Bodies as Earthed Medium of Struggle and Decolonial Climate Wit(h)nessing in The Age of Water

The Age of Water (2024) explores the environmental and public health repercussions of groundwater extraction for export-crop irrigation in Guanajuato, Mexico, following MAYOYE, a group of women who partner with a hydrogeologist to investigate local leukaemia cases. The article argues that the documentary operates as an expression and enactment of radical ecology and political geology. Although informed by the material turn in resource geographies and science and technology studies, the analysis foregrounds the racial logics underpinning development, and ontological politics. Drawing on Kathryn Yusoff’s work on geotrauma, the article shows how the film deploys water as an inhuman analytic and proposes the concept of racial hydro-geo-social formations to capture the structures it unearths. It then examines the documentary’s portrayal of competing visions in Mexico, and traces how MAYOYE become earthed medium of struggle. Taking into account the deployment of the eerie as an aesthetic practice, the conclusion argues that the documentary enacts a decolonial climate wit(h)nessing that opposes the futility of planetary-scale analysis.