Hydrocommoning
Lisa Blackmore
Related terms: amphibious urbanism, blue ecology, blue humanities, tidal rhythms.
Sources
In Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (2025), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson shares that the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Nation is called “the people of the big river mouths” because of their intimate relatedness with the waters that drain into Lake Ontario. For Betasamosake Simpson’s people, water is the origin and teacher. Its material dynamics inform principles of coexistence. The cycling of water forms “a matrix of bonds and attachments amongst living things of all kinds, a cascade of living beings across time and space, on a cosmic scale, extending into ancient times and into the future” (155). Betasamosake Simpson learnt this lesson during the years spent observing snow falling onto paths she skied along during cold, long winter seasons. When a snowflake falls onto ski paths, she noticed, it bonds with others to create a fabric that sustains those traveling on it. This process, called ‘sintering,’ enacts “a communal transformation” whereby bonding with others, the individual snowflake “weaves itself into its environment … in a way that doesn’t destroy its neighbours” (18). Sintering extrapolates to a broader theory of water – or ‘Nibi,’ in the author’s terms – where its physical forms manifest principles of interdependence, connectivity, and responsibility.
At stake, in attending to and learning from the cycling and transformation of water, are political lessons about ethics that privilege kindness and gentleness. The proposal that water models relational ethics is echoed in other Indigenous cosmologies. In their rich diversity, water is recurrently held as a living being, subject, spirit, vital energy, kin, and ancestor, to which human life is indebted and whose rights humans are duty-bound to protect. Indigenous thought denounces water’s commodification and subordination to profit (e.g., Krenak 2020; Estes 2019) and underpins the rights of bodies of water, such as the Whanganui River in New Zealand (2017) and dam demolition programs (e.g., Klamuth River, California). Such beliefs also foreshadow the recent emergence of the ‘hydrocommons,’ a coinage that fuses the adjective ‘hydro’ with the noun ‘commons’ to name water as shared cultural and natural resources. The term appeared in 1990s scholarship to define the interconnectedness and interdependency of basins in transboundary and transregional water governance (Michel 2020; Gaines 2002). Google’s ngram captures an almost vertical spike in its usage since 2010. We can understand this rapid rise as a mirror of growing public awareness of water stresses amid entrenched water inequity, critical pollution, increasing extreme climate events, and precarious water futures. Cultural production has followed suit, mainstreaming debates beyond scientific and technical milieux through globally-watched television shows, such as the BBC's Blue Planet, major art exhibitions (such as the Rīvus, Sydney Biennial, 2022), artistic research programs and publications (e.g., TB21 Ocean Space; Lemos 2024), and water-focused commercial fiction (e.g., Itäranta 2016; Shusterman 2018) and non-fiction (e.g, Macfarlane 2025).
Scholarly discussions around the ‘hydrocommons’ in the environmental humanities emphasize the ways water connects life across scales and matters: it appears from cellular fluid, via ecosystems and infrastructures, through to the planetary waters. Hydrocommons scholars probe the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of coexisting through water. They call for a rethinking of modes of relating to address material and epistemic injustices linked to the broader crises of the Anthropocene. In this context, Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water (2016) draws on posthumanist philosophy and hydrofeminist practice to conceptualize the hydrocommons as the network of wet relations that gestate, connect, and sustain life writ large. This emphasis on water as a transtemporal and more-than-human medium of connection resonates with feminist theorizations of transcorporeality (Alaimo 2008), porosity (Grosz 1995), and viscosity (Tuana 2008), which similarly address the forms and politics of membranes, interfaces, and systems that exist between bodies of water. Thinking through exchanges and boundaries across bodies of water in situated ways grounds discussion about the hydrocommons and emphasizes the stakes at play in watery coexistence. To give just a few examples, the Covid-19 pandemic brought heightened awareness of vapor – a state of water – as one potentially life-threatening mode of exchange that spanned global and interpersonal scales. The rise of flash floods across the globe makes terrifyingly palpable how water exceeds technologies of enclosure and hydraulic control designed to regulate shared spaces. Melting ice caps and atmospheric rivers manifest water as a planetary commons that connects regions in the shifting patterns of climate change. Most prosaically, the brain fog caused by dehydration reveals the vital role of bodily fluids in daily, lived experience, and the embodied discomfort caused by the experience of inner drought.
