Throughout the last decades, ‘liquid/fluid space’ has become a metaphor for the description of unstable orders in the realm of knowledge (Mol/Law), the social (Bauman) and the aesthetic (Deleuze, Heller). Without excluding the metaphor of the liquid, this workshop takes its starting point from aquatic spaces in a non-metaphorical sense for the analysis of cultural techniques of the aquatic. Particular attention in this workshop is given to fluvial landscapes in South America. Unlike the paradigm of the maritime, cultural techniques of the aquatic, and especially of the fluvial, do not deal with the endless ‘smooth’ spaces of the sea as opposed to the ‘striated’ space of the land, but organize and stabilize continuous transitions and entanglements between water and land, be it from the point of view of the history of the agricultural (fluvial and hydraulic societies), from the point of view of urban history (urban settlements on the riverside), from a geopolitical point of view (rivers as borderlines) or from the perspective of mobility studies (rivers and transportation). Fluvial landscapes form environments where the natural and the cultural are always already enmeshed, where scenes of transition between material and semiotic practices are located. For an aesthetics of aquatic spaces, the challenge of this perspective of cultural techniques consists of taking into account the metonymic (and not just thematic or metaphoric) quality of the aquatic in literary texts, film or other semiotic practices.