\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"\"$
Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/strong>
Zanjas y Camellones<\/em>, Bosque las Mercedes, Thomas van der Hammen Natural Reserve, Bogot\u00e1, 2022.
Photo: Diego Pi\u00f1eros, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Jumping across the slippery embankments, Berm\u00fadez observed the milky film clinging to the surface of the water. A few months had passed since the collective turned the earth to excavate the metre-wide zanjas<\/em>, releasing a torrent of water buried when the savannah was transformed into grazing pastures. But now the water was stagnant: run-off from a nearby cattle ranch had contaminated the irrigation channels. As a fragment, Zanjas y Camellones<\/em> can only function as a synecdoche for the vast agricultural system that functioned in reciprocity with seasonal precipitation and shifting water levels across the Altiplano Cundiboyacense plateau.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything smelled of rain as we spread an improvised picnic on a red-and-white checkered blanket. The grass quivered under the grey sky, leaning toward the distant bird calls. \u201cBogot\u00e1 is a city of water,\u201d said Berm\u00fadez. Before the large-scale process of land dispossession in the sixteenth century, before the city swallowed their land, imposing an urban order on it, the agrarian societies of the Muisca Confederation maintained close relationships with water. \u201cThe whole Muisca territory,\u201d says Abuela Ospina Musus\u00fa, \u201cis from the womb \u2026 from the sacred lagoons\u201d (our translation).^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Quoted in Alejandro Mazuera Navarro, \u201cEl aguante ind\u00edgena en Bogot\u00e1,\u201d Cartel Urbano<\/em>, September 1, 2016, accessible online.<\/span> The modern city broke these relations. Not that there is no water in Bogot\u00e1. With anthropogenic climate change, the rains are fiercer and more frequent than ever, but the water is buried below the city\u2019s iconic red brick and forced into canals filled with industrial and human waste. The interdisciplinary collective aims to reawaken the memory of waterways that once coursed through the savannah\u2019s flood plains, organizing an amphibian system of food cultivation that traversed both land and water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$
Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/strong>
Zanjas y Camellones<\/em>, Bosque las Mercedes, Thomas van der Hammen Natural Reserve, Bogot\u00e1, 2022.
Photo: Diego Pi\u00f1eros, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Mar\u00eda Buenaventura\u2019s research on the histories of food in Bogot\u00e1\u2019s savannah, or Muyquyt\u00e1\/Bacat\u00e1, was the impetus for the collaborative agroecology project. For years, she has been organizing collective meals that recover foodways and regenerate a connection to the land and waters that make up the flood plains. In Escuela de la sabana<\/em> (Savannah School<\/em>) (2018), farmers, researchers, traditional cooks, urban cultivators, and seed guardians gathered monthly at Plural Cultural Node in Bogot\u00e1 to discuss stories that coalesce around a regional recipe prepared by the multidisciplinary artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Alguna vez comimos ma\u00edz y pescado <\/em>(One Time We Ate Maize and Fish<\/em>) (2020), Buenaventura staged an underground banquet that communicates with the subterranean world of seeds, soil, and salt mines. Three earthen dining tables stretched seven metres through the dimly lit space of the Santa Fe Gallery, located below Bogot\u00e1\u2019s Plaza de Mercado La Concordia. Made from old adobe bricks reclaimed from a demolished house in the town of Ubat\u00e9, the tables recall the sowing ridges and channels. On the floor at the end of the tables, a maize observatory displays varieties native to Colombia, now largely replaced by US-grown corn. Kernels of gato<\/em>, pajarito<\/em>, domin\u00f3<\/em>, rojo<\/em>, arroz<\/em>,and porva <\/em>maize are suspended on gold acupuncture needles. They glisten against the burnished black surface of plates handcrafted from clay gathered from the fields of local farmers in the village of La Chamba prior to sowing. The heterogeneous colours and patterns of the endangered maize, provided by seed custodian Fabriciano Ortiz, affirms the still-living potential of non-imperial practices of caring for a shared world. Their jumping genes assure both the variability of species and heterogeneity of worlds. They await a sowing that promises to awaken the memory of confederated territories organized around astronomical-meteorological observatories into an engineered landscape of irrigation canals, check dams, and drainage conduits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Maria-Buenaventura_Algunavezcomimosmai\u0301zypescado\"$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Maria-Buenaventura_Algunavezcomimosmai\u0301zypescado\"$
Mar\u00eda Buenaventura<\/strong>
Alguna vez comimos ma\u00edz y pescado<\/em>, installation views, Galer\u00eda Santa Fe, Bogot\u00e1, 2020.
