Left to Be Desired Episode 10: Lisa Blackmore

Episode 10 of the SAVA podcast Left to be Desired features a conversation with Lisa Blackmore, researcher, curator and educator working with art and water cultures in Latin America.

 Left to Be Desired is available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and Audacy. You can also access it via the podcast website: 

https://lefttobedesired.libsyn.com/site  

Left to Be Desired explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.

Lisa Blackmore on Troubled Waters 

This episode of Left to be Desired seeks points of reference and comparison between the Anthropocene histories of Latin America and the environmental transformation of Europe and Central Asia during the socialist period. Lisa Blackmore shares insights into the brutal hydroforming of the rivers of Sao Paulo, and the dramatic consequences of paving over, channelizing and even inverting the flow of its liquid arteries through flash floods made more frequent and perilous by climate breakdown. The conversation with Maja and Reuben Fowkes also explores the ways in which artists have sought to restore connections with hydro-worlds and engage with post-human aqueous ontologies. While eco-socialist approaches can be identified in localized forms of hydrocommoning that incorporate post-human, biocentric and spiritual approaches to land and water, “degrowth is not on the table” in systems governed by extractive capitalism.

About the Speaker

Lisa Blackmore is a researcher, curator and educator, working with art and water cultures in Latin America. Since 2018, she has been directing entre—ríos, a platform whose collaborative methodologies (re)connect diverse communities to bodies of water through curatorial, editorial and pedagogical projects. She is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK. In 2023, she was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow for her project “Imagining the Hydrocommons: Art, Water and Infrastructure in Latin America.” Her recent publications include "Water" in Handbook to Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (2023) and the co-edited volume Hydrocommons Cultures: Art, Pedagogy and Care Practices in the Americas (2024). https://lisablackmore.net/