Dry Water is the first installment of a bilingual, multichannel video opera installation that explores water governance in Chile, the most water-stressed country in Latin America.
Loosely following the opera format, Dry Water is presented as a choral storytelling that has acts, scenes, and a varied cast of characters. Dry Water is also an investigation into the poetics of water governance, looking for the forms that governance acquires and the types of engagements with those forms. With an emphasis on language, local testimonies are put in conversation with financial brochures, critical literature on water financialization and archival research into the genealogy of water privatization. These many forms are presented through video portraits, poetic short texts and dialogues, and sound design.
Challenging notions of value, financial imagination is in this artwork at the service of a decolonial tale under critical environmental conditions. It shows a mottled landscape where desertification is conjured with religious processions, wealth coexists with dispossession, and value grows in recycled plastic bottles.
This preliminary version was developed with the support of the Governing Through Design initiative, under the Against Catastrophe project. See the Water Sovereignties dispatch, that also has art by Solveig Qu Suess, and texts by Michael Pryke, Meera Karunananthan & Marcela Olivera, Andrew Alan Johnson, and Jerome Whitington.
Scenes
(samples)