Photos: Laura Imery, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
On the walls, texts documenting Buenaventura\u2019s research were interspersed with pages from ethnobotanist V\u00edctor Manuel Pati\u00f1o\u2019s 1965 Historia de la actividad agropecuaria en Am\u00e9rica equinoccial<\/em>. Pati\u00f1o, who worked as a field collector of indigenous maize for Colombia\u2019s germplasm bank from 1951 to 1955, details the historical development of the country\u2019s agricultural practices: the temporalities of harvests and festivals associated with the renewal of life and the struggles over the cultivation, classification, and naming of plants, which was an integral part of the conquest of Abya Yala\u200a\u2014\u200athe earliest name given to the territory now known as the Americas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buenaventura\u2019s projects call our attention to the two-pronged framework that Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls \u201contological politics.\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Arturo Escobar, \u201cThinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South,\u201d Revista de Antropolog\u00eda Iberoamericana<\/em> 11, no. 1 (January\u200a\u2013\u200aApril 2016): 11\u200a\u2013\u200a32.<\/span> On the one hand, political ontology describes power-laden cycles of material violence that actively produce the disappearance of alternative ontologies, or worlds<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
\n
Agriculture, in Colombia as in many other places, has been a key technology of power that actively creates space for colonial expansion by making absent the worlds it occupies.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In an agrarian sector dominated by patented transgenic seeds, chemical fertilizers, and export-oriented monoculture crops, in the wake of the US-led War on Drugs that still rains toxic Monsanto glyphosate from the skies, neoliberal agricultural reforms have favoured multinational chemical-seed conglomerates, while criminalizing indigenous and campesino seed-propagating practices. This dominant system of necro-pol\u00edtica agraria<\/em>, or agrarian necropolitics, involves not only physical occupation of land but the ontological occupation of territories.^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Henry Salgado Ruiz, \u201cEl Campesinado de La Amazonia Colombiana: Construcci\u00f3n Territorial, Colonizaci\u00f3n Forzada y Resistencias,\u201d PhD dissertation, Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, 2012, accessible online.<\/span> This is the negative, colonial side of ontological politics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, political ontology describes resurgent practices. Buenaventura\u2019s work centres alternative practices that have persisted throughout the destructive project of agrarian necropolitics, performatively enacting the endurances of ancestral agricultural practices across the Altiplano Cundiboyacense. <\/em>Her projects show the positive side of ontological politics, demonstrating that the destruction of worlds is never absolute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indeed, neither water nor the Muisca have disappeared from the savannah. They survive under a predatory global capitalism that enlarges itself through a generalized mode of expulsion, by turning the wetlands into industrial flower plantations and grasslands for grazing cattle. Zanjas<\/em> y Camellones <\/em>works to unlearn national imaginaries that keep the Muisca people ossified in a pre-Columbian past, erasing their ongoing histories of resistance. Referring to themselves as raizal<\/em>, or \u201crooted,\u201d contemporary Muisca articulate their belonging in an agricultural language: they are seeded and nurtured by the soil of the territory, from which they are materially inseparable.^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Daniel Rubio Rosas, Under the Pavement Makeup: Muisca Territory Beyond Culture and Nature<\/em> (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2020).<\/span> Yet, their world is rooted in water as much as soil. Their amphibian territories are traced by waters that descend from the lagoons of the p\u00e1ramo<\/em> to the agricultural channels that spread across the flood plains of the Bogot\u00e1 savannah. For Abuela Ospina Musus\u00fa, a pivotal figure in the struggle to regenerate ancestral knowledge, food, and modes of self-governance, the project brings attention to the efforts by members of her community to protect their territories along with the teachings of their mothers and grandmothers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Maria-Buenaventura_Algunavezcomimosmai\u0301zypescado\"$
Mar\u00eda Buenaventura<\/strong>
Alguna vez comimos ma\u00edz y pescado<\/em>, installation view, Galer\u00eda Santa Fe, Bogot\u00e1, 2020.
