"Corn is planted and harvested in the following manner. Corn is grain that is borne on an ear about six to eight inches long. This ear or spike is covered with grains almost as large as chickpeas".
 

Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo. Natural History of the West Indies. Ed. and trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.

Material and cultural sustenance of the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations, corn (also called maize) was created by domesticating the wild teocintle plant species. Over the course of millennia, this process resulted in plants that were efficient to grow and easily adaptable to different geographic conditions, making corn a staple food for pre-Columbian peoples (Fournier García 1998; Staller 2006). Thus, corn, as well as its fermented and nixtamalized preparations, became an essential resource for the food sovereignty of indigenous communities and a symbol for the social relations of everyday life and ritual life across the Americas.

In "La resta de las partes," artist Carlos Castro (Bogotá, 1976) takes the fruits of the corn plant as the starting point for a visual narrative. This quest, which is also a return to the aesthetic questions that initiated his body of work, led him to connections between the earth, its products and the symbolic dimension that permeates the capital. The value of human labor, for example, is in the green cornfield that lines the entry to this exhibition and in the Incan wall made of gunny sacks; it is in the padded painting made of uniforms where the surplus value endures; and it is in the time taken by men and women who gathered the thousands of receipts, bills and corn kernels used to create the depreciated and demonetized banknotes and coins that are in the show. These works, whose value resides only in the evocative potential of their images, represent the dream of a nation of lush plant life and high culture, a deeply Latin American utopia. Here, Castro reminds us that it was the Spanish conquest that brought coinage and, with it, a form of exchange that was imposed over and above indigenous currencies—products of labor, like seeds and textiles—that could be used for survival but instead went on to be the base for an exploitative system of tributes and tithes.

In the center of the room, a stepped pyramid is the support for an installation with small paintings/memes, anthropomorphic fruits and reflective artifacts. There are ears of corn and popcorn kernels made of human teeth that contain the energy of a collective—with dental problems—whose biological waste has become desirable. The sculptures do not hide the violence of extraction that precedes them nor the narcissism of the golden reflection that covers them. There is a meditation on colonial violence in the symbols and monuments of the Eurocentric narrative, and thus, spread around the floor or hanging from the ceiling, there are mutilated remnants of conquistadors, monarchs and profiteers who have been invaded, in a decolonial gesture, by the thinking of the Inga indigenous community from Valle del Sibundoy, on the upper Putumayo River. Their placement isn't random: Castro has had in mind the conditions of displaced indigenous peoples in cities, their invisibility, persistently sitting on the floor as if it were a reservation—the grievously unequal distribution of capital and those who must endure it.