Juan Covelli on El Salto 

I began this piece in July 2020, having returned to Colombia in 2019 after ten years abroad. As an artist who works with technology as a medium, my interests are focused on the continuing processes of colonialism and on museums, specifically archives: in finding ways of decolonising the museum through digital practices and releasing archives from institutional control for the purposes of emancipation. The 2019 bicentennial celebrations marking Colombia’s foundation in 1819 returned my attention to Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in the country at the start of the nineteenth century, in particular to the proximity of Humboldt’s scientific exploration and the processes of colonial domination. Humboldt and his peers used packing cases and cages to transport live specimens back to Europe for investigation as to their potential uses, for example; their aims were to name and classify what they found, assembling a picture of nature that was at once holistic, strongly utilitarian and transparently extractivist, and it is relevant to think of language and representation as key parts of their technology. Within this technology, the construct of landscape was a powerful tool: a way of positing the environment as exterior to the human subject - beautiful and majestic, but also available to be plundered. 

I followed this interest up with detailed archive research into historic representations of Colombian landscape and reflection on their role in the present-day imaginary of the country and the wider world. I found multiple representations of El Salto de Tequendama, a spectacular 152-metre-high waterfall located not far from Bogotá, one of them an engraving based on a Humboldt drawing. El Salto is fed by the Bogotá river, which flows from a source north of the capital, descends onto the savannah and eventually joins the Magdalena, Colombia’s largest river. The waterfall has been venerated for millenia. In Muisca cosmology, the falls were created when the knowledge god Bochica struck at the cliff rocks with a stick in order to drain the savannah above. (Interestingly, geological data also carry evidence of a historic flooding event in the deep past, so the Muisca narrative coincides with scientific accounts.) Today, it is important to note just how damaged and polluted this exalted site has become; the video can’t communicate this, but the smell there is horrible. Chemicals are ejected into the river along its upper reaches and it is fed by the sewers of the capital. Human interventions have weakened its flow and at times the falls are completely dry, because they serve an electricity generation system. The Bogotá’s polluted waters go on to poison the Magdalena as well, of course, so it represents an ecological disaster on a huge scale. 

El Salto became the focus for my video, which is the first of a trilogy of works. Each will examine different Colombian locations that are relevant for the underlying aims of the total work: to think about tropes of landscape as key instruments in the technology of colonial domination, and also to ask questions about the applications and potential of digital technologies: how do digital technologies serve processes of colonial extraction, and how might they work differently, to decentralise the anthropocentric view, and present other, better ways of envisioning and living within our environment? 

In El Salto, digital and representational technologies work in combination to narrate the waterfall’s story, and to present a new kind of view, one that allies nature and technology and attempts to subordinate the extractive human point of view. A criticism I’ve received is that the video is framed in a documentary form, and that this is a language of colonialism. In fact, the documentary form is just one of the tropes of landscape being placed under examination in the work. Digital colonialism operates in complex ways. Its physical chains of communication follow the older routes of the colonial extractive process. Corporate producers in the global north use digital technologies of visualisation to identify resources for extraction, and those resources are then used to make products - mobile phones, for instance - that are sold back to the inhabitants of the places of extraction, further networking them into dependency on digital information streams and capitalist economics and disempowering the global south. Digital representation also gives the landscape back to its inhabitants as exotic spectacle - for example, via the documentary form - and this is a historic process of spectacularisation that goes back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. El Salto includes both the imagery of nineteenth century Romantic landscape and contemporary sublime landscape, such as the kind of views found in documentaries. At one level it might be read as “fake” documentary, using the form as a provocation.

The video is also woven with alternative perspectives. It includes a “meta-landscape” imposed within the main image, a screen that contains digitised images but which was an actual physical construction, an eight-metre projection screen with guy-ropes that temporarily served in reality to block the view of the waterfall from the video camera. This (plus other factors, not least the weather) made the production process a challenging one: the screen needed to be positioned dangerously close to a deep abyss and it was buffeted by the wind, but I had decided it was key to make a physical and not just a digital intervention in the location. At one point in the video, a superimposition on this screen shows a sequence of historic images of El Salto that merge from one to another with a shimmering effect; this was generated by an algorithm rather than by me, and is one of the ways in which technology takes over the editorial process in this piece. The drone footage, as well, is an invitation to displace the anthropocentric view and think about the way that a machine can see.

There are also various references to Musica cosmology and Musica deities in the work. A digitised image of a golden poporo, a traditional container for the lime that accompanies coca consumption, is shown drifting down the river. We see a golden fish, el capitan de la sabana, a creature that used to be a staple in the Bogotá river but that can now no longer survive in it, whilst hearing about human beings’ incursions into its waters. These pre-Western, pre-catastrophic, ecological and cosmological references are included for their beauty and as another relativising perspective: an invitation to envision alternative ways of living within, rather than off, our local territories and ecosystems. 

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