Casa Río: Teachings of the Flood

What is a river? The saying goes: “A river is what flows, and what emerges in its wake.”

A river is not only the deep current of the mainstem, but also the tributaries with all their branches and sources, the spreading and withdrawing waters, the gleaming wetlands and damp prairie soils. A river only stops at the limits of its watershed—in this case the La Plata basin, encompassing parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.

Casa Río is an eco-activist NGO using art as a transformative practice within grassroots communities. It’s first of all a real place—a “river house” and a “building power lab”—located among many alternative communities along the Río de la Plata estuary in Argentina, a short train ride south of Buenos Aires. But we are also part of a basin-wide alliance, Wetlands Without Borders, whose struggles for diverse inhabitants and alternative modes of development go back thirty years. Teachings of the Flood, an amplification of the Rivermap Atmosphere at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, offers an intimate look at the watershed today, after three decades of rapacious neoliberal development on the “soybean frontier” that sucks entire Latin American biomes into the world market.

The beautiful thing is that despite everything, the Paraguay-Paraná still flows without dams or levees over four thousand kilometers of open river, from the Pantanal wetlands to the South Atlantic ocean. This means the water still mixes with the soil in a seasonal flood-pulse, generating human ecological niches alongside natural ones. And this persistence is living proof of how many people struggled to preserve the river life, across national borders, languages, continents and decades. Casa Río engages with everyone who cares about the wetland environment. We produce art and information, draft and promote laws, carry out ecosocial restoration projects, organize and contribute to many local initiatives, support basin-wide demands in the framework of Wetlands Without Borders and collaborate with international peers and partners, all with the idea of opening up “biocultural corridors” between habitats that are inherently social and ecological. Art is reconceived and reenacted here, as a collective aesthetic encounter leading outward to an engagement with the surround, the land, the water, the others, the non-humans.

At the same time Teachings of the Flood constantly sees double: biocultural corridors are constantly presented in confrontation with the realities of corporate exploitation, the extractive corridors. The river’s deep channel is first among them. GMO grain pours out onto endless lines of deep-sea freighters plying the mainstem of the dredged and managed waterway. And everything else in the basin is engaged in the same industrial development path, in particular the distant forests at watershed’s edge, incinerated by devastating fires when not cut down for soybeans, feedlots or open-pit mines. The key idea behind this double mapping of present-day experience is that every territory is both biocultural and extractive all at once, neither refuge nor apocalypse but dramatic interplay of worlds.

The concept of “metabolic rift” became a keyword for us in recent years. It points to a world-market force that interrupts biogeochemical cycles at earth-system scale, with tangible consequences. Hillsides are scraped clean, deep holes are dug in the ground, massive dams are inexorably filled, giant propellors spin. Entire forests disappear in a year or a decade. Rivers flood as never before—or run dry with drought. You too will experience these things.

So come see double with us. Teachings of the Flood is about the present and the future. Try to imagine a distant land. Feel out your own local watershed. Find a way down to the river. Let it rain.

A curatorial proposal by Tamarind Rossetti and Stephen Wright.