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Liquid Conviviality in Chilean Documentary Film. Dynamics of Confluences and Counter/fluences

By Berit Callsen

This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2024 and can be read here.

1. Introduction

This working paper focuses on the staging of aquatic, and especially fluvial, agency in three examples from recent Chilean documentary films produced between 2008 and 2021. Considering filmic codes such as sound, setting and camera, it explores the construction of relations between water and humans as well as about the implications of a visualized narrative capacity and a material quality of water. How do these films create an aquatic agency? How do they model forms of a human-nonhuman conviviality? One hypothesis is that the interrelation between the material, poetical and aesthetical notion of water is crucial in this undertaking.

In the approximation to the films, our reflections are guided by the concept of liquid conviviality. This term describes the conflictual connectivity, interrelation and interaction between human and nonhuman actors in aquatic ecosystems. More specifically, considering discourses from the blue humanities and perspectives from material ecocriticism that will be presented in more detail later, this concept focuses on the agency of watery elements in these encounters and examines their potential to question and subvert underlying asymmetric structures.[1] Furthermore, within the field of literary and cultural studies, the idea of liquid conviviality raises the question of the aesthetic modulations of aquatic elements on the one hand, and their potential to influence this aesthetic, on the other. At this juncture, by engaging with a vital materiality, different media can promote forms of thinking with water (Oppermann 2023) as an epistemological shift, recognizing the subjecthood of watery elements and aquatic environments.

In addition, the concept implies a self-reflexive notion. Fluidity itself then becomes a conceptual force of epistemological dynamisation: by shaping bodies of water as active elements, the films question hegemonic binary perspectives on the animate/inanimate, subject/object and land/water dichotomies, which also subverts the strategies of producing difference and otherness themselves. The “Other” then appears as pivotal figure between the human and the nonhuman articulating (conflictual) dialogues between Western and non-Western discourses on nature and environment as well as on human and nonhuman relationships themselves.

A person swimming in a lake, eyes closed.
“Thinking with water” includes considering watery elements not as mere objects of research, but as environments or even as modes of scholarly thinking. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Thus, within a broader perspective of aquatic agency, we ask to what extent the liquid poetics, aesthetics and materialities in these films perform counternarratives facing neocolonial forms of invasion such as extractivism and devastation of watery ecosystems in Indigenous territories. At this juncture, the subjecthood of rivers, in their role of narrators and protagonists, transmits a decolonial gesture since they are no longer considered as resources to be appropriated, explored and sold, but as animate beings. Here, dynamics of confluences and counter/fluences are revealed by performing acts of dissident power and by focusing peripheral knowledges as well as strategies of resistance. Hence, aquatic agencies can be considered in most of these filmic works as articulations of Indigenous epistemologies that stand their ground.

2. Watery Actors – Liquid Stories: Insights from the Blue Humanities

The blue humanities arose as an interdisciplinary subfield of the environmental humanities in the beginning of 2000.[2] Rooted in literary and culture studies, the blue humanities deal with theoretical concepts from ecocriticism,[3] new materialism and posthumanism and deliver forms of literary and cultural critique that focus on water aiming at a “[…] richer connection between humans and water […]” (Mentz 2023: 24). Consequently, one of the crucial ideas in many blue humanities approaches is the agential power of nonhuman entities; water in all its forms (rain, floods, humidity, rivers, lakes, oceans, ice, snow, fog, glaciers, etc.) is considered as an active player (Mentz 2023: 17).[4] Furthermore, the entanglement between human and nonhuman actors is at the centre of blue humanities perspectives. Some of the most striking concerns that result from these basic thoughts are a revision of the relationship between water and humans as well as of the central position of humankind. Attunement to the senses (above all visual, haptic, and auditory) and reflections on the notions of liquidity and fluidity (both in their metaphoric and material meaning) are further thematic nuclei. Thus, forms of embodied thinking that tend to defy dichotomies of all kinds are at the core of blue humanities approaches.

