Artistic Research in the Amazon: Dialogue between Arts and Sciences
Image credit: Rosario López
You are cordially invited to a conversation on art in the Amazon featuring Professors Rosario López and Dolors Armenteras, who will discuss their research experience and the exhibition held at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia, between March and August 2021. That event was attended by more than 5,000 visitors, and the 352-page book titled Trazas, Oficios y Territorios was subsequently published by Universidad Nacional of Colombia. This crucial dialogue and the book will be presented at 1200 noon on April 30th, 2025 at the IACS Seminar Room.
Trazas, Oficios y Territorios (Traces, Trades, and Territories) was a research experience led by an interdisciplinary team of artists, biologists, and gender scholars who, in close conversation with artisan women from the Eastern Tukano reservations, visited the rock shelters of Cerro Azul and Nuevo Tolima, in the Serranía de la Lindosa, in Guaviare in the Colombian Amazon. From a transdisciplinary perspective, the categorization of these pictograms speaks to a symbolic universe that seems to bring together a series of trades practiced by a human group, capable of capturing its biogeographic context through a minimal gesture such as a line, a stroke, or a stain. In our field discussions, we identified these pictorial abstractions as valuable for their relevance and continuity, given the trades currently carried out by the communities that inhabit these Amazonian territories. But they’re also valuable for the way in which they and the paintings are sustained by an ecosystemic relationship between these communities and the vegetation that characterizes this region.
About the artist Rosario López Parra is a plastic artist and researcher on issues related to landscape and territory. She is Associate Professor at the School of Plastic and Visual Arts of the Faculty of Arts at the Universidad Nacional of Colombia, from 1999 to the present. She studied Plastic Arts at Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá and completed a Master’s degree in Sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Colombia and abroad, and has received support from, among others, Research-Creation Grants from the Faculty of Arts, Universidad Nacional of Colombia, the Colombian Ministry of Culture, the District Institute of Culture, Colfuturo, the American Foundation for the Arts, the Mariann Palloti Fellowship. Rosario López lives and works in Bogotá.