Whirlpools
Interest in the hydrocommons coalesces in the emergence of the hydrohumanities and blue humanities as sub-disciplines of environmental humanities scholarship and practice invested in how human-water relations take shape historically, materially, aesthetically, and ethically (e.g., De Wolff, Faletti & López-Calvo 2022; Oppermann 2023). Methodologically, such inquiries entail close attention to physical environments where water manifests as “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2009) that makes and undoes worlds. Water flows but also returns, spiraling in whirlpools and defying the linear sense of time that is intrinsic to and dominant in modernity. Viscous mixtures of water and mud defy expectations of transparency or legibility in water, rendering opaque technologies of seeing as ways of knowing. Water erodes material memory, just as it also surfaces from hidden depths what has been thought to be lost or submerged in amnesia. The “liquid turn” in art, film, and literature (Blackmore & Gómez 2020) attends to the materiality and aesthetics of water, its dynamic motion, and the infrastructures that seek to contain it.
The hydrohumanities also study cultural practices around water, asking: “How do the stories we tell, and the knowledges we draw on to tell them, work to establish certain kinds of ethical relations with our watery others?” (Neimanis 2016, 12). Material ecocriticism thus attends to how water takes forms and is given form, manifesting as “liquid ecologies … [where] the human and non-human converge, bringing the sediments of history while facing climatic, infrastructural, economic, sociopolitical and cultural forces in dynamic processes of becoming” (Blackmore & Gómez 2020, 3). None of this is merely abstract or theoretical. We are never outside the hydrocommons. Yet water also imposes its own physical and cognitive limits on human bodies of water: too immersed, humans drown; too water-starved, life withers and dies. These physical principles explain why hydrofeminist practice connects embodiment to critical inquiry. For instance, through swimming (Shefer & Bozalek 2022), deep sea diving (Jue 2021), and “weathering” humidity (Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2013), scholars parse the limits of human immersion and deploy the body to think-feel phenomena, such as climate change, that can often seem abstract. Water overflows thought, imposing its own “hydro-logics” (Neimanis 2013) that resist capture by human logocentrism. Its unknowability manifests materially, without a code to crack.
Currents
The ‘hydrocommons’ as a noun names a milieu of interconnection. ‘Hydrocommoning’ directs attention toward what being bodies of water is in practice. It raises important lines of inquiry, such as: What actions cultivate more just and care-full water cultures? What sensibilities, capabilities, and values animate and sustain care for common waters? Who is doing this work, and how can it be sustained over time? Thinking through the gerund tracks recent calls in commons scholarship to approach ‘commoning’ as an active process connected to ‘community,’ ‘commonality,’ and ‘communion.’ It focuses on social, political, and spiritual webs of relation where meaning and value are constantly being produced, negotiated, and sustained through collective making and doing (Linebaugh 2014, 17-18). ‘Hydrocommoning,’ like other practices of commoning, thus designates the dynamic weaving of “an organic fabric of social structures and processes” of thinking, learning, and collaborating toward shared goals (Bollier and Helfrich 2015, 2).
Hydrocommoning entails “radical collective practices of place and community making” (Boelens et al, 2022, 1123) that encompass grassroots actions, coalition building, and sociolegal work (Kallhoff, 2015) to contest hydrosocial stresses and to practice care for common waters. The endurance and resilience of commoning work rely on beliefs, values, and rituals that generate meaning and identity. This means hydrocommoning also entails biocultural work (Blackmore 2022; Blackmore 2025) to enlist the imagination to work with water as subject and to critique discourses and imaginaries that frame it as object. While responding to the fundamental connectivity among water bodies, the experimental and experiential practices of hydrocommoning tend to emerge from situated experiences that foster human-water interconnectedness and articulate them across ecological, ecopolitical, and biocultural spheres of action. The ecology of knowledges necessarily woven into this work is key to gestating more holistic water cultures capable of expanding public engagement with water causes in local networks and broader coalitions. To paraphrase Silvia Rivera Cusiquanqui (Salazar Lohman 2015), hydrocommoning is what happens when people respond to the calls of vulnerable bodies of water, forming communities of care around them, attuning to the life of water, learning from it, and taking action to protect it.
