With this video essay, we strive to establish a dialogue—both literal and symbolic—between flows that pour into what floods us entirely: ongoing and past genocides. Water like language, and language like water: both cyclical, fluctuating, indeed insufficient. Departing from an encounter with Sierra Nevada’s mountains in Southern Spain, where the sources of the Dílar and Monachil rivers are threatened by the ongoing expansion of a ski resort, and seeping through the mountains and waters of Lebanon, we ask:
Do rivers panic about vanishing? Do the words we use today feel their own impotence? Do olive trees count their wounds from white phosphorus? Do mountains count the snowflakes made of exiled water?
These questions do not only arise from our PhD research processes with environmental activists and historical archives of Islamic and Arabic heritage. Going beyond academic frameworks that attempt to assign a quiet place to our affections, we began to write water-correspondences to each other, to allow an intangible matter to circulate between the overlooked colonial wounds in Andalusia and Lebanon, the voracious extractivism of the tourism industry, sleepless nights, and a language that no longer knows how to name ongoing catastrophes in so many places. We trace these ideas like bridges, with waters as irrigation channels: a conversation about past, present, and future flows in Andalusia and Lebanon, but also suggesting an extension towards other geographies and paths of radical care as a counterweight to radical ferocity. Our hasty rhythms interrupted, we stopped to stare at exhausted watery bodies, while exhausted thirsty bodies resist, and in that resistance guiding us. We connect the disappearance and mistreatment of bodies of water in Andalusia with the immeasurable reality of a genocide. Gaza as the epitome of so many global past and present struggles; Palestine as a compass for all contemporary
inquiry that dares to be attentive; and water as our great alarm for the memory of every dispossession—physical and metaphorical—and for the possibilities of redirecting our affections.
Written by Carolina Cuevas Parra (PhD Researcher / Wageningen University) & Jimena Germán Blanco (PhD Researcher / University of Granada)
Research: Carolina Cuevas Parra, Jimena German Blanco & Ana María Arbeláez Trujillo (PhD Researcher/Wageningen University)
Camera & Music: Arcadio Martinez Lanz Durán (Independent Artist)
Special thanks to the Dílar and Monachil river basins, their waters, their inhabitants, and the collectives Que corra el agua Dílar, La nieve no es de naide, Somos Vega Somos Tierra, Ecologistas en Acción Granada for their generosity and hospitality.
This short film was made under the framework of the Riverhood and River Commons projects at
Wageningen University, the Netherlands (https://movingrivers.org)