At present, a certain consolidation in the field can be observed, since various handbooks on blue humanities are being published right now: In his Introduction to the Blue Humanities, published recently in 2023, Steve Mentz gives an overview from the beginnings in the new millennium, emerging from Anglophone literary contexts and focusing on Atlantic, Mediterranean and Caribbean sites, to current approaches that widen the perspective including “Indigenous and Pacific ideas” (Mentz 2023: 17). Although these broadened perspectives are gaining in visibility as an object of scholarship until now there have been only a few academic works concentrating on the Global South. Especially the cultural (water)space of Latin America surprisingly remains a less studied field in Western academic discourses on blue humanities. Within these discourses Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez and Kathrin Sartingen and Stefania Chiarelli have recently published two important studies on liquid ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean art, respectively on representations of water in Portuguese, Brazilian and African literature, film, music, and visual art (Blackmore and Gómez 2020; Sartingen and Chiarelli 2023). Nevertheless, most of the studies on these cultural spaces until now come from Latin American scholarship, strengthening theoretical perspectives from the Global South and drawing special attention to (neo)colonial and extractivist questions concerning bodies of water. To this effect, the dossier Descolonizar como poética. Aguas libres en la literatura y las artes latinoamericanas
recientes
organised by María José Barros and Dámaso Rabanal connects with activist discourses, understanding literary and cultural productions as part of political acts and resisting activities that, moreover, connect with Indigenous epistemologies and ethics (Barros and Rabanal 2023: 2). The dossier Materia fluvial. Configuraciones estético-políticas de las cuencas de América, edited by Franca Maccioni and Mónica Bernabé, presents another interesting example of Latin American scholarly perspectives on waterscapes (Bernabé and Maccioni 2022).[5] Until now, the research focus mainly remains on visual art and performance art; surprisingly, film and literature are media that are less studies in this context.[6]

Methodologically, the blue humanities analyse representations of watery sites in different media, such as literature, film, and visual art, but they also draw attention to the materiality of water and on forms of “thinking with water”: watery elements then do not appear as mere objects of research, but take on an active role as environments or even as modes of scholarly thinking. This kind of watery presence gains different forms: thus, to Serpil Oppermann in her recently published study Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene, “thinking with water” means to be attentive for the semantic productions of water: “This new interpretive horizon, which encourages us to be more perceptive of the stories and meanings of fluid matter, transforms our objectifying attitude to waterscapes and thus generates disanthropocentric modes of thinking” (Oppermann 2023: 13–14).

It becomes clear that perceiving water as an active player subverts anthropocentric perspectives and questions the nature-culture-divide. Consequently, Oppermann unfolds possible “counternarratives to anthropocentrism” (Oppermann 2023: 35) activating new and more ethical modes of water-human relations. At this juncture, she engages with Jane Bennettʼs argument that a strategic cultivation of anthropomorphism is able to counter anthropocentric perspectives. To cite Bennett:

I will emphasize, even overemphasize, the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces (operating in nature, in the human body, and in human artifacts) in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought. We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism – the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature – to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world (Bennett 2010: xvi).

This kind of “thinking with water” in search of liquid stories becomes very striking in Oppermannʼs perspective on rivers, framing them as “narrative agencies whose stories trace maps of environmental contamination” (Oppermann 2023: 45). These insights, on the one hand, are inspired by actual discussions and movements within the field of environmental justice that contest the status of rivers as legal subjects.[7] On the other hand, the approach of Oppermann is based on ideas from material ecocriticism understanding aquatic elements as “vital materialities producing […] configurations of meanings and narratives that we read as material stories” (Opperman 2023: 24). In a broader sense, and not necessarily linked to ideas of material ecocriticism, the liquid materiality of rivers connects with the concept of bodies of water that attributes not only corporeality but also a notion of vulnerability to rivers.[8]

