Vilcabamba: de iura fluminis et Terrae

Abstract

Vilcabamba: de iura flumnis et Terrae. A Chamber Music Piece in Two Acts and Intermezzo is an artistic project aimed at bringing the voices of rivers to the 23rd Biennale of Sydney. The work is inspired by a critical cartography approach, or what Nato Thompson and Trevor Paglen define as “experimental geography” to offer the opportunity to “rethink” the world, the plurality of worlds, and epistemologies that concur to reshape relations between humans and ecosystems. In this context, indigenous peoples recur to GIS (Geographic Information System, currently used, among others, to identify potential sacrifice zones for resource extraction) to challenge the dominant colonial-settler use and vision of land and territories and mainstream their cosmology, traditional knowledge, and livelihoods. Similarly, GPS (Geographic Positioning System) coordinates can be “hacked” to bring to light struggles for the recognition of the Rights of Nature and legal personhood of ecosystems, while advancing an imagery that aims to liberate political imagination and the voice of those ecosystems. Hacking geospatial technologies can offer the possibility for the non-human to be represented or to emerge, and hence challenge the dominant epistemology, creating a sort of “placement-displacement” circle, whereas the definition of a place brings with it a “displacement” of its canonical representation.