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

Bárbara Santos’s work is rooted in Amazonian knowledge. It explores relationships between art, technology, and ecology connecting forest cosmologies with contemporary artistic and scientific discourses.

 Santos’s artistic practice is rooted in deeply listening to and closely observing territorial processes for months or years. It involves dialogues with diverse stakeholders that, due to their complex and ecologically vital, lived relationship with the Amazon, have produced profound, situated knowledge. Through these associations and collaborations, the artist serves as a membrane, a filter that carefully selects what elements to reveal and what elements, do to their sacredness, must remain hidden.

Over the last 25 years her artistic practice has catalyzed the creation of an interactive sacred cartography. Guided by indigenous Peoples of Origin, this extended project joins the work of many researchers, including astrophysicists, artists, musicians, engineers, programmers, and anthropologists. Santos’s sacred cartography appears in her individual and collective artworks in many forms, including of drawings, video installations and experimental documentaries, interactive books, and maps that highlight the interconnection of objects, places, and beings with stories of origin.

Santos’s book, Healing/curing as Technology (Curación como Tecnología, Idartes 2019) exemplifies these concepts, as well as those addressed in the landmark conference “The Acknowledgement of Loss” (Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2025). Healing/curing as Technology invites us to consider indigenous healing techniques as powerful forms of technology equivalent to but different from those of post-industrial technoscience. It invites us to reflect on how common ecological terms, such as “climate change,” are inextricably interwoven with colonial rubrics; that there is a fundamental gap, a loss, a schism between intellectually comprehending the forest and cultivating an embodied understanding of its cybernetic-ancestral core.

There are archives that belong to specific places. There are open-source and open-access archives, publicly available online from anywhere. And there are other archives – sacred ones - that belong only to a specific place and culture, and that demand special protection and stewardship. They must be reconnected based on the power to appear or not to appear in public, to reveal or not reveal the loss of translation and/or its relevance.