RÍO BOGOTÁ is an ongoing curatorial collaboration with Laura Giraldo-Martínez, Diego Piñeros García and Juliana Steiner, initiated in 2023. The project seeks to foster reconnections with the Bogotá River watershed, one of the most critically polluted in the world. The project comprises a number of actions and processes, spanning fieldwork, documentaries, publications, workshops and exhibitions.
VISIT PROJECT ON ENTRE-RIOS.NET
Current processes involve a series of “convites”, culinary encounters with river activists at different parts of the watershed, in collaboration with cook and curator Alejandra Sarria, a cycle of workshops in Bogota’s network of public libraries, as well as our upcoming participation in COP16.
Piquete del río Bogotá, 23 April 2023
During 2023, we traveled along the Bogotá River from its source in the Páramo de Guacheneque to the Salto del Tequendama. We bathed in the river, walked, navigated its banks, and met with inhabitants of the upper and middle basin. We listened to representatives of Mhuysca Indigenous councils, and projects in ecological and agroecological restoration, community water management, environmental education, nature tourism, heritage institutions and organic produce markets. We gathered sixteen river guardians to eat in front of Tequendama Falls, one the watershed’s most polluted points. Artist-cooks Cristina Consuegra and Carlos Alfonso devised a menu with inhabitants of the watershed to serve on the day, putting at the heart of the dining table the abundance that the river gives life to in gardens and vegetable plots along its upper and middle courses.
Full credits here
How to care for a river
Cómo cuidar un río is a collaborative publication that gathers stories of river care from six points along the upper and middle course, through grassroots initiatives, via reforestation NGOs and community projects of rooting in the watershed. These stories are woven through the publication in drawings made by Carlos Alfonso, along with texts written by Cristina Consuegra from fieldwork notes and documents produced by the curatorial team. The publication also includes scientifically-informed perspectives on the “pulses” of the river contributed by civil engineer Luis Alejandro Camacho, connecting us to the dynamic changes from high mountain páramo, via serpentine meanders, boggy wetlands, and fast-flowing descents through canyons. The river emerges as richly biodiverse, resilient and protected by those who care for it.
Design: Juan Pablo Fajardo / Piedra Tijera Papel Open access, available for download here
