El Mato.
The Jungle.
The future has already passed.
An exploration of the delicate bond between memory and imagination. The representation of the memory of a Colombian jungle that was once home and refuge. Between machine-generated images and human recollections, a dialogue emerges—a reflection on conservation, nostalgia, and the transformation of landscapes that reside in both our minds and hearts.
I find myself at my desk, imagining what is not before me, what I cannot traverse; the distance prevents me. I am simply on another continent. My family and I have migrated. That jungle that was once my home is no longer present. That small corner of the jungle on one of the slopes of Medellín, Colombia, has become a memory. The change of territory transforms me: I am no longer that hunter of scenes, no longer documenting with my camera. From now on, I only imagine what I do not see. What do I see when I imagine? I see paths, stories, images that do not exist, images that yearn to come to light, that wish to be born.
My imagination is not a solitary entity; it is accompanied by all those images that have nourished my instinct and my memory. Exposed to the constant flow of images across different media, we have built a bank of visual memories, creating a "human algorithm" of imagination. What we once called experiences has turned into data; memories have become kilobytes.
We have designed machines for almost everything, and one of the latest assists us in the task of imagining. Does its [imagine] command proceed in a way similar to ours? Does it instinctively interpret the vast archive of human images we have already seen, photographed, or stored? Or does this entity already possess a code capable of creating from nothing?
In the near future, we will not know how to identify the boundary between documented and imagined images; the struggle between the prompt and the camera is just beginning. Until recently, the genre of staged photography still included the real; there was something imagined to photograph. Today, the machine has dispensed with the human factor: it only uses its memory to imagine and give birth to new scenes.
I am interested in exploring the interplay between machine and human. I want this interplay to involve not only imagination and the vast archive of memory stored in kilobytes but also the human gesture, the impulse of instinct, and the call to the unknown. A game where images move between the real and the imagined, between the kilobyte and the painting, between the inkjet and the drawing. It is a game of representation in which tools, guided by our imagination and instinct, shape new realities and mysteries.
The project "El Mato" (The Jungle) is based on the memory of the Colombian jungle to construct a game of representations of memory and imagination. After my move to Europe, having lived so closely with the jungle, nostalgia drives me to imagine. It is not only nostalgia but also the fear of losing it, of never seeing it again, of feeling it slowly disappear before our eyes due to our own greed.
That entity of infinite life is in danger of extinction; it is in the process of domestication under the hand of the all-powerful human being.
La invasión
Oleo sobre lienzo
100 x 100 cm
2024
Berlin Art Spring
Open Studio
2024
Click or Swipe to see the images
El mato.
78 imágenes de formato libre
Archivos digitales .tiff
2023
Espíritus de la selva.
Acuarela sobre papel.
20x30cm
2024
La manigua en el patio.
Oil on linen boards
4 boards 40x30 cm
80x60cm / 2024
La siembra.
Oil on wood.
30x40cm
2024
La maquinaria agricola
Oil on wood.
40x40 cm
2024
El guardian
Oil on wood.
40x40cm
2024.
Recuerdos del Guaviare II
InkJet print
60x40cm
2024
El futuro ya pasó.
Oleo sobre lienzo.
60x80cm
2024
_ What is survival? Who and what should survive in the face of climate catastrophe? How do we build a world where conservation plays a principal role?
Whose jungle is it?
Whose is this mato?
The answers to these questions continue to be anthropocentric. Humans will remain at the center and hold the reins of the conversation, challenging all ecological concepts until they fit our needs. El mato is a new series of images produced by the artist in collaboration with AI that spring from a visit he did to the archeological site of Chiribiquete in the Colombian department of Guaviare, a series of plateaus with paintings on rock dating from 12,500 years ago and only recently discovered by the West.
The trip, which was shared with artists and Colombian trans conservation biologist Brigitte Baptist, put an emphasis on the strategies of conservation for both the paintings and their now ‘natural’ environment.
In this new project, Echeverri explores several of his main interests: on one hand, the creation of images and their arrangement in narratives that allow the viewer to visit partially imaginary worlds – transport them to a kind of visual literature or filmic narrative. On the other, territory, displacement, and survival processes for the construction of a new habitat that spring from concerns regarding the conservation of the jungle in general, and the Amazon in particular. Using photographs taken during this trip, the artist employs artificial intelligence as an ally and a tool to develop a conversation about the Amazon jungle (termed "mato"), its past and present inhabitants as well as its conservation.
The sequences of images can be exhibited either as a digital slideshow with music provided by the artists or printed on paper thus collapsing the worlds in which they too live. The viewer is taken through an ancestral culture by its ‘elder siblings’ up to the political universe and the leaders of the countries touched by this jungle territory. Shifting between optimism and a dark vision of what awaits us, we traverse parallel temporalities in which they try to survive while the settlers, forced by new ecological dynamics, are forced to migrate to safer territories using whatever resources remain available. In a parallel narrative but complementary, politicians appear in desolate scenes, in disagreement, drawing upon desperate measures for the recovery of their environment after much lost time.
Artificial intelligence creates images from commands and a blend of all existing images in human databases. Camilo, in conversation with the machine, manages to construct visuals from an imaginary space between reality and fiction, the present and the future, darkness and light.
Emiliano Valdés.
Chief Curator.
Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín
