The Poetics and Politics of Climate in Fiction and Fact: An Interview with Claudia Aboaf

It is hard for the human mind to comprehend the number of the stars in the universe. But perhaps it is even more difficult to grasp the vastness of Earth: the interconnectedness of all actions, communities, and ecosystems. As technology progresses and we build systems that have effects beyond what we can see in space and time—effects that are easier to ignore because of how removed they are from the urban centres that benefit—it becomes increasingly imperative to find ways to see, and speak about these realities. The cost of modern life and technology—where resources are mined, where rivers are dammed, where landscapes are obliterated for ‘development’, where waste is dumped—is often born in places far from urban centres, affecting ecosystems and people in ways that states and companies have legislated into compliance. Technology and capital move at a pace that is hard to grasp, and difficult to quantify within the knowledge systems of economics and international trade and profit that were built by the same system. A vicious cycle. But where facts can be hard to relay or absorb, and barely begin to capture the true impact, fiction can provide a lens that cuts to the core. This is why writer and teacher Claudia Aboaf set out to, in her own words, “build my own Latin American library” of what she calls climate-fiction or Cli-fi (a term coined by reporter and climate activist Dan Bloom). 

When Claudia began writing what would become the first book of her Trilogy of the Water in 2014, she says, “my narrative stood alone among the books of my contemporaries, who drew from other interests. The only comparable reference texts were Anglo-Saxon, such as Ballard’s The Drowned World and The Drought, or Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, alongside the autocratic dystopias that always feature in narratives about the dismantling of nature.” Today, her works are part of several university curricula, such as the National University of the Arts (UNA).

Claudia works across languages, collaborating with people around the world. It’s interdisciplinary work, grounded in community engagement and her own relationship to nature and the Earth. She is also the co-founder of the astrology school Casa XI. Her work is permeated by a sense of cosmic planetary perception, and her essay Astrology and Literature: Cosmic Dialogues Between Authors of Our Literary Constellation is an attempt to hybridise fields of knowledge. 

Her openness to intersectional causes is perfectly encapsulated in her advocacy against lithium mining, which is, as she says, “a vestige of the cosmos, a remnant of an energy transition in a post-fossil world that never materialises.” She uses both poetry and history to frame her arguments for the cause.

Claudia has also worked with the art-community collective Aerocene. Aerocene is a movement for eco-social justice, started by artist Tomás Saraceno, to imagine, through methods at the intersection of art, science and technology, a world free of fossil fuels. The movement attempts to realise that future through education, protests, festivals, exhibitions, and through its many record breaking aerosolar flights, both piloted and unpiloted, which fly without the aid of fossil fuels, lithium and hydrogen. By finding earth-friendly ways to move through the air, Aerocene imagines a world where we float “with the ocean of air, uprooting dominant geo-centric logics towards embodying an ever more entangled relationship with the atmosphere and the cosmos.” You can learn more about Aerocene in Susan Mathews’ interview with Joaquín Ezcurra on The Subverse.

In this email interview, Claudia talks about imagining new worlds through fiction and activism and a deep attention to the world as it is, and what it takes to sustain that attention. Parts of the interview, translated from Spanish to English, are extracted below. 

What began, and what has sustained, your engagement with the environment and climate justice?

Socialising the struggle. Activism is carried out with others, in collectives like the one I’m part of: Mirá socioambiental. Mira Socioambiental is an ecofeminist collective of five female writers—Maristella Svampa, Dolores Reyes, Soledad Barruti, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, and me—that was formed in 2022 during the intense defense of the Buenos Aires coasts and the Argentine sea against offshore oil expansion. We collaborate by visiting territories, producing podcasts, and writing manifestos.

Each of us also works on journalistic articles, talks and workshops. Our objective is to contribute to the debate on the climate crisis, the responsibility of the richest countries, and the current neo-extractivist model in Argentina and Latin America. Our proposals aim to develop other languages of valuation (ecoliterary), to promote scientific language and the voices of the territories in relation to socio-environmental problems, with the aim of questioning society and mobilizing cultural debate. We also made a podcast series, The territory speaks, which is available on Spotify and YouTube.

What do you see as the role of environmental science fiction, or of fiction and art in general, in addressing the climate crisis?

Stories tend to align with our neural maps and determine how we perceive life. They are not just a set of ideas; they are a form of world-making. Writing is the making of metaphorical operations—our capacity to create an image and sustain it—that may be effective enough to oppose the dominant narratives that have taken hold of the social body. These narratives may say that Nature, including women and indigenous people, is inferior and thus, they make us vulnerable to exploitation and colonisation, if not extermination.

Poetics and politics are a powerful combination when they move people. In spite of the fact that literature may sometimes be erratic, it is always a minimalist revolution. Creating a world is no doubt heavy work, but whether it is an aesthetic gesture or a specific use of language technology or a simple story, it is what we find at the beginning of any political or historical movement. Writing offers the possibility of rehearsing and re-tracing; it is a delirium that can disrupt the course of events. Fiction provides access to the world, and it is precisely between what is real or weird, between virtuality and reality, that the future is now being disputed. In which narrative do we now find ourselves? Politics is always a promise of a future. Political discourse sells the future. And the last and most significant tale of how we depicted the future turned the Earth into Capital.

I find the question of speculation proper to science fiction. In the third part of my trilogy, The Eye and the Flower (2019), I wrote of a great drought of the Paraná River—the main tributary of the basin that crosses Latin America—which actually happened in 2021. 

Science fiction can function as a warning beacon. Yet, it’s not about prophecies but about observing the signs of the present moment. We sometimes tend to deny climate change and forget the real anatomy of AI, which is no more than a circuit of cables and a collection of data, extremely thirsty for water and energy. This is partly induced by the aestheticization of platforms, that is to say, the embellishment of all our platforms, which makes us forget that to keep AI alive we will have to dismantle Nature. 

I wrote a fictional scenario in which one of the protagonists decides to abandon her body in front of the screen, motivated by childhood trauma. She finds another woman in the impregnable strongholds of cyberspace interfaces and empties her memory through interaction with this woman, foreshadowing the dangerous use of LLM chats as a form of psychological therapy. Ultimately, the two characters conspire to hack technocratic alignment. In the face of accelerating AI development, failing to consider this issue is akin to yielding political ground.

Your latest novel, Trilogía del agua has been commended for its insightfulness and poetry. Could you tell us a little about the book, its themes, and how it’s evolved in the ten years since the first novel was released?

In the years since I wrote the first story, we have only deepened local and global crises. The dystopia, that imagined bad place, is already here. My obsessions remain the same: bodies of water, their contamination, the transformation of a river ‘of divine spine’ into a waterway, its commodification in the form of hydroelectric dams and the consequences this has for coastal populations. My concern regarding not only critical but also vibrant matters has affected my literature, with non-human things becoming increasingly prominent to the detriment of human characters.

On the other hand, during the writing process, I felt the need to brighten up the end of the story. For example, in the final installment of the Trilogy, where the story features a Malthusian government—based on population theory and geometric accounts, the world is given a reprieve. A restart will indelibly be inscribed in the end—for in every dystopia lies a hidden utopia, and vice versa. Literature reminds us that endings are open.

Lithium-powered batteries are seen as a key to move humanity away from fossil fuels. But this is not the whole story. What are the pitfalls of lithium mining?

From our ‘southern’ perspective, the consequences of lithium extraction are immediately evident. It’s another form of spoliation. Northern neocolonialism comes for natural goods resulting in the sacrifice of territory and the displacement of communities. So, apart from replacing cars in Europe, who is this change for? 