Photo: Laura Imery, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
Political ontology describes practices of onto-epistemic regeneration that enlarge worlds expulsed under conditions of imperial violence. In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism<\/em>, theorist Ariella A\u00efsha Azoulay uses the term \u201cour violent commons\u201d to describe how imperial violence forms our collectivity, making a common world only by erasing alternative ontologies, or worlds<\/em>.^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - Ariella A\u00efsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism<\/em> (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 166; in \u201cOur Violent Hydrocommons,\u201d Esse<\/em>, no. 109 (Fall 2023): 16\u200a\u2013\u200a19, I focus on the cycles of violence that accumulate in Colombia\u2019s waterways.<\/span> Underpinning Azoulay\u2019s reading of the relation between violence and imperialism is a reparative task: to undo the violence shared by victims and perpetrators. \u201cUncommoning\u201d describes the process of moving from imperial commons to worldly commons by creating the conditions for dialogue among divergent actors. Zanjas<\/em> y Camellones <\/em>and Alguna vez comimos ma\u00edz y pescado <\/em>contribute to ongoing struggles to remake a worldly commons. In staging performative dialogues, they participate in what Colombian anthropologist Kristina M. Lyons, in Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics<\/em>, calls \u201cagro-life processes\u201d that open spaces for alternative agricultural practices and creative experimentation that disrupt the power of dominant agrarian reasoning.^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 8 <\/a> - Kristina M. Lyons, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 135.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Alguna vez comimos ma\u00edz y pescado <\/em>gathered artists, researchers, activists, seed custodians, and the public on reed mats from the F\u00faquene lagoon to share stories, recipes, and agricultural practices. One table featured fish from the Amazon\u00eda region. On another, foods once common across the Bogot\u00e1 savannah were served: peeled negrito<\/em> corn wraps, fried and roasted porva <\/em>maize, and masato<\/em>, a popular fermented rice beverage. The shared meal regenerated a \u201cmetabolic intimacy\u201d with the savannah\u2019s multi-species actors that bring food to their plates: its soils, nutrient cycles, rain patterns, and microbial plant and aquatic life.^{9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 9 <\/a> - John Law and Annemarie Mol in Kelly Donati, \u201cThe Convivial Table: Imagining Ethical Relations Through Multispecies Gastronomy,\u201d The Aristologist: An Antipodean Journal of Food History<\/em> 4 (2014): 127\u200a\u2013\u200a43.<\/span> The gastronomic act of sharing food and recipes around the performative space of the table was a gesture of ecological intimacy with the savannah; an act of communion\u200a\u2014\u200aof becoming common\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>with the savannah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few hours later, we were back in Bogot\u00e1, driving alongside the concrete corridors that channel water through the city. Buenaventura described her efforts to trace an endogenous species of catfish called Capit\u00e1n de la Sabana, or chichinegua<\/em>, through old recipe books and the notes of nineteenth-century colonial expeditions. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the fish passed freely through the channels from the Bogot\u00e1 River to its tributaries. Today it survives in headwaters, but it cannot be eaten downstream because of the agribusiness chemicals and the quarry and tannery waste. After the river was converted into an open-air sewer in the 1960s, the fish disappeared from the tables of the city\u2019s inhabitants. With Zanjas y Camellones<\/em>, Buenaventura dreamed of returning the memory of the pre-Hispanic hydraulic system to the savannah, regenerating the fish\u2019s habitat along with the life philosophies it carries. To do this, the project builds a platform for encounters between nongovernmental organizations, farmers and seed custodians, Indigenous leaders, lawyers, architects, biologists, scholars, environmental activists, and the fertile soils of the wetland ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"RedtradicionaldePesca\"$
Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/strong>
Red tradicional de Pesca<\/em>, F\u00faquene, 2021.
