Sonic Cartography in the Rímac Watershed: On the Contemporaneity of a Pre-Columbian Acoustic Ecology

Overview (Underhearing)

The following article considers a series of intersections between the practice of sonic cartography, environmental activism, and academic research. It functions as the baselines of sonic maps that are yet to be made, articulating the historical and practical grounds, methodological concerns, material limitations, and ethical commitments involved in cartographic practice. In conjunction with this articulation, the article poses several questions: What can territorial approaches to mapping add to the hegemonic modes of representation in planning? How can putting listening at the center of mapmaking intervene in the colonially-inherited, vision-oriented tradition of cartography? In what ways can the collective practice of mapping, when approached from the standpoint of motion, transform our communal relations and sense of place?

More than making a map, the primary concern is to approach listening-based practices of community mapping in Huarochirí within the context of work carried out as part of the Asociación de Siembra y Cosecha de Agua (ASyCA), dedicated primarily to the implementation of the hydrological system known in the Andes as water sowing and harvesting (siembra y cosecha de agua). Both an ancestral and cosmopolitan knowledge, the process of water sowing involves capturing, deriving, retaining, and filtering water in the headwaters (cabeceras de cuenca) of the mountain peaks (punas). Rainwater crowns and then enters the mountain—subsoils are nurtured, biodiversity proliferates—and is made available year-round to be harvested during the dry season, by directing it to neighboring settlements and cultivation areas. This system has the potential to secure food sovereignty and control over natural resources, thus strengthening the networks between neighboring communities by means of sharing the watershed. This ancestral technology also operates as a living archive, in the sense that it revalorizes the histories of these communities by recalling practices and modes of living that lie forgotten under the current precarious infrastructures of dependence to, in this case, the metropolis of the Peruvian capital, Lima.

Huarochirí is a province located in the Andes at the headwater of the Rímac River, the main water source for the city of Lima. Thus, from the standpoint of water, Lima depends more on Huarochirí than the reverse. In the context of our climate crisis, and the specific challenges posed by this particular ecosystem (characterized by cycles of flood and drought), listening to and walking the ways of the water is a vital strategy for a deep engagement with the territory through an opening up, in the words of Anna Tsing, of “the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times” (Tsing, 2015,19).

The territory, in terms of the practice of water sowing and harvesting, is understood as the different interconnected ecosystems in the same basin or sub-basin, with its present, past, and potential headwaters (Mora, 2020). A trained eye can identify the traces of infrastructure where water used to be harvested. These traces of hydric infrastructure are also traces of ancestral practices for the use and maintenance of water. The identification of these traces points to an abundance that lies latent in the mountains, but has been unknown to the communities in their lifetimes. Gregorio Ríos, technical promoter, a senior master builder from San Pedro de Casta in Huarochirí, and the president of ASyCA, states that water sowing is a “forgotten” practice. From this statement we understand that the implementation of the system is a work of remembering. Ríos speaks of the work of the Asociación as “the implementation of a new structure, following the traces of the ancient ones (siguiendo las huellas de los antiguos).”[1] These traces are imprinted in the mountain—they are depressions in the soil that can hold and channel running water, the vestiges of pre-Columbian[2] stone infrastructure for retention and capture, as well as underground conduits and filtering caves. Water sowing and harvesting are taught and learned by walking with and listening to the paths of the water, from the moment it arrives from the clouds. The practice responds, both historically and cyclically, to an integrated sense of territory, and to the shared necessities of its communities.

In response to the systematization of the science of cartography, various practices of community mapping (mapeo comunitario) have emerged that point towards other forms of representation of histories and life cycles grounded on the sensorial (Sletto, Bryan, et al., 2013). Representation here works towards an understanding that the shared necessities of communities are entangled with poetics and idiosyncrasies, with fantastic senses of the future and with histories that lie dormant. In working with ASyCA, mapping thus weaves itself into the process of remembering, that is, the implementation of the hydrological system, communicating other forms of habitation and honoring a heritage that is imprinted in the mountain, but which hegemonic systems of historical recording invalidate as fiction rather than fact (De la Cadena, 2015)[3] .