I believe we need radical narratives about the real problems that humanity faces, considering human beings as just another species on the planet. There is no solution without diversity. We must embrace degrowth instead of continuing business as usual. However, governments like Trump’s in the US and Milei’s in Argentina are expanding oil extraction and prohibiting even the mention of the climate crisis in certain institutions. At some point, we will have to consider the full picture of the world and the dark side of this electric civilisation that is now targeting lithium. Once again, we are faced with a problem of narratives that result in dangerous actions. We need to figure out how to dismantle, subvert or hack them. 

You collaborate with people who have varied expertise and many forms of knowledge. What draws you to these varied roles? What is the value and need that you find in intersectional and interdisciplinary work?

I am driven by infinite curiosity and a refusal to accept the existence of borders, crystallised knowledge or geographies, all of which are imaginary constructs. Border tracings as well as fields of human knowledge are illusory consensuses that forget that the Earth is, in effect, one.

How did you get involved with Aerocene?

In January, 2023, Maristella Svampa, who is part of the Mirá collective, asked me to join a trip to the Puna, a region of the Andean highlands. I spent several days living with Tomás Saraceno, Joaquín Ezcurra and director Maxi Laina in a small town at an altitude of 4,000 metres. For this event, members of 33 local communities had been invited to spend long hours together eating, laughing and drafting the Declaration of the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin as a Subject of Rights. Environmental lawyers and lithium specialists were present, as were the Apus (mountains), whose presence we learned to include in the encounter. It was a great conversation. Together with Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, I coordinated an ecolyrical workshop with people from the communities. We created a narrative map comprising their songs (coplas), stories that grandchildren had heard from their grandmothers, and the locations of ‘water eyes’, the local flora and fauna. It was there that we began to have conversations with Tomás. During those days, I observed how Tomás navigated that interconnected, multispecies world and the respect he had cultivated during his previous trip in 2020, during which the flight of the Aerocene Pacha took place. We hoisted the black balloons over the white salt flats and aerosolar sculptures danced to the music of the wind and sun. We met different local communities. Throughout our journey through nature, which was as arid as it was vital, ideas flashed back and forth. Until then, I had never met people who were as integrally an ‘imagination in action’ as Tomás Saraceno and the Aerocene community he fosters. 

After this trip, he proposed that I accompany him on the film project, integrating the previous material with what was generated on this trip. Working with Tomás is a loving labour, something rare. He lives in Berlin, I live in Argentina. Every time we contact each other, he asks me, “What more can we do?”

Could you talk about your, and Aerocene’s, engagements with local communities in the course of, and after, your work?

Aerocene builds continuous networks. There are concrete collaborative actions with local communities and strong ties that continue in daily life through updated communication. It is active in more than 40 countries.

After concluding my work as screenwriter on the film Fly with Pacha—into the Aerocene, I organised the premiere in Argentina, which coincided with the arrival in Buenos Aires of the ‘Tercer Malón’ (a mobilisation of indigenous communities across a thousand kilometers protesting against the advance of extractive industries in their territories). To bring more attention to the issues faced by the communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna Guayatayoc, we wrote a letter, in collaboration with the local communities, which Tomás delivered to Pope Francis by hand. We went to the owners and directors of one of the main oil companies, also interested in lithium mining, to convey the communities’ voice and to put pressure on them by exposing their greenwashing in art museums, which display artworks representative of those same indigenous peoples. Of course, there are other actions, like the Museo Aero Solar, carried out by other activists in the Aerocene community.

If there was one thing you would want your climate fiction writing students, and other people passionate about climate-related work, to consider when creating artistic work, what would it be?

Science fiction seeds questions that break the imposition of the Single Truth Regime that has brought us to this Era of Dementia. As Donna Haraway says, science fiction is philosophical writing because it is a way of thinking, a practice shared with others. Art and literature offer a sensitive bridge to active receivers, taking them out of their filter bubbles, and maybe, just maybe, leading to a better understanding of the complexity of this world. Science fiction and art compel us to estrange our gaze, allowing us to see everything as if we were seeing it for the first time. As Ursula K. Le Guin said, “Resistance and change often begin in art.”