Other listenings in the Magdalena lagoon

About the work

This project, part of the 2024 Colombian Ministry of Culture Creation Grant, sought the profound significance of the Colombian Massif not only as the nation's "water star," where several of the country's important rivers are born, but as a sacred territory charged with ancestral cosmologies. The work was rooted in the understanding that this landscape has been historically interpreted and inhabited through non-Western epistemologies, specifically those embodied by the San Agustín culture and its shamanic tradition. In this vision, shamanism is not seen as superstition, but as a political art and a sophisticated form of knowledge that operates through the "abduction of agency." The shaman, by interpreting mountains, rivers, and animals as entities with intentionality and power (evident in Augustinian sculptures that fuse the human, animal, and divine), grants and recognizes the condition of subject to what modernity reduces to object. This practice of "trans-species translation" was the essential conceptual framework for the work.

Thus, the research-creation at Magdalena Lagoon was conceived as a contemporary exercise analogous to that shamanic practice, using technological tools (sensors, radio astronomy, sonification) not to measure and dominate, but to listen and translate. The sonification of ecosystem data and the capture of galactic hydrogen frequencies became a ritual of aesthetic mediation, seeking to make audible the voice of non-humans in a dialogue that honors the memory of the territory. The final installation, with its vibrating bowl that unites water, sound, and light, functions as a sort of modern "shamanic artifact." It not only points to nature's agency in the climate crisis, but actively recovers and reclaims the wisdom of the Massif's aquatic cultures, proposing that the path toward a new relationship with the planet necessarily passes through rereading and relearning from these forms of integral interpretation of the world, where humans and non-humans coexist in a continuous network of agency and meaning.