When nature is perceived as a network, its vulnerability is obvious. Everything is held together. If you pull on a thread, the whole tapestry can unravel [...].

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

Tropicality is that geographical and cultural notion distant from European geographical and material conditions. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the strangeness and dazzlement felt by colonisers and chroniclers in the face of the exuberance of Latin American nature and territories created an imaginary full of fantastic and terrifying descriptions in equal measure. Thus, while scientific research and the exploration of the economic potential of the natural resources in these regions were promoted on the one hand, the idea was also cultivated that there were obstacles to the development of thought and the prosperity of the colonies, such as the marked features of the territory and the customs of its inhabitants. In "Tropics", the Colombian artist Ana González takes up the notion of tropicality to think about two cultural and material realities that meet in water and the sacred.

The Oratorio San Felipe Neri, which houses the exhibition, is witness to the cultural syncretism that resulted in the superimposition of two historical periods, two architectures and two symbolic uses of water. On the one hand, we have the underground baths, vestiges of the Roman Empire, where the liquid was conceived as a vehicle for the cult of the body, recreation and pleasure; and above them, a religious building from the medieval period that reminds us of the rituals of purification and rebirth through water in the Christian tradition. Other levels of reading have been added to the place through two elements; a Sephardic loom from 1922 that the Consorcio de la capital castellano-manchega recovered at the beginning of 2023, and now "Trópicos", the textile and sound installation presented by Ana González on a majestic body of water that enters the ecosystem of the cloud forest and is projected in a song of the tropical forest.

The installation is composed of "Tequendama", an 18-metre long canvas piece containing the image of the Tequendama waterfall, the great natural cascade of the Bogotá River in the Andes Mountains. For indigenous Colombian communities, waterfalls are sacred places; sites of devotion and renewal that represent the abundance of life, where water nourishes the earth and cleanses the body. This waterfall, in particular, is an important water source that appears in the founding legends of the Muisca cultures that inhabited the region before Spanish colonisation. 

González manages to create a waterfall that advances like a river and vanishes in threads that become knots, to show a current that has endured the pollution of its flow for decades. But the transformation of the material also responds to the question of the modification of the landscape due to the exploitation of natural resources; for in the area, mining, monoculture, cattle farming, and, above all, the absence of the state, have undermined the efforts of the original communities to preserve the integrity of this devotional place. 

Girotari, which means "to make drink" in the Uitoto language, is the name of the sound piece that completes the installation and amplifies the sensorial experience in the enclosure. In it, the sounds of the rainforest and water mingle with ceremonial chants that reclaim the heart of the forest and invite us to drink its honeys, as if we were hummingbirds or bees. In turn, these voices are a call to the primordial goddesses of water; who now, as a reflection, name the Venus that dwells in the depths of the hot springs so that she may rise up and become an image in this other sacredness. 

Ana Cárdenas
Museologist, Universidad Nacional de Colombia