Levelling (Night Sowing), 2015 |
The installation starts with a research on the work by Francisco José de Caldas, a Colombian scientist of the XIX century, in the Botanical Garden of Madrid. It takes Caldas’ profile of Los Andes mountain system, a set of four schemes drawn between Quito (Ecuador) and Santa Fe de Bogotá (Colombia) around 1803 to study the potentials of the terrain for agriculture that were found in the archives as the main reference. The work recreates spatially a fragment of the schemes traced by Caldas by piling up a bunch of wooden tables with boards of different lengths. A few desk lamps and magnifying lenses are part of the piece as well, to make a light metaphor of the sowing, where the seeds are replaced by light bulbs projected down from one level to the next.
The piece interweaves historical and scientific narratives to explore the relations between knowledge construction in the former Spanish colonies and the particular territory where they arise. The Project was developed and showed in Matadero, Madrid as a result of a three months residency. |
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