I met Fernando Cruz in my first trip to Bogotá in 2018 and we have been friends since. Fernando is a long-time walker, intimately connected to territory and a constant researcher of photographic techniques that afford agency to non-human forces. I always dreamed we would do a project together. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, I contacted Luis Alejandro Camacho, a civil engineer who has measuring the health of the Bogotá River’s water for over twenty years. His capacity to describe the river’s asphyxia and how it manages to breath were captivating, and I knew we would collaborate in the future.
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This project is the fruit of those synergies, developed as part of the RÍO BOGOTÁ, an ongoing collaborative curatorial project. Thanks to support from the University of Essex Impact Fund, we were able to design workshops combining water quality analysis with image-making with those same river waters. The result is this exhibition.
Pulsos del río Bogotá, Galería Sextante, Bogotá
June 14 – August 31, 2024
An exhibition by entre–ríos, communities along the watershed, Fernando Cruz and Luis Alejandro Camacho
Through our pulses, we inhabit a constantly changing world. The beats rise and fall, sometimes we feel like they are suspended, but they always seek to return to their rhythm. To think about the pulses of a river is to recognize it as also alive and changing — capable of self-regulation.
For civil engineer, Luis Alejandro Camacho, the Bogotá River expresses its heartbeats in the dynamic rhythms of its flow through high mountain páramos, meanders, rapids and waterfalls. And, through fluctuations in its levels of dissolved oxygen and electrical conductivity – some of the measures that define the health of its waters.
This scientific vision converges with revelations of a river that appears alive and powerful. In Fernando Cruz’s canvas cyanotypes, different waters from the river – taken from its sources, flows and wetlands – are the raw material not to represent the river, but for it to manifest itself.
A photographic technique invented in the 19th century, cyanotypes enable a direct mediation between humans, light, plants and water. Gathered in a mural created by communities in the basin, these images attest to the diversity of lives that the Bogotá River basin hosts in its forests, vegetable plots, wetlands and waterfalls.
A river is all of this – a network of ecosystems conserved by riverside residents and organizations who – from their paths and councils – take care of the pulses of this vital basin that unites us, from the moors to the Magdalena River.
Lisa Blackmore
Installation Views
Community Workshops
These collaborative workshops to measure water quality and create images through which the river revealed itself, were held from July to September 2023. We worked with communities and waters from the source of the Bogotá River in the Páramo de Guacheneque; the river in the Vereda La Merced Aqueduct, Refugio Guacheneque; the river as it passes through the Santa Rosa path and the Santander bridge, Cacicazgo, Suesca; the source and jagüey of the Tomsatyba Reserve, Cabildo Mhuysca de Sesquilé, a tributary of the river; the Bogotá River as it passes through the La Conejera Wetland, Suba; groundwater that nourishes the wetland restored by the community of El Charquito, Soacha; source of the restored cloud forest of the El Porvenir Ecological Reserve, Salto del Tequendama.
Press
