El cabal del riu [The River’s Course]

El cabal del riu [The River’s Course] continues Paula Artés’s long research into hidden histories and power structures, developed through collaborative work with communities whose testimonies are absent from institutional archives. The project examines the RENACE hydroelectric plant on Guatemala’s Cahabón River. For more than two decades, it has restricted access to drinking water for Q’eqchi’ Maya communities along more than thirty kilometres of river. This must be understood within a long history of expropriation and territorial reordering. From the decline of indigo and cochineal to the imposition of coffee plantations and the coercive policies of the Liberal Reform, Guatemala has developed a model that subordinates land and resources to external interests. This pattern, inherited from colonial logics, persists today.

The RENACE complex is a paradigmatic example. Neoliberal reforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s enabled privatization and large-scale concessions. Corporación Multi Inversiones (CMI) and Cobra (ACS) shaped a legal framework to their advantage. Opaque agreements and the absence of consultation created dependence and systematic rights violations.
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Water—understood by Maya peoples as a living being—becomes the project’s symbolic axis. Artés’s analogue photographs depict pipeline routes, retaining walls, eroded embankments, and abandoned machinery. These traces reveal irreversible
transformation and industrial control while exposing propaganda narratives of progress.
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Developed with Q’eqchi’ leader Bernardo Caal Xol and local communities, the project continues Artés’s inquiry into how power operates through mechanisms that appear neutral but produce profoundly unequal effects. Her work functions as a device of visibility, revealing historical continuities of dispossession and resistance.

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Carolina Ciuti