Most of those approaches, besides forwarding the idea of rivers as persons, highlight the relation of human and nonhuman bodies of water in immersive terms. In this manner, Ailton Krenak, representant of the Indigenous Krenak people in Brazil, foregrounds a watery model of being that is incorporated by rivers: “Sejamos água, em matéria e espírito, em nossa movência e capacidade de mudar de rumo, ou estaremos perdidos” [Let us be water, in matter and spirit, in our movement and ability to change course, or we will be lost] (Krenak 2022: 27).[9] This idea is shared by the approach of Blackmore, who claims: “Apuesto a que por ahí se puede llegar a ser más río” [I bet thatʼs where you can get to be more river] (Blackmore 2020: 19).[10]

Moreover, at a second scale, forms of thinking with water pay special attention to a human-nonhuman entanglement based on the idea of a relational ontology that is particularly productive in theoretical perspectives from Latin America. At this juncture, Arturo Escobar, in his idea of “sentipensar con la tierra” [feelthink with the earth] (Escobar 2014), strengthens both the intellectual and the emotional dimension of this relationship and underlines the fact that in many non-Western societies there is no nature-culture divide. Further perspectives of relational ontologies can also be found in the approaches by Marisol de la Cadena, who refers to earth-beings (La Cadena 2015), Astrid Ulloa, who underwrites the political capacity of nonhuman actors opening spaces for producing knowledge otherwise (Ulloa 2017: 72), and Stacy Alaimo, who coins the term transcorporeality in order to refer to a bodily embeddedness in environment decentring the human position (Alaimo 2010).

In a third line of thought, there are several approaches (mostly, but not exclusively from media studies), that reflect upon the epistemic and mediatic implications of thinking with water: In her book Wild Blue Media, Melody Jue states: “This epistemic shift is about cultivating a certain humility, aware of how mediation might seem otherwise from another embodied point of view in the milieu of the ocean” (Jue 2020: 22).[11] Jue is turning here to what Macarena Gómez-Barris, on her part, has grasped as “a submerged viewpoint” (Gómez-Barris 2017: xiv), that enables “to see differently and to question what lies beneath the visible world of the extractive zone” (Gómez-Barris 2017: xv). In this manner, thinking with water reveals and catalyses nonutilitarian and decolonial perspectives besides ecocritical, posthuman and new materialist approaches relating not only to water, but to nature and environment in general. And it is a mode of thinking that, in a self-reflexive way, questions Western configurations of epistemology, since it foregrounds multisensory modes of knowing and knowledge that engage not only with visuality, but also with the tactile and the auditory dimension. Moreover, thinking with water calls for recognizing the limitations of (human) knowledge, since, as Astrida Neimanis claims, “no waters are fully knowable” (Neimanis 2017: 147).

Keep reading here.


Notes

[1] For theoretical and methodological insights into dimensions of human-nonhuman conviviality-inequality, see also Manzi 2020.

[2] From its inception, a plethora of terms and definitions of this interdisciplinary academic field have been circulating. Integrating perspectives from anthropology and history, some of the alternative notions are “blue criticism”, “hydro-criticism”, “critical ocean studies” or “ocean history” (Mentz 2023: 1).

[3] In some approaches, the blue humanities are framed as oppositional perspectives to “[…] the obsessively green visions of ecocriticism” (Mentz 2023: 24) that countervail an oceanʼs deficit (Dobrin 2021).

[4] Mentz states that in the beginning, scholarly perspectives mostly focused on oceans (Mentz 2023: 17). For oceanic perspectives on north-European literature, see Søren Frank and for insights from critical ocean studies that emphasize asymmetrical relations of hydropower and maritime extractivism see Elizabeth DeLoughrey (Frank 2022; DeLoughrey 2023).

[5] For a hydro-critical approach to issues related to the colonial period, see also the volume Hydrocriticism and Colonialism in Latin America, edited by Mabel Moraña (Moraña 2023).

