RadioActive - on Water #2 - River Song, Singing Rivers by Lisa Blackmore & Leonel Vásquez
A six-part series by Meira Asher and Stephen Shiell exploring the interactions between transmission, sound, activism and water. Each episode is created by a different artist or group who engage with water politics and the politics of listening through the medium of radio.
In this episode, sound artist Leonel Vásquez and researcher Lisa Blackmore navigate the Bogotá River in Colombia through a more-than-human song created together with the living forces that shape the watershed’s ecosystems.
Loaded with chemicals and sewage along its course, the river is largely devoid of the fish and freshwater crustaceans that for thousands of years teemed in its waters. People have turned their backs on the water body, even though it was once the centre of collective life.
How might listening to the river’s song renew bonds of relation and reverence for water in dis-enchanted times? Guided by Leonel’s compositions, River Song, Singing Rivers is sonic immersion that attends to the Bogota rivers bogs, meanders, and flows as a living being worthy and in need of care.
Lisa Blackmore is founder-director and curator of entre—ríos, exploring continuities between bodies of water, human bodies and territories, recognising rivers as active subjects. Lisa is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies and is the author of publications like Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space and Visuality in Venezuela 1948-1958 (2017), and co-editor of Hydrocommons Cultures: Art, Pedagogy and Care Practices in the Americas (LA ESCUELA__JOURNAL, 2024) and Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art (2020).
Leonel Vásquez is a Colombian sound artist exploring non-human sonic agencies: waters, trees, rocks... living and vibrant materials. Their interests include underwater noise, geo-resonances, relational listening, and vibroacoustics of planetary well-being. They have worked with the National Radio of Colombia, Ministry of Culture, and as a teacher of sound art at the University of Los Andes.
entre—ríos explores continuities between bodies of water and human bodies, recognising rivers as active subjects producing aesthetic forms and shaping memory. They believe in artistic practices as catalysts for collaborative experiments connecting us to the environment. Their practice traces hydrographies rendering borders porous, creating shared territories. They put into circulation ways of knowing and feeling bodies of water through creative methodologies and flow systems that create deltas of knowledge where arts and sciences, communities and institutions meet. Their project, **RÍO BOGOTÁ&&, connects community initiatives in one of Colombia's polluted rivers through culinary encounters and publications.
Collective Werebere focuses on communication and expressions between the human and natural world, based on the study of different bodies and their sounds. They have conducted research on resonance phenomena and subtle landscape signals. They lead the High Mountain Listening Station project, a space for contemplation and well-being practices towards the body and Sumapaz páramo territory.