Blue Ecologies ~ Sweet

As freshwater ecosystems are increasingly threatened by climate disruption and colonial legacies, this seminar invites participants to think with water beyond the lines and borders of geopolitical maps, moving toward wet ecologies of entanglement, sound, memory, and reparation. What happens when we listen and relate to sweet waters as fluid, relational, and sacred beings? What are the embodied and collective strategies that enable humans and more-than-human communities to live within these damaged watery ecosystems? 

Guest contributors Zahra Malkani (Pakistan) and Elizabeth Gallón-Droste (Colombia) bring situated perspectives rooted in their work along the Indus and Atrato rivers, sharing methodologies that blend art, anthropology, activism, and collective care. Together, we’ll explore fresh bodies of water as sites of resistance, spiritual depth, and interspecies coexistence, where floods, droughts, and hydroelectric infrastructures carry political and poetic meaning. How can fresh bodies of water and those living with them invite us to reweave transnational forms of solidarity? 

From the emergence of lakes around the Indus Delta to the flooding cycles of the Atrato and the droughts of the Manzanares river, these four sessions foreground how water communicates—and how we might listen. Blue Ecologies ~ Sweet is an invitation to attune to sweet water’s rhythms and resonances: its subtle urgencies, submerged stories, and capacity to connect geographies across continents.

Session I — Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano
05 / 11 / 2025
Humid Telepathy: Collective Practices of Wet Attunement
In this opening session, Juan Pablo will share his methodologies for listening to bodies of water as politically, ecologically, historically, and spiritually entangled entities. Drawing from his experiences along the Byfjord in Norway, the Manzanares river in Spain, and the Maas river in the Netherlands, the session offers an introduction to attuning with aquatic ecosocial geographies through technical and deep listening, soundwalks, guided meditations, and the practice of humid telepathy. How can we collectively expand our capacity to listen to the voices, territories, and bodies that animate freshwater ecosystems? How does water seep into our cities and what are the wet infrastructures that sustain us? 

Session II — Zahra Malkani
12 / 11 / 2025
Stateless Sounds, Aquatic Internationalisms
Wetlands across history and geographies have been cast as syncretic, stateless sites hospitable for all sorts of mystical mischief and minglings. With a focus on the Indus Delta, where the ancient Sindhu River meets the Indian Ocean, this session explores how the unruly and ungovernable affects of water elude the extractivist eye, and how love songs, lullabies and laments for the river become soundtracks for sweet struggle. 

Session III — Elizabeth Gallón-Droste
19 / 11 / 2025
When the river sounds, stones manifest
This session delves into the process of listening and the articulated defense of the Atrato River, questioning how struggles for nature’s rights expand the notion of territory to territo-rivers. What does a river mean in a pluriverse of non-commons? Through relational ontology, this session engages with the multiple connections to the Atrato and its existence, as the forces of water and social movements leak into modern law, rupturing its boundaries and allowing the river to seep into its structures. Who is a river, where does it begin, and where does it end?

Session IV — Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Zahra Malkani and Elizabeth Gallón-Droste
26 / 11 / 2025
Confluences: Methods and Echoes Across Borders
In this closing session, Zahra Malkani, Elizabeth Gallón-Droste, and Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano come together in an open conversation to reflect on the resonances between their practices across South Asia, South America, and Europe, and the possibility of reweaving international solidarity across bodies of water. Building on the methodologies of listening and experimental cartography shared throughout the seminar, the session will explore how these tools can be translated and transformed within the specific contexts, territories, and communities each participant works with. How might we continue listening—with and through water—beyond this online space?