The Río de la Plata Basin is one of South America’s major territorial systems. It connects five countries, encompasses some of the continent’s largest cities and productive regions, and contains one of the world’s largest freshwater reserves. It is a complex territory shaped by the interaction of geological processes, living systems, human settlements, infrastructure, and technologies. At the same time, it is a stage where political, economic, and environmental interests converge, and a source of material realities, cultures, conflicts, and confluences where the local, regional, and geopolitical scales are inextricably intertwined.

Giving Voice to the Río de la Plata Basin is a multimedia documentary that attempts to describe and map the complex web of situations, actors, realities, and history of the Río de la Plata Basin. Through situated research, a journey across different points in the basin region, we mapped some of the layers that have shaped it: from its geological origins and ecological networks to its cities, infrastructure, productive landscapes, and political histories.

At m7red, we have worked for years with our complex scenarios methodology: a way of approaching territories not as fixed or homogeneous spaces, but as configurations in which multiple processes, scales, and temporalities coexist and interact. Instead of isolating individual phenomena, the complex scenario makes visible the ways in which the relationships between geological, ecological, historical, technical, and political processes intertwine in the production of space. These layers do not exist in isolation; they overlap, transform each other, and produce the particular forms of life and occupation that characterize the region: we call this process intertwining.

The basin is a territory in transition. Environmental transformations, urban sprawl, technological development, and shifting political and economic relationships are altering how its different parts connect. The equilibrium that once seemed to organize the region is becoming increasingly unstable, raising questions about the forms its future might take. Different conceptions coexist within the basin, organizing the relationships between technology and territory, and between humans and non-humans.

To explore these issues, the project examines the basin from various interconnected perspectives. Its landscapes can be understood as ecological systems, but also as historical constructions, technological assemblages, productive networks, and cultural territories, with each of these facets acting perpendicularly to all the others. Architecture and urbanism offer a way to interpret these transformations, observing how the different elements are continually organized, connected, overlapped, and redesigned. The sections of this site approach the basin from different strata. They can be explored independently, but together they form a broader cartography: a way of traversing geological time, ecological processes, human history, technology, and spatial transformation.

The goal of this documentary, as is generally the case with our work, is not to provide definitive answers to problems we conceive as multipolar and interdisciplinary, but rather to compose a map of interdependent, multiscalar relationships. In this sense, the problems and situations presented cannot be “solved,” only composed. Instead of presenting a definitive image of the Río de la Plata basin, this project documents a territory in a moment of transformation. It asks how we can understand the relationships between humans and non-humans, nature and technology, culture and environment, on the scale of a large region, and what new ways of conceiving space might emerge from them.