Extractivist City

(hegemonic systems of historical recording)

I chose to begin this piece of writing in the city of Lima as a gesture of positioning, since it is where I come from and where I began to walk and listen, and make the point that the foundation of the city of Lima marks a tradition of shaping the territory in alienation from the land (tierra)[4] . It is this tradition that the previously-mentioned hegemonic systems of historical recording inaugurate, dehistoricize, and perpetuate. Lima’s inception as the “City of Kings’’ in the sixteenth century brought with it the imposition of a sedentary society of settlers that established the city as the centralizing point of accumulation of the Viceroyalty of Peru and the principal communication channel between the New World and the Spanish Empire. The aim of establishing the port city was to effect a shift in the center of imperial power away from the pre-existing Incan empire, with its political center in Cusco, in the heart of the Andes. Having Cusco, nicknamed “the belly of the world,” as an administrative imperial center, corresponds to an understanding of the territory as an interconnected landmass, and of the practices of circulation of resources as processes integral to the territory’s geography (Kaulicke, 2008). The port city reflects a different set of circulation priorities, in which the center of accumulation sits beside the boats that will take the resources to an alien land far away. The re-centralization of power established a form of accumulation in which lifeforms, otherwise conceived as beings that come from the landmass and are destined to go back into it, are deterritorialized as alienated resources that ought to be taken away, by sea, to another—invisible yet subordinating—place. From its inception, the planning of this city presupposes an erasure of the places, beings, and resources that build and sustain its territory.

From the standpoint of the ecosystem, this geographic expansion of life came at the expense of many of the life cycles already in place (and consequently at the expense of lives themselves). Thus, from an ecological standpoint, the so-called conquest can be understood as an expansion of the existing ecology that necessarily brought with it the introduction of new cycles sustained by the brutal eradication of others.

The first official map of Lima dates back to the seventeenth century, and is emblematic of the slow violence (Nixon, 2011) of physical and mnemonic obliteration of the existing ecosystem by Spanish colonialism. Drawn from the perspective of someone reaching the city from the ocean, the author specifically arrives at the port of Callao, the largest port on the Pacific coast at the time, and still the largest in the country today. The land is represented as a void—only the Rímac River, the gridded plan of Lima (at the time a walled city), and the mountain behind it (now part of the city), crowned with a cross,[5] are shown. Cultivation, irrigation systems, puquiales[6] , humedales[7], settlements, the qhapac ñan[8] , the lomas[9] , and most living beings are all rendered non-existent. Also non-existent are newly developed practices such as the importation of cattle, and the overuse of water from the Rímac required to feed them, uncontrolled deforestation for building with wood and fabricating vegetable carbon (practices the locals did not engage in), all of which contributed to an “ecological rupture” (Rostworowski 1981, 35) that materialized as the overall drying out of the soil. These practices reflect a lack of communication between beings, a sense of planning divorced from a tradition of habitation, and constitute precisely what is meant by alienation of the territory from the land.

Figure 1. The oldest map of Lima, dated 1675. Anonymous. Public domain.

Figure 2. José Canziani; Hypothetical valley of the northern or central coast, illustrating the settlement pattern, with the extension of agricultural management to the medium and lower zones of the valley through the development of irrigation channels in both margins. Source: José Canziani, “Ciudad y territorio”. 2009.

In the map at figure 2, architect and researcher José Canziani illustrates a hypothetical reconstruction of life in a valley in the ecosystem of the central or northern coast, similar to the site of Lima. In Canziani’s map we see that most of the land where the current city stands was allotted to cultivation, and that settlements existed in a more decentralized manner, according to the economic activities of their corresponding areas (fishing, agriculture, politics, etc.). An intervalley path, corresponding with a path known as the Incan road system or qhapac ñan, connects all the basins on the coast, facilitating easy exchange between them. From the river derive various irrigation channels that nurture fertile soil in what is now experienced as arid land (Canziani, 2009, 183).

