THE PROMISE OF FOG CAPTURE: Ground-Touching Clouds as a Material (Im)Possibility in Peru

Abstract

This article centers on an NGO-induced fog-capture project in Lima, Peru. While presented by the NGO as an alternative water-supply system for residents lacking state infrastructure, the fog catchers ultimately failed to live up to promises about potable water. Yet as fog turned into a material impossibility, the project's failure yielded a series of new possibilities and expectations, for instance about the potential acquisition of a piece of land. The fog catchers creatively informed other, ongoing processes of improvised urbanization, meaning that the failure became not an end point but a site of emergence whereby the temporality of the fog-capture project folded into parallel rhythms of socio-material transformation. In conclusion, I suggest that the failure be understood not as simply dictated by a larger politico-economic order but as a generative moment through which certain urban configurations became momentarily exposed and could be productively acted on.