To feel the rivers and flow. To be in motion. Watery. Perpetual. To submerge and pass through the waters that carve into our continent is to navigate identities—ways of being, existing, and perishing. Rivers carry both life and contamination. Fish spawn there. Petrochemicals bleed into them. They are channels of communication, the web before the World Wide Web, weaving across the surface and beneath it: subterranean waters, a mycelium of biotic soup. Messages and goods travel upstream and downstream. Legal and illegal traffics. Open veins and wet gashes in the earth. Tributaries. Barges. Canoes. Enslaved people. Timber and cocaine. Everything passes through the river. Soy, too. Agricultural toxins. Agribusiness. Clear waters flowing into murk. “Aerial waters,” to quote Néstor Perlongher, and everything turns muddy. The silt and Lezama Lima meet on shores littered with corpses—Guaraní, Pampas, conquistadors, soldiers, the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado, the War against Paraguay, floating bodies, death flights. Flood. An America of water halts at this muddy shore of the Río de la Plata and soaks the works that make up River Crossing.
Questions about Latin American identities and Río de la Plata subjectivities flow through these pieces. Just like a hook or a fishing net, each casts a question into the water and gathers mud: layers upon layers of organic sediment that take shape, just for a moment, only to dissolve again in the waves of myth-history.
Adriana Bustos
Image: Adriana Bustos (ARG) Cruce en el río, 2025