For Canziani, city and territory are coexisting categories, the former a type of “domestication”[10] of the latter. The colonial city, however, is essentially different in that it inaugurates a particular form of unsustainability demanded by a specific economic activity that remains the core of Peruvian economic progress today: mining for export. The contemporary forms of such export-based economies in South America have been termed neo-extractivism (Gudynas, 2015). In the historical record, extractivism has its roots in a model of accumulation that follows the demands of nascent urban centers in settler colonial societies (Svampa, 2019, 6). In South America, the symbiogenesis of cities and extractivism stands for a single urbanization pattern based on a model of subordination rather than one of reciprocity (Acosta, 2013). Understanding settler colonialism and counter-territorial urban planning as mutually constitutive make the logic of extractivism inseparable from the systems of representation of the colonial city.

Territorial Standpoint (the future of the watershed)

If we follow the Rímac upwards into the Andes, we reach the district of Huarochirí, where the construction of hydroelectric dams (Huinco and Callahuanca) throughout the twentieth century not only exacerbated the drying of the soil (the subsoils are no longer fed by water vessels[11] ), but also failed to bring any resources to the communities that live there. In the official historical record (written in Spanish), Huarochirí is first mentioned in reference to practices of forced spiritual indoctrination, marked by the “reductions”[12] of ayllus (complex kin-and-town-ships) through the imposition of borders and the burning of the homes and sacred spaces of families that refused to separate (Rosas Cuadros, 1995). The ayllu reduction corresponded with the previously mentioned extractivist reconfiguration of labor. The systematic drying of the soil continues, exacerbated by aggressive centralization policies throughout the republican history of Peru that continue to marginalize communities in the Andes. These policies have led to decades of forced migration to coastal cities, especially Lima, where over a third of the country’s population lives (Matos Mar, 1984; Gandolfo, 2009).

In the face of these challenges, exacerbated by the disproportionate impact of climate change in the Andean highlands, community leaders resort to territorial approaches to the organization of life, the implementation of which is often challenged by the segmentarist political division of the territory into municipalities (Alencastre, 2021; Magnaghi, 2012). In Huarochirí, the Asociación de Comunidades Nor-Huarochirí brings together the independent associations of the communities that share the valley of the Santa Eulalia River (which flows into the Rímac). Although striving for territorial organization, the communities of the basin must nevertheless, in most cases, pass requests for funds for the implementation of infrastructure through their corresponding municipalities. Gregorio Ríos founded the Asociación de Comunidades Nor-Huarochirí based on his understanding of a territory closely bound to the movement of water.

Figure 3. Intervention in a map of the Rímac watershed, running from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean. San Pedro de Casta circled in Yellow by the author. Retrieved from the website of the Ministry of Energy and Mining of Peru: http://www.minem.gob.pe/minem/archivos/file/dgaam/publicaciones/evats/rimac/rimac2.pdf

Figure 4. Diagram of the Pacific-facing central Andean ecosystem by Michael Moseley.

 While different versions of water sowing and harvesting are, and have been, practiced worldwide, ASyCA’s work responds to the ecosystem of the Pacific-facing central Andes. This ecosystem is characterized by having a desert coastline narrowly hemmed in by the Andes. The mountain range rises to over 5000 meters above sea level, a dramatic ascent that generates many neighboring microclimates at different altitudes. The Andes block clouds formed from the evaporation of Pacific Ocean water from reaching the Amazon rainforest, retaining them over the coast year-round. Evaporated ocean water would normally be warm in such a tropical latitude, but in this case the water remains cool because of the cold Humboldt current from the southern seas. As the waters evaporate, they are warmed by the desertic landmass in a temperature inversion that inhibits precipitation until an altitude of about 2500 meters is reached (Moseley, 1974). This happens in the warmer months of the year (November–April) known colloquially, below 2500 meters, as summer and, above 2500 meters, as rain season. The rest of the year, the coast is covered by cool and rainless fog, while the Andes suffer intense drought. The Andean ecosystem, characterized by floods and droughts, has historically demanded sophisticated water management technologies from its inhabitants (Engel, 1980; Canziani, 2009). ASyCA understands water sowing and harvesting as an integral system that brings together most of these technologies in an interdependency.

