Surrendering to the pull, inhabiting subterranean water worlds

• In Event: Doing Cosmopolitics: Exploring Everyday Potentials Within STS Research

Abstract

Water movement has been used to produce analogies and metaphors of social relations, exchange processes, and the global circulation of capital, people and nature. Under the guise of flows, an apparently unfettered movement of substances and beings has captured much creative and analytic energy. But a crucial flow which requires alternative thinking coordinates has been mostly left unexplored: the underground movement of water. Here I am not referring to the circulation of water through human-made infrastructures but to its dislocation across the dense time-space of underground geologic formations. This is not movement across space, but through rock, clay, and stone in time. In this paper I explore the qualities of that peculiar type of movement; one that resists dreams of infrastructural direction and discretion, and is, from the get go, caught up in the architectural density of its geologic substrate. To do so, I explore a particular ethnographic moment: the initiation of the layperson in hydrogeological thinking, that is, the invitation to inhabit subterranean worlds. I analyze the work of hydro-geologists from the National Water and Irrigation Service in Costa Rica and think sympathetically with their modest, and somewhat dated experimental methods, to imagine and communicate the existence of active flows in subsurface formations. More broadly, I query what are the politics of making the subsurface fluid at a time when fears of water crisis hover over our imaginaries of the future?

Author

• Andrea Ballestero, Rice University