La Vorágine is the title of the novel (1924) by Colombian writer José Eustasio Ribera. It reveals the elements that make up the Colombian imaginary linked to the word vortex. It is a story, in the key of historical tale and fiction that uses a romantic plot to address the violent exploitation of the territory and human bodies during the “rubber fever” in the Amazon. Vorágine is at the same time turbulence of emotions, powerful natural force and violent exploitation. I am interested in taking up this word from its cultural signifier to follow the dialogue between territory and human modes of permanence.

Although the novel is set in the early twentieth century, today the situation has not changed so much. The rubber rush, the gold rush, the lithium rush, and a long etcetera of unbalanced relationships between those who dispossess ethnic communities and take over the land, assuming the land, the communities and the population that migrates in search of work as resources to be exploited. I propose a reflection from listening and voice; between discovering and camouflaging; between the body and its movement in the territory; between two distant sound territories. As a reflection from the ear, we have in the soles of our feet.

About the Artist: 

Researcher, Visual Artist and Sound Explorer. From the practice of walking and from processes of listening, she becomes involved with the human manifestations that affect public space and natural acoustic environments. From the audiovisual documentation procedure, her work proposes reflections and analyses of everyday aural encounters, also based on collective social situations. Her projects are familiar with the ideas of surrounding informality, itinerant commerce, economic precariousness, illegality and their grey areas of collective action and popular recursiveness; the vindication of voices as collective bodies of protest and visibility; the transformation of aural landscapes impacted by human activity; as well as the ephemeral and transitory.