Contribution short abstract:

This proposal investigates the relationship between radio and aquifers in the Ranchería River’s floodplain in Southern Guajira, Colombia, delving into the potential of radio as an ethnographic medium to trace the ontological multiplicity of aquifers.

Contribution long abstract:

Engaging with subterranean worlds disrupts many of our sense-making habits, as they demand a retooling of our languages and mediums to oscillating figures, volumetric grounds, and multi-scalar magnitudes. Amidst these worlds, aquifers emerge as distant and phenomenologically elusive intensities, yet they remain critical water sources drawing increasing attention in the face of planetary meltdown.

In the semi-arid peninsula of La Guajira in northern Colombia, aquifers weave the Ranchería River’s floodplain and are enacted through a divergent network of technologies, imaginaries, and affects. Much like aquifers, radio operates as an interconnected tapestry, articulating sonic frameworks of belonging and subjectivity across the region. The current proposal asks how radio might serve as a medium that carries and transmits sonic manifestations of the ontological multiplicity of aquifers,

including the imaginaries, affects, rhythms, choreographies, and repertoires through which they come into socio-material presence.

Drawing from the resonances between these two networks, the proposal of a radiophonic ethnography of aquifers inquires upon the possibilities of radio as an ethnographic medium to make sense of aquiferous worlds. It reimagines radio

broadcasting as an apparatus that not only mimics and performs the conductive capacities and elusive dynamics of aquifers but also mediates them through divergent shapes above the surface, akin to discerning water forms within radio fields.