Eliana Hernández-Pachón: Suspended Waters

Objects Talk Back Worlds of ritual, sanctity and abundance Suspended Waters is a poetic essay that connects four objects: 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. Colombian writer Eliana Hernández-Pachón explores how these objects sustain different worlds. Through a text pulsing with the life of more-than-human beings, with multiple voices both solo and choral, Hernández-Pachón evokes worlds of ritual, sanctity, abundance. She asks: what does it mean to possess, to preserve, to let go? Series Objects Talk Back published by Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss. Eliana Hernández-Pachón was born in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first book, La Mata, is a poignant work of historical reckoning: it commemorates the 2000 massacre in the village of El Salado and reflects on the broader tragedy of mass killings in Colombia. The book received Colombia’s National Poetry Prize in 2020, making Hernández-Pachón the youngest poet ever to receive the award. She is a member of the poetry collective Como un lugar, which runs a publishing house in Buenos Aires and organizes literary festivals in New York and across Latin America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.