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mesk @meesk.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I greatly enjoyed Rolando Vargas' "Infrastructures in the Darién Rainforest: From Soft Earth to Mudware" in the latest @jcmsjournal.bsky.social. It reminded me of the Pluribus episode "The Gap," which follows a conventional view of the Darién Gap upended by Vargas' analysis.

Infrastructures in the Darién Rainforest: From Soft Earth to Mudware.
Rolando Vargas

Rolando Vargas is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Global Studies program at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Abstract: With media scholars rethinking environments as media, I turn to media ecologies to examine how mud, historically and in the present, functions as an elemental medium enabling the Darién rainforest’s resistance to external interventions. I propose the term mudware to describe the collaborations between mud and the beings that inhabit the rainforest, as an infrastructure of bios sustaining life in the region. Through a perspective grounded in mud—its ephemerality, impenetrability, discontinuities, and intervals—I analyze how Spanish colonial enterprises in the Darién, as well as the Pan-American Highway project and other contemporary incursions, have repeatedly failed within the Darién territory.