Friction and the Reconfiguration of Colbún's Waterscape: Manoeuvring Across Troubled Waters in the Chilean Central Andes

Abstract

In the Maule basin, Chile, the domestication of the waters occurs below the line of a thousand meters of altitude, giving rise to the existence of a transition strip which the modernising processes and the elusive practices of mountain populations mutually infiltrate. The strip stands out as a site of confluence of the waters' diverse modes of being, below which stands a waterscape that recreates the environment to naturalise what, in another context, has been the object of dispossession. The Colbún dam and the Panimávida Resort & Spa are iconic of this process in the Maule basin: while erasing all signs of dispossession, these interventions project the image of a narcissistic self-made civilisation. The study of the Colbún area in the Maule basin, central Chile, highlights the multiple historical ways of shaping waterscapes. Water goes through fluctuating conditions depending on how it becomes entangled with social processes. From indigenous daily practices to high-tech engineering, the article suggests the existence of a process of aestheticisation that encompasses the downward movement of the water from the glaciers in the high mountains towards the valleys. Likewise, different epistemologies seem to operate at both sides of the altitudinal divide. This article is both an account of the complex process of statecraft by means of infrastructure, and the overlapped and contested ways such a project imposes ways of framing the material world, more-than-human relationships, time, and urgencies.