After the Gold

Images dissolving, appearing and disappearing: memory, repetition, loss, silence. Material and immaterial territories melt in the promise of a stationary, alien, and transcendental wealth.

The thirst for gold does not change, but the name of the conflict does. While the mineral is ripped from the mud to be piled in distant vaults, the history of cultural, political, and environmental genocide reaches the bloodstream.

It turns into the extinction of species in the Magdalena River, into toxic gases invading unborn beings, into promises of capitalistic progress. In Colombia, armed conflict has lasted for over sixty years, and has to be understood as an ecosophic conflict as much as a sociopolitical one.

The Pseudoplatystoma magdaleniatum, or bagre rayado, is an endemic species of catfish living in the shallow waters of the Magdalena River. More than 1,500 km long, the river is born in the Colombian Andes and flows into the Caribbean Sea.

Through its waters, gold, enslaved people, animals, and spices traveled to Europe, while the Spanish colonial project entered the territory and funded cities from Cartagena to Bogotá over a period of 400 years.