the level of form and the tendency towards plots that conclude in ideological recontainments of the political prospects intimated earlier in the narratives, and can be understood, I have suggested, as embodying the political unconscious of the crisis of the neo-liberal hydrological regime.” Sharae Deckard, “Waiting for the Master’s Dam to Crack”: Hydro-Dependency, Water Autonomy and World Literature,” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, v. 103 (2021) 154-155.
19. Michael Rubenstein, Bruce Robbins, and Sophia Beal, “Infrastructuralism: An Introduction.” Modern Fiction Studies 61.4 (2015): 575-586.
20. In Braga’s words, “As usinas hidrelétricas, como grandes projetos de engenharia, foram utilizadas comoum desses ícones do “Brasil grande” e do poder dos militares. As usinas hidrelétricas, nessaleitura, funcionaram quase como um elo de ligação entre o desenvolvimento e as potencialidades naturais do Brasil.” Fernanda de Souza Braga, A ditadura militar e a governança da água no Brasil: Ideologia, poderes politico-econômico e sociedade civil na construção das hidrelétricas de grande porte (Leiden: CRC Press/Balkema, 2020) 118.
21. For an overview of the “Suspensão de segurança” as a legal mechanism employed in the building of Belo Monte, see Ed Atkins, Contesting Hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon (London and New York: Routledge, 2021) 77-81. Because Belo Monte is a run-of-the-river plant, its dam submerged a smaller area than originally planned, but nevertheless entailed the deep changes analyzed in the following sections.
22. The technological sublime, in Nye’s words, “dissolved the distinction between natural and artificial sites.” David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994) 152.
23. Jason Moore and Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018) 98.
24. For an overview of this process in connection with social movements, see Idelber Avelar and Moysés Pinto Neto, “Energia limpa e limpeza étnica: As condições discursivas, jurídicas e políticas do ecocídio de Belo Monte.” Luso-Brazilian Review 57.1 (2020): 150-171, also reproduced in Idelber Avelar, Eles em nós: Retórica e antagonismo político no Brasil so século XXI (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2021).
25. According to Svampa, “Los diferentes tópicos del giro ecoterritorial dan cuenta de la emergencia de una nueva gramática de las luchas, de la gestación de un lenguaje alternativo de fuerte resonancia al interior del espacio latinoamericano de las luchas, de un marco común de significaciones que articula luchas indígenas y nuevas militancias territoriales-ecológicas y feministas, que apuntan a la expansión de las fronteras del derecho, en clara oposición al modelo dominante.” Maristella Svampa, Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina: Conflictos ambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias (Guadalajara: Maria Sybilla Merian Center, 2019) 57.
26. See Marisol de la Cadena for a study of how, in the Peruvian Andes, earth-beings (tirakuna) such as mountains and rivers, living together in the world of the ayllus with humans (runakuna), can offer alternatives to modern politics by composing “cosmopolitical moments with a capacity to irritate the universal and provincialize nature and culture.” Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) 279.
27. Information on the various artworks and interventions that compose this project can be found on the artist’s website.http://carolinacaycedo.com
28. See http://carolinacaycedo.com/be-dammed-ongoing-project.
29. Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) 96.
30. Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Adeus a Sete Quedas,” Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, September 9 (1982) 8. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/DocReader.aspx?bib=030015_10&Pesq=%22Sete%20Quedas%20poderia%20ser%20salva%22&pagfis=49297 and, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Farewell to Sete Quedas,” The Latin American Ecocultural Reader, ed. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes, trans. Charles Perrone (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020) 251.
31. The argument that hydropower is cheaper because water is free was famously made by Rousseff at the United Nations’ COP 21 in 2015. See, for example, Bruno Góes, “Dilma sugere ‘estoque de vento’ e vira piada na internet,” O Globo, October 10, 2015. https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/dilma-sugere-estoque-de-vento-vira-piada-na-internet-17744645.
32. For a study of how the almost religious imperative of development uprooted local communities and demanded that they sacrifice their modes of living in favor of modernization, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
33. For Caycedo’s explanation of the work’s structure and its connection with the Berlin Wall, see the video included in the presentation of this work. http://carolinacaycedo.com/serpent-river-book
34. In Blackmore’s words, “[r]ivers, in this perspective, are not linear phenomena but multi-temporal ‘organic machines’ whose liquid flows and structures of containment are assemblages of ancient organic matter and life forms, modern technologies and economies, all mixed together.” Blackmore, “Turbulent River Times” 29.
35. I understand epistemicide according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s definition, which is, in a few words, “the murder of knowledge” (92), or more precisely of all the alternative forms of knowledge that are replaced by “[t]he epistemological privilege of modern science” (152). Epistemicide — a process very evident in the Indigenous communities living in areas near Belo Monte — “involves the destruction of the social practices and the disqualification of the social agents that operate according to such knowledges” (153). See Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (New York: Routledge, 2014).
36. Carolina Caycedo, Libro río serpiente (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2018).
37. Pachamama, or its Spanish equivalent, Madre Tierra, has also been at the center of the “earth jurisprudence” that emerged in the early twenty-first century and was adopted in Ecuador’s constitution and in Bolivia, which opens juridical avenues for recognizing nonhuman rights. On earth jurisprudence, see, for example, David Humphreys, “Rights of Pachamama: The Emergence of an Earth Jurisprudence in the Americas,” Journal of International Relations and Development 20 (2017): 459-484. For an approach to the rights of nature that includes environmental legislation in Brazil, see Zelma Tolentino and Liziane Oliveira, “Pachamama e o direito à vida: uma reflexão na perspectiva to novo constitucionalismo latino americano” Veredas do Direito 12.23 (2015): 313-335.
38. Stefania Barca, Forces of Reproduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) 36.
39. According to Barca, this critique of the Anthropocene as gendered “allows us to rethink the forces of reproduction from non-binary and also more-than-human perspectives: they start to be seen as not simply coinciding with the colonized and feminized unpaid work of producing and caring for life, but as a collective of earthcare composed of all those subjects who are engaged in resisting the master version of modernity by countering the subordination of life to social imperatives of production/accumulation.” Barca, Forces 38.