Eliana  Hernández Pachón

Suspended
waters

Diaphanes & University of Chicago Press, 
Forthcoming 2026



Text commissioned for the project Objects Talk Back 
curated by Priya Basil for the Humboldt Forum. 
We tossed the gold we extracted from stones into the lake. The gold we melted down and carved with our own hands. The gold others are desperate for, the gold they’ll come barking after. We cast it in so our dreams will speak, so the day won’t grow weary, so the plants will flourish and  keep sustaining us. Those of us who can, who understand: we throw it all in. It will scandalize them. They’ll be baffled.
“Suspended Waters is a poetic essay that connects four objects made of plant fibres: a death raft woven from reeds that has come ashore in the wrong place, a gold Muisca raft that evokes the legend of El Dorado, Amazonian flutes made of palm that can only be seen by men and a sheet of paper used for museum records. Eliana Hernández-Pachón explores how these objects, from the Humboldt Forum collections, sustain different worlds. Through a text pulsing with the life of more-than-human beings, with multiple voices solo and choral, the author evokes worlds of ritual, sanctity, abundance. Worlds disrupted by outsiders versed in extraction, accumulation, scarcity. She shows how plants can hold time, memory, ceremony, how they can reveal and conceal, how they can heal. She follows their clues, drawing connections between disparate waters, flowing lyrically through cycles of interrelation, all the while asking: what does it mean to possess, to preserve, to let go?

—Priya Basil
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