On a recent afternoon in Getty’s Central Garden, artist Carolina Caycedo unfolded her Serpent River Book, a 72-page collage of archival images, maps, poems, lyrics, and satellite photos of the rivers of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.
One by one the pages unfurled, accordion-style, to form one long stream—“a river of information,” Caycedo says—which was then carried aloft in a single-file procession through the Getty Center.
The Serpent River Book series—combining scholarship, visual art, how-tos, and proposals for a communal energy infrastructure—is part of a larger body of work called Be Dammed that explores the complex issues surrounding the construction of hydroelectric dams: the displacement of Indigenous communities, loss of biodiversity, and the commodification of water resources.
Of Colombian descent, Caycedo was born in London and grew up in different places around the world. For her, water is significant for how it transcends national borders, a shared global language. With a background in public art, she became interested in rivers when she realized how they functioned as a kind of communal space in rural communities across the Americas, a common good threatened by capitalist development. “I feel strongly about defending this public realm,” she says.
To create the project, Caycedo collaborated with activists and Indigenous community groups who are on the front lines of ecological collapse, working together to imagine a future not dependent on fossil fuels. The answer to our current environmental crisis is not just about building more solar farms or buying electric cars, the work suggests, but requires a much larger, radical transformation of how we relate to the physical world. If Western thought places humans outside nature—with elements like rivers and forests seen simply as exploitable resources—Indigenous perspectives treat waterways as living relations, vital links in the web of life. For instance, the Whanganui River in New Zealand was granted legal personhood in 2017, reflecting the Maori belief in its living essence.
The Serpent River Book also reveals how ancestral knowledge—the tools and techniques passed down through generations—models ways to live more sustainably. Honed over time, these technologies often represent traditional ways of doing things—from agricultural practices like crop rotation and water irrigation to handicraft techniques like weaving and pottery. Drawing on the wisdom of the past to address current environmental challenges, these technologies reflect a deep connection to and respect for the natural world.
Caycedo, who spent this past year as Getty’s 2023–24 Artist in Residence, logged long hours in the Getty Library conducting research for the second volume in the Serpent River Book series. “I think the librarians here must think I’m crazy,” she says, “I have about 200 books.” She looked at everything from 19th-century travel albums, depicting ancestral technologies like rice harvesting, to contemporary art, drawing inspiration from Getty’s large collection of artists’ books by Sam Winston, Cecelia Vicuña, Agnes Denes, and others. “Research in the archives is a way of building a genealogy,” she says, connecting her work to a larger web of relationships.
The Serpent River Book is designed to be “activated” through movement, installation, and collective study. Just as communities like Idaho’s Nez Perce tribe, who Caycedo has collaborated with, give offerings to nature to repay what they’ve taken for sustenance, Caycedo sees her project as a way to give back to the communities she works with. “As artists, we take images and information but forget to leave stuff,” she says. The book, after all, is a portable medium. Throughout history, books have functioned as technology for sharing information across vast distances, spreading ideas and culture through images and text. While sometimes used as colonial tools, they also enable communities to practice creativity and resistance. As modes of exchange, books give voice to the underrepresented, expose injustice, and tell new stories different from the ones upheld by the dominant culture.
In a world based on extraction, in which bodies and lands are continually ransacked by capitalism, Caycedo’s art is an important enactment of reciprocity, joy, collaboration, and creative resistance. “What are the processes that uphold life?” she asks. Through artist’s books, videos, sculptures, and performances, her work is ever evolving to platform the voices of others. “The work we create can host and take care of other people’s struggles and preoccupations,” she says, “and for me, that is what art is really about.”
Carolina Caycedo’s work is on display at the PST Art exhibitions:
