Seminar and screening: Embracing Water

Associate Professor Mattias Borg Rasmussen at Department of Food and Resource Economics will host a seminar followed by a screening of his documentary broadcast “Embracing Water” .

Programme:

  • 12-12.50: Presentation: Assembling Water: The Prefigurative Politics of Land Futures in Argentina (Mattias Borg Rasmussen and Maximiliano Navarrete)
  • 13.00-14: Documentary broadcast: ’Abrazando al Agua’ (Embracing Water). Written and produced by Mattias Borg Rasmussen, directed by Adriana Arce.
  • 14-14.30: Q&A

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As in other areas of Argentina, residents from the Norte Neuquino in the northwestern reaches of Patagonia are concerned about the recent advancements of extractivism onto their territories. Projects to extract wealth from mineral deposits, waterways and thermal heat add to the broader sensation of people in the province who have lived with the promise and perils of the large scale fracking enterprise at Vaca Muerta.

Like other places in Argentina, concerned citizens have self-convened in socio-environmental assemblies to contest not only the concrete project but also the underlying political structures. Their analysis is clear: the environmental crisis is directly linked to a democratic one, and they engage in a wide range of actions to envision and enact alternative futures.

To understand their prefigurative politics, this seminar discusses the production of the documentary ‘Abrazando al Agua’ (Embracing Water), which the authors made in collaboration with one socio-environmental assembly and a local filmmaker.

We show how the making of the documentary came to be not only a representation of the socio-environmental assembly, but a situated narrative that became deeply implicated in its reproduction and ongoing mobilization.

‘Abrazando al Agua’ thus enabled a shared analysis of the entwinement of struggles, art and love that make up the labor of the assembly, and allow us to discuss the new grammars of politics, the expansion of its limits, and the proposals for alternative world-making projects that are enacted to counter the advancement of extractivism onto these territories. 

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The seminar takes place in meeting room Kongelunden at IFRO. 

The event is open to all.