Figure 5. “Water sowing: Forgotten resources and hydric systems” by Gregorio Ríos (Cultura al Agua, 2017)

Walking Listening (the ways of water)

In the process of writing technical reports for the construction of infrastructure, there is the first moment of diagnosis, which often arises from educational activities where people present their relationships with the project at hand to each other. These are often creative activities, like putting on a play or drawing a map. Social cartography has a long tradition; as a member of ASyCA, my contribution focuses on the practice of field recording, for its unique ability to bring walking and listening together. The mapping process takes the form of intergenerational workshops centered on walking with and listening to the paths of the water. The trajectories of this map are not fixed, as the idea is to start mapping from the ways in which people listen to the movement of water. My role is to offer techniques related to field recording and the facilitation of long sessions of walking and listening, leading to the eventual development of collective forms of archiving the material.

The intent of these workshops is to engage in an acoustic ecology—that is, as Hildegard Westerkamp writes, an “arena” for “the study of the inter-relationship between sound, nature, and society” (Westerkamp, 2002). Westerkamp is a pioneer in the field of acoustic ecology, which emerged from the World Soundscape Project, the work of a group of soundscape composers in British Columbia in the 1970s. By using field recordings of environmental sounds in composition and putting together soundwalks, the group emphasizes listening throughout the composition process. Composition thus becomes about modes of engagement with the environment through sound. While the practice of “soundscape composition” was used from the group’s inception, the field of acoustic ecology was only formalized decades later, in the year 2000, with the publication of the first volume of Soundscape: A Journal of Acoustic Ecology, edited by Westerkamp herself.

Often, soundwalks and field recording sessions are one and the same, and this interrelation of walking and listening in soundscape composition is a focus of the work this paper relates to. In the field of sound studies, ‘soundscape’ refers to a specific legacy, heavily influenced by a 1976 book by R. Murray Schafer: On Sonic Environment and The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World. Many critiques of Schafer (a colleague of Westerkamp) have emerged since then. Tim Ingold argues against Schafer’s transposition of the visual mechanics of the landscape into sound, claiming that this results in basing ideas in the same binaries that gave them birth—ideas that many in the field of visual culture have long tried to undo (Ingold, 2007). Namely, and chiefly, framing things in terms of “the relation between man and the sounds of his environment” (Schafer, 1967, 3) already presupposes a problematic division between the human and the natural. The proposal made here for a sonic map aims to de-center this explicitly gendered (and implicitly racialized) separation of human subjectivity, imbued in the practice of soundscape composition, in accordance with Ana María Ochoa’s assertion about the influence of post-structuralist anthropology in sound studies:

This is not an issue of how to “include” the human in the environment but rather of asking how the given and the made are conceptualized and thereby related to the reformulation of notions of production, habitation, the acoustic, and form.(Ochoa, 2016, 132)

When recording in the field, headphones can be used to hear what is being recorded as it happens. This state of amplified hearing informs movement on-site in particular ways. Paying attention to the challenges and potentials of walking with recorder in hand not only offers mobility, but also makes the physical presence of a body an unavoidable part of the recording (the movement of the headphone cable, friction from clothing, footsteps on soil and stones, breath sounds that indicate the pace of the body, and so on.) A “masterful” approach to field recording would demand that these mentioned traces should disappear, in order to maintain a seamless aesthetic flow of “environmental” sounds, separate from any indication of the recording human. Mastery would mean using a handle or a tripod and a windscreen on the microphone, so that nothing that reaches it does so without a filter. In a gesture of mastery of non-mastery (Taussig, 2021), the workshops encourage experimentation with movement-based approaches as a way of understanding that, in recording, the operator too becomes record. Embracing the interruptions of touch and motion, of breathing and walking, creatively, is a way to begin to suspend the separation of the given and the made, understanding gesticulations, sensibilities, the archive, and the territory as mutually constitutive.

