News
Inspiring counter-mapping initiative Travelling Rivers in Colombia and Ecuador
The Riverhood and River Commons projects (coordinated by the WRM chair group) have – together with local partners, activist leaders, artists and communities – facilitated the traveling of six rivers through the bottom-up counter-mapping initiative Rios Viajeros-Travelling Rivers.
From April to June this year, fisher and peasant communities, social movements and activists-artists María Benítez and Vanessa Roa, and researchers from the Riverhood and River Commons projects, engaged in local counter-mapping workshops in six rivers: the Magdalena (case study of PhD researcher Juliana Forigua), La Miel (Ana Maria Arbelaez), Bogotá (Laura Giraldo), Sumapaz (Sebastían Reyes) and the Guargalla y Alao rivers (Masters researchers Sebastián Silva, Susana Zavala, Meike Klarenbeek). The aim of these collective counter geographies and the Travelling Rivers initiative (coord. Bibiana Duarte, Rutgerd Boelens) was to illustrate and mobilize the knowledges, imaginaries and conflicts around these rivers that are generally hidden, but that are perceived and experienced every day by the communities that inhabit and depend on the mentioned rivers. Through bringing the mapping workshops and the maps themselves from one context to the other, the different experiences and struggles were woven together; connecting stories, concerns, debates and movements. Making rivers travel and promoting transnational solidarity.
The workshop series was further complemented by the international seminar “Ríos, Territorios y Poder: cartografía política y representaciones hidrosociales alternativas”, organized by Riverhood and River Commons in Riobamba, Ecuador (1-4 July). Around 40 participants from academia and grassroots organizations met to learn about and discuss alternative hydro-territorial representation practices, concepts and processes (such as the Travelling Rivers initiative) that can support more democratic, fair and sustainable co-governance strategies for rivers.
Finally, the researchers of the Riverhood and River Commons projects and the Travelling Rivers initiative participated in the Twelfth National Water Forum, co-organized with Ecuadorian partner CAMAREN. More than 1000 policy makers, grassroots leaders and researchers met, to discuss current challenges and possible alternatives for water governance, law and management in Ecuador. During the Forum and through a creative and surprising ‘flashmob’, another massive river counter-map was created: 50 meter long, representing individual but also shared rivers, river perspectives, threats and struggles, alternative river futures, counter-hegemonic visions. The teaser for this collective mapping, which gives some impressions of the earlier mappings in Colombia and Ecuador and was meant to inspire debate, can be seen below.
Participants of the Travelling Rivers initiative are now busy with the follow-up: systematizing and analysing the process and outcomes of the workshop series, elaborating a documentary about it, and exploring how the maps can be used to transform local political-social-ecological-material riverine realties. Updates will be published on the project website: https://movingrivers.org/
Riverhood has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC)
under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
(grant agreement No 101002921). River Commons is funded by the Wageningen Interdisciplinary Research and Education Fund (INREF).
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