Photo: Juliana Steiner, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Zanjas-y-Camellones\"$
Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/strong>
Zanjas y Camellones<\/em>, Bosque las Mercedes, Thomas van der Hammen Natural Reserve, Bogot\u00e1, 2022.
Photo: Sergio Dur\u00e1n, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The understanding of agriculture that emerges from this process differs from that which modern empiricism has imposed on Muisca territories. Buenaventura\u2019s quest for the catfish guided the Zanjas y Camellones collective in a process of unlearninga terra-centric nomos<\/em> (law) of earth and soil imported with Western conceptual and material practices. Not only have imperial agricultural practices functioned as an apparatus of the colonial capture of territories, but agriculture\u200a\u2014\u200afrom Latin agr\u012b<\/em> (field or country)\u200a\u2014\u200aimposes an ontological division of land\/water that was nowhere operative in Muisca cosmology. Muisca agro-life processes were fundamentally amphibian<\/em>: spanning land and water, their open ecosystem functioned in reciprocity with cyclical patterns of rainfall and the migration patterns of fish that freely roamed across the aqueous territories. This process of uncommoning agriculture nourishes a future vision of the savannah deeply rooted\u200a\u2014\u200aenraizado\u200a\u2014\u200a<\/em>in ancestral knowledges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By performatively enacting endurances of ancestral food cosmogonies, by awakening knowledge stored in seeds and recipes, and by carefully unearthing agricultural technologies, the Zanjas y Camellones collective agitates for the political restoration of amphibian territories that have been encroached on since the conquest of the Americas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
An image theorist and independent curator, Gwynne Fulton holds a PhD in philosophy and art history from Concordia University. She is a contributor at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared in Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, Mosaic<\/em>, In\/Visible Culture<\/em>, Dazibao editions<\/em>, and ARP Books.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>\n
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>
Gwynne Fulton, Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, Zanjas y Camellones collective<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a cool grey morning last January, we clambered into a black SUV. After losing our way on the snaking highways that connect the sprawling city of eight million to the urban peripheries, we arrived at the Thomas van der Hammen Nature Reserve in Suba, on the northwest edge of Bogot\u00e1. After a short walk through the undulating grasslands we reached the site of Zanjas y Camellones (2022\u200a\u2013ongoing), a collective agroecology project created by artist Mar\u00eda Buenaventura, landscape architect Diego Berm\u00fadez, educator Liliana Novoa, lawyer Sabina Rodr\u00edguez, archaeologist Lorena Rodr\u00edguez Gallo, and curator Juliana Steiner, in consultation with Hycha Caca (Abuela\/Elder) Blanca Nieves Ospina Musus\u00fa. The interdisciplinary project re-creates a fragment of an ancient agricultural system in the territories of the Muisca people who\u200a\u2014\u200acontrary to the authorized version of history\u200a\u2014\u200asurvived Spanish colonization and are currently undergoing a process of\u00a0resurgence.<\/br><\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":241609,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[6774],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[935],"artistes":[6783,6784],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-241625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-110-agriculture-en","auteurs-gwynne-fulton-en","artistes-maria-buenaventura-en","artistes-zanjas-y-camellones-collective-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241625"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270942,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241625\/revisions\/270942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=241625"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=241625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}