Water sowing and harvesting are studied by walking up to the mountain peaks and following the descending paths of the water, learning how to read the inscriptions in the soil and stones, the traces of dams, channels, and caves. In proposing to connect with this practice through sonic mapping, listening takes place in motion, by walking while recording as a way of mapping the space from within–cartography from habitation.

Walking as a critical practice also has a history as a discipline. The activity is usually approached from a perspective of labor, and in reference to urban spaces (rural spaces tend to work by contrast.) Walking in a city is associated with the incorporation of a set of standard disciplines (posture, pace, clear direction) that follow a productivist logic of reproduction (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008, 2). In contrast, critical walking practices focus on play or other dimensions of labor that refuse this logic. Key examples are the figure of the flâneur (Benjamin, 1999) and the practice of the dérive (Debord, 1956)–what Francesco Careri, in his influential book Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, refers to as the “anti-walk.” For Careri, the issue at hand is “the communication of the experience in aesthetic form.” (Careri, 2002, 207), thus critical walking is framed as always bound to the duty of counter-hegemonic forms of mapping.

In working with Asociación de Siembra y Cosecha de Agua, the intervention of sonic cartography proposed emphasizes the interconnectedness of habitation, mapping, archiving, and constructing. The aesthetic experience of amplified hearing opens channels of communication with the territory. A dimension of this is made reproducible[13]  by field recording, and is accordingly available to be shared for collective study. The methods of editing, formatting, and ordering the recordings, alongside communication of the experience of recording constitute the map, which stands as an archive that has the capacity to directly inform the shape of the infrastructure to be built.

Concluding Offer (An active line on a walk[14] )

Maps are made of lines. With sound, this materializes quite literally in the timeline. A single field recording is a line in time, a trajectory walked, with its chances and choices. The sonic map begins when bringing these walks together. Last April, members of the Asociación de Siembra y Cosecha de Agua went up to San Pedro de Casta on a recording trip. The purpose was to record with GPS precision the infrastructure for water sowing that the community had built the year before, as well as the infrastructure for water harvesting that is yet to be built. The GPS points were accompanied by photographic records to which I proposed a sonic complement. The first day was spent in Marcahuasi, a complex of impressive pre-Columbian stonework in the highest peaks of the mountain, where community members enclosed naturally formed depressions with dams made of stone and adobe (remains of which are present from pre-Columbian times). The recording trip was right at the end of the rain season, so the depressions were filled with rainwater to a considerable degree of their capacity.

Figure 6. Fabrizio Mora, “Carhuayumac Microbasin Water Harvesting Systems”, 2021.

To conclude this article, I offer a line from the recording trip, edited together with minimal overlaps that give a sense of continuity, as well as rough cuts and examples of in-recorder leveling, presenting them in the condition of edited fragments of an archive. Listeners will hear my breath and steps, and the friction of my body as well as gusts of wind hitting the microphone. The words of my collaborators, learning as we go, and the sounds of the machines as they record the names of the bodies of water, the height of the dams, and the time of the day are heard. For those who were present, these recordings are remarkable memory aids, giving a visceral as well as technical sense of what it was like to walk down the paths of the water. They become a living archive, linking our movements to those of the hydrological system. The water, in the beginning, is nowhere to be heard, as the walk started amid the qochas and smaller wells, where water is either still or infiltrates deep underground. The silence is of the water (Fantinato, 2021). What is heard is the movement around it, of birds gathering, of small organisms breathing in the shallows, of humans mapping and walking and talking. As our path descends, the water infiltrates the recording with its motion, dripping and running through underground channels and overground streams.

What is left is to share. To keep walking and listening to the ways of water sowing and harvesting. To sustain the living archive that is latent in the territory.

Audio 1. Vered Engelhard, “Line with ASyCA, Marcahuasi, 17/04/21”, 2021.