Delta
These ideas were the premise of our editorial work compiling the Hydrocommons Map (entre—ríos 2024). We aimed to create an emerging index of hydrocommoning practices across Latin America that are bridging Indigenous knowledges, conservation science, territorial defense, experimental pedagogies, and biocultural work. Through an open call, we invited long-standing and recently formed initiatives to share descriptions of how they were caring for specific ecologies. Projects featured diverse practices, including river walks, ecological restoration projects, music festivals, community archives, and educational processes, among others. To compile the index, we catalogued these hydrocommoning actions in a directory of practices: Education, Activism, Research, Biocultural Actions, Communication, Territorial Actions, and Restoration and Conservation, each subdivided into specific actions stemming from the project input. Although by no means exhaustive, the Hydrocommons Map also indexes two dozen types of bodies of water where fourteen collectives included are engaged in hydrocommoning work across diverse scales and environments. These range from high Andean springs, via urban rivers, through to marine wetlands. Bodies of water flow across human-made borders and infrastructures. By removing nation-state borders and territorial relief, the hydrological map we used to geolocate the initiatives gestured toward commonalities and connections in the region.
Hydrocommoning initiatives often emerge from highly local experiences and communities. The artivist collective (se)cura humana works almost exclusively in São Paulo. They leverage hydroengineering know-how to tap into the hidden springs of the city and fill inflatable pools that become ephemeral pop-up urban beaches that reclaim citizens’ rights to common waters. The Renaico River Community Museum project is even more localized, working with a specific waterbody. They organize beach clean-ups and environmental education in the Chilean Araucanía to root collective identity in the local ecology. These examples show how hydrocommoning work emerges from small core groups of organizers who engage and sustain networks of “hydrocitizens” (Evans 2018). This work also unfolds on much larger scales. Canto al Agua is a cultural initiative founded in Colombia in 2010 to convene a transnational event where different groups gather on March 22 to sing to rivers, wetlands, and streams. While they never meet, this hydrocommoning community is connected in resonance. Since 2017, Maíz de Vida has organized plurinational water summits in Guatemala that physically bring together different Indigenous peoples affected by water grabbing and pollution to foster collective action. Both projects demonstrate how hydrocommoning practices – whether more cultural or more political – create imaginaries of hydrocitizenship that connect bodies of water, human and non-human, to work toward greater awareness and mutual well-being. With the ongoing challenges facing global water, platforms that map and document hydrocommoning as dynamic, living processes are emerging across the world (e.g., Riparian Struggles; Hack2O; Goa Water Stories). Such mappings are signaling a widening interest in raising awareness of how hydrocommoning actions unfold and seek to share strategies that effectively change water culture for the better.
References
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Blackmore, Lisa. 2025. “Art for the Hydrocommons. Rethinking Human-Water Relations in Latin America.” Environmental Humanities 17 (1): 23–44.
Blackmore, Lisa. 2022. “Imaginando culturas hidrocomunes: investigaciones interdisciplinares y prácticas curatoriales entre ríos.” Heterotopías, materia fluvial. Configuraciones estético-políticas de las cuencas de América 5 (10): 43–72.
Blackmore, Lisa y Alejandro Ponce de León, eds. 2024. Hydrocommons Cultures: Art, Pedagogy and Care Practices in the Americas, LA ESCUELA__JOURNAL 1. https://laescuela.art/en/campus/library/journal/hydrocommons-cultures-art-pedagogy-and-care-practices-across-the-americas-index
Blackmore, Lisa, and Liliana Gómez. 2020. “Beyond the Blue: Notes on the Liquid Turn.” In Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art, edited by Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez, 1-10. New York: Routledge.
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