BÁRBARA SANTOS
Bogotá, Colombia, 1977
www.quiasma.co
Instagram: @quiasma
Whatsapp: +57 3212438239

Bárbara’s work is rooted in Amazonian knowledge, exploring relationships between art, technology, ecology that connect forest cosmologies with contemporary artistic and technological discourses.

The artistic practice stems from listening to territorial processes (for months or years), dialogues with people who have a complex and ecologically vital relationship with the forests; experts such as naturalists, scientists, or traditional knowledge holders, almost all of whom, based on their daily experience, have produced situated knowledge. Through these associations and collaborations, her artistic work resembles a breathing membrane, allowing and selecting what is worth to appear and what needs opacity within these processes of collective exchange.

As a visual artist, she have worked over the last 25 years on the creation of a interactive sacred cartography,  helped by the collective and joint work of people coming from different disciplines (astrophysicists, artists, musicians, engineers, programmers, anthropologists, among others), and guided by Peoples of Origin / forest experts in the Amazon. This cartography appears in both my individual and collective work in the form of drawings, video installations, video art, interactive books, scripts, expanded documentaries, and maps that highlight the interconnection of objects, places, and beings with stories of origin.

Curation as Technology book (Santos, Idartes 2019, in Spanish) as an example of the aforementioned concepts, as well as the notions brought by the conference “The Acknowledgement of Loss”: an invitation to understand that terminology such as Climate Change is woven within colonial rubrics, not with the intention of opposing these labels with denialism, but with the awareness of the fact that there is a fundamental gap, a loss, a schism between academically “understanding” the forest and comprehending it in its cybernetic-ancestral core.

There are archives that belong to specific places, there are other open-source open data archives, but there are other sacred archives that only belong to a specific place or culture, which require special protection or handling. They must be reconnected based on the power to appear or not appear in public, to reveal or not reveal the loss of translation and/or its relevance.