Travelling rivers, mapping movements. Counter-mapping and translocal river defense networks

Capitalist grabbing and state-centralist interventionism degenerate and discipline rivers worldwide. Dominant cartographies re-present rivers as extraction sites, legitimizing peasant, indigenous and fishing commons' territorial erasures. As performative power-constructs, maps advance political decisions, designs, and claims to rivers' materialities and governance. Riverhood's “Travelling Rivers” initiative connects grassroots artist-activism, scholar-activists and commoning struggles through translocal counter-mapping. Bridging Colombian and Ecuadorean river conflict-arenas, grassroots knowledges, strategies and struggles converse and cross-pollinate, invigorating ‘living-with-river’ proposals and river-defense networks. River movements map, mapping moves rivers - as entangled socio-ecological communities. Grassroots counter-mapping among socio-fluvial struggles mobilizes new concepts and strategies to contest river-grabbing, misrepresentation, and status-quo governance.