March 14 – September 20.
10% of the planet’s biodiversity is found in Colombia. This territory with almost fifty million inhabitants has one of the largest water reserves on Earth , and one of the most fertile lands in South America . However , it has also experienced over time one of the longest periods of war in the world , leaving high rates of murder and other atrocious practices , as well as a marked structural violence that permeates the entire nation . Colombia has been a country of birth, of life, sadly known for being a cradle for cruelty and home to death.
The corn of the native peoples in Latin America, the rivers of ancestral narratives and the guacas – indigenous tombs – shelter a mysticism broken by the irreversible exploitation of the land and the accelerated contamination of the waters, places where death ceased to be sacred, in order to become a violent daily act that bursts into nature. This land and its tributaries have been witnesses of the natural and national history, two parallel and unlinked realities in search for an encounter scene.
The Corn , The River and The Grave exhibition is an identity story between the anxiety and the calm of the territory. From its three milestones , it weaves a possible fabric about the complexities of the land as a point of divergence between the sacred and the mercantile ; the violent alteration of the pure flow of rivers, means of development stained by dark interests, and the uneven expansion of the tombs of war, scattered in nature, but latent in the collective memory, where they still claim dignity.
This exhibition traces some of the contrasting realities of the Colombian experience , the country where the compliance with the 2016 Havana Peace Accords is still ongoing, in which some rivers are subject to reparations as victims of the conflict. The nation where the ancestral sacredness of corn extends to the frailejon (Ruilopezia paltonoides ) plant of the moorland , ecosystem guarantor of water and life threatened by extractivism . The society fed up with the tombs in which the persistent feeling of hope is more relevant than ever, at the gates of a state project that includes the so-called “total peace”.