El Mato emerges from a reflection on the memory of the Colombian rainforest in a time defined by the climate crisis. Inspired by the Serranía de Chiribiquete, the project understands the jungle as a living territory where past and present, nature and technology, are deeply intertwined. El Mato situates itself at the threshold between the real and the simulacrum: through images generated by both humans and machines, it opens a space of encounter between the human and the non-human, between memory and invention—a site where images cease to function as mere representations and instead become active forces that transform how we see, remember, and inhabit the world.

Imagining is neither an individual act nor an exclusively human faculty, but a shared practice. As the rainforest—understood as a living system—begins to vanish from our field of vision, imagination becomes a form of care and continuity. The images that emerge in this project inhabit a liminal zone in which data is translated into affect, and in which remembering, inventing, and looking again become essential gestures for sustaining our relationship with life and the Earth.

Moving between documentary records and algorithmic fictions, El Mato suggests that representation is also a form of intervention, shifting the question from how we look at the world to what remains alive once everything has already been seen. An essential question arises: what does it mean to survive, and who decides what deserves to endure? While conservation continues to be conceived from a human-centered perspective, Camilo Echeverri’s work opens a space where the rainforest belongs to no one and time folds between past and future.