Intersections between water and coal mining in artistic productions of southern Santa Catarina, Brazil

Abstract

The article analyzes the hydrological degradation of the Coal Region in southern Santa Catarina (Brazil) not only as a chemical and physical phenomenon associated with coal mining, but also as a perceptual crisis that affects regimes of sensibility. It takes as reference the rivers in the region. Drawing on Rancière’s notion of the partition of the sensible, the article proposes the concept of the “partition of the sensible of coal” to understand the institutional, economic, and symbolic practices that have organized ways of seeing, speaking, and inhabiting the territory since the early twentieth century. The research adopts a cartographic approach and engages in dialogue with contemporary artistic productions that generate dissensus within the extractivist regime by activating imagination as a field of political dispute, fostering fabulations of post-extractivist horizons grounded in relations of care, coexistence, and multispecies responsibility. By reinscribing rivers as memory, body, and interlocutors of the territory, art contributes to reconfiguring environmental disputes in the field of the sensible, expanding possibilities for other ways of life in the face of the ruins of capitalism.