[6] The articles “El río como dios de la llanura. Acerca de la poética fluvial en Historias extraordinarias de Mariano Llinás”, published by Jörg Dünne in 2022, and “ʻLa película fluvialʼ en Latinoamérica: una mirada comparativa”, published by Christian von Tschilschke in 2021, as well as the monograph Filmästhetik des Fluiden. Strömungen des Erzählens von Vigo bis Tarkowskij, von Huston bis Cameron (2010) by Franzsiska Heller present examples from Romance Cultural Studies and from Film Studies that recently have offered detailed analysis of the staging of water in film paying attention to the affine correlation of water and the cinematographic medium (Dünne 2022; Tschilschke 2021; Heller 2010).

[7] For a closer look at the subjecthood and legal status of rivers, see for example Elizabeth Gallón Droste and Matthias Kramm (Gallon Droste 2021; Kramm 2020).

[8] For different approaches to the corporeal materiality of water in the sense of “bodies of water”, see
for example Barros and Rabanal 2023; Blackmore 2020, 2022; Krenak 2022; Neimanis 2017.

[9] All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.

[10] On the immersive experience of swimming see also Mentz 2020.

[11] Jue illustrates here the statement of John Durham Peters: “Environments are also media” (Peters 2015: 3).


References

Alaimo, Stacy (2010): Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Barros, María José and Rabanal, Dámaso (2023): “Introducción. Descolonizar como poética. Aguas libres en la literatura y las artes latinoamericanas recientes”, in: Mitologías hoy, 28, 1–4. 

Bennett, Jane (2010): Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bernabé, Mónica and Maccioni, Franca (2022): “Materia fluvial. Configuraciones estético-políticas de las cuencas de América”, in: Heterotopías, 5, 10, 1–11. 

Blackmore, Lisa and Gómez, Liliana (2020): “Beyond the Blue: Notes on the Liquid Turn”, in: Blackmore, Lisa and Gómez, Liliana (eds.), Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art, New York: Routledge, 1–10. 

Blackmore, Lisa and Gómez, Liliana (2020): Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art, New York: Routledge.

Escobar, Arturo (2014): Sentipensar con la tierra: Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia, Medellín: Ediciones Unaula.

Gómez-Barris, Macarena (2017): The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, Durham: Duke University Press. 

Jue, Melody (2020): Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater, Durham: Duke University Press. 

Krenak, Ailton (2022): Futuro ancestral, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. 

La Cadena, Marisol de (2015): Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds, Durham/London: Duke University Press.

Mentz, Steve (2020): “Swimming in the Anthropocene”, in: Public Books, December 17, 2020, at: publicbooks.org (Last access 10.04.2024).

Mentz, Steve (2023): An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, New York: Routledge.

Neimanis, Astrida (2017): Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Oppermann, Serpil (2023): Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Sartingen, Kathrin and Chiarelli, Stefania (eds.) (2023): Histórias de água: o imaginário martimo em narrativas brasileiras, portuguesas e africanas, Berlin: Peter Lang. 

Ulloa, Astrid (2017): “Dinámicas ambientales y extractivas en el siglo XXI. ¿Es la época del Antropoceno o del Capitaloceno en Latinoamérica?”, in: Desacatos, 54, 58–73. 


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About the Author

Berit Callsen holds a PhD in Romance Philology from Humboldt-Universität Berlin. She has been working as an Assistant Professor of Romance Cultural Studies at Universität Osnabrück, Germany since 2017. In 2023, she was a fellow at Mecila and, together with her colleagues Flavia Meireles and Mariana Simoni, a member of the Thematic Research Group “Submerged Visualities: New Perspectives on Nature and
Indigeneity in Latin American Literature, Film and Performance Art”. Her main research interests are aesthetic figurations of nature in recent Latin American documentary film, constructions of corporality in contemporary Latin American literature and culture, subject cultures in Spanish modernity (19th/20th century), visuality and poetics of sight in Spanish, and Latin American and French literature and film (20th/21century).


Citation: Berit Callsen, Liquid Conviviality in Chilean Documentary Film. Dynamics of Confluences and Counter/fluences, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 02.06.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/65823

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (June 2, 2026). Liquid Conviviality in Chilean Documentary Film. Dynamics of Confluences and Counter/fluences. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16bfx


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