Throughout the last decades, ‘liquid/fluid space’ has become a metaphor for the description of unstable orders in the realm of knowledge (Mol/Law), the social (Bauman) and the aesthetic (Deleuze, Heller). Without excluding the metaphor of the liquid, this workshop takes its starting point from aquatic spaces in a non-metaphorical sense for the analysis of cultural techniques of the aquatic. Particular attention in this workshop is given to fluvial landscapes in South America. Unlike the paradigm of the maritime, cultural techniques of the aquatic, and especially of the fluvial, do not deal with the endless ‘smooth’ spaces of the sea as opposed to the ‘striated’ space of the land, but organize and stabilize continuous transitions and entanglements between water and land, be it from the point of view of the history of the agricultural (fluvial and hydraulic societies), from the point of view of urban history (urban settlements on the riverside), from a geopolitical point of view (rivers as borderlines) or from the perspective of mobility studies (rivers and transportation). Fluvial landscapes form environments where the natural and the cultural are always already enmeshed, where scenes of transition between material and semiotic practices are located. For an aesthetics of aquatic spaces, the challenge of this perspective of cultural techniques consists of taking into account the metonymic (and not just thematic or metaphoric) quality of the aquatic in literary texts, film or other semiotic practices.

Program

Thursday, June 22

15:00
Jörg Dünne & Graciela Silvestri: Welcome / Introduction

PANEL I (Chair: Andrew Patten, Erfurt)
15:30
Fernando Williams (La Plata): Desert waterscapes: Ideas, conflicts and images behind the use and transformation of rivers in Patagonia
16:30
Coffee Break
17:00
Graciela Silvestri (Erfurt/La Plata): Water, snakes and lines. Reflections on a fluvial landscape
18:00
Sebastian Dorsch (Erfurt): Looking for the lost Rio Vincent de Pinçon. Aquatic Techniques in the Border Discussions in the Guyanas between Brazil and France

Friday, June 23

PANEL II (Chair: Kirsten Kramer, Bielefeld)
09:30
Jörg Dünne (Erfurt): Carapachay. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and the geopo/li/e/tics of the river delta
10:30
Mariela Sánchez (La Plata): Memoria de la última dictadura argentina en perspectiva generacional y transatlántica. Océano, ríos, piscinas y lágrimas en textos literarios de Félix Bruzzone y Mariana Eva Perez
11:30
Coffee Break
12:00
Alejandro Gasel (Río Gallegos): Cuerpo, agua y desierto. Contar la Patagonia Austral en la narrativa reciente de Argentina
13:00
Concluding Remarks

Organization:

Graciela Silvestri (Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina, International Fellow of the Cultural Techniques Research Lab in Erfurt) and Jörg Dünne (Uni Erfurt); invited guest speaker: Fernando Williams (Universidad Nacional de la Plata/Universidad Nacional de San Martín)

Location

Internationales Begegnungszentrum (IBZ), Michaelisstraße 38, 99084 Erfurt