Vitality and Hydric Forensic Landscapes in the Sinú
Authors
The present essay is the product of a series of reflections hydrated principally by testimonies and collective memories of people who live in and around bodies of water, drawing, moreover, on poetic languages and diverse theoretical constructions from the social sciences. Why is the River Sinú dead? What are the implications of its transformation into a cemetery? What relationships, meanings, positions, and subjectivities arise at the level of amphibious /riverain populations when their hydric landscapes are caught by the logics of death? How, in the face of the dispossession of the vital, do initiatives articulated by a political vitality emerge? These are some of the elements unfolded in this text, from which we propose to think the Sinú in terms of ‘the river that carries death’ (water graves) and ‘the river that has died’ (hydrocide), as signs of a forensic landscape. Furthermore, the text also accounts for practices of resistance that integrate the vitality from which the indigenous, Afro-peasant, and fishing communities in the province of Córdoba challenge the projects of death that seek to put an end to their life worlds.
