| Location: | Torreón II, Laboratorio |
Ever wondered why gold is located underground? The Covered Gold exhibition invites visitors to listen to the sounds and voices of things that have remained hidden in the subsoil of the Amazon rainforest: minerals, waters and living beings. Through this proposal, the artist suggests the need for a fractal and intraspecies connection with the planet on which we live.
The project forms part of the special ARCO 2025 programme dedicated to the Amazon: “Wamatisé: Ideas for an Amazofuturism”, curated by María Wills and Denilson Baniwa. The artists, curators and collectives involved in this edition of the contemporary art fair delve into the Amazon’s rich biodiversity and its complex realities, using art as a tool to raise awareness and prompt action in the context of the environmental crisis that is endangering the planet’s lungs.
The work invites us to visualise the Amazon as an electric river and conducts a sensory exploration of the sounds and voices hidden in the subsoil of the rainforest. Through this immersive experience, the artist examines the need to establish bonds beyond humanity, proposing a fractal and intraspecies connection with the planet.
The exhibition includes activations in collaboration with the Barasana sage Reynel Ortega and the English anthropologist Stephen Hugh-Jones. Ortega shares his view of climate change as seen through the prism of Amazonian ancestral wisdom, while Hugh-Jones, who has studied the region for more than six decades, offers an anthropological perspective on ways to understand and translate that knowledge. Bárbara Santos has worked with both of them for years and in this exhibition revisits some of the reflections developed in previous projects, such as the video art proposal Delegating Meaning, which addresses the challenges of translating knowledge that stems from radically different universes.
After more than twenty years working in Amazonia, in her practice Santos intertwines time, respect and the relationship with the human and non-human inhabitants of the rainforest. She explores healing as a technology, and the impossibility of translating certain knowledge without stripping it of its essence. Her work offers a crucial reflection: the need to understand that not all knowledge can be translated or assimilated by the western gaze. Her approach doesn't attempt to rationalise the incomprehensible, but to let it flow in its own logic and temporality.
The presentation of Covered Gold aims to disrupt the ways in which we relate to language, and to encourage us to experience the sounds of the rainforest and assimilate—in the incomprehensible words in Barasana of the sage Reynel Ortega—messages about the future of the world. Instead of the historical desire to control and translate knowledge, the work proposes something different: rather than impose meanings, let us allow these narratives to flow in their own nature. Covered Gold makes no attempt to offer an absolute truth, but to demonstrate how ancestral wisdom, rituals and traditional knowledge about plants are living and constantly evolving technologies. Like the electric river that emerges from the ground, these layers of knowledge contain codes that western science has not yet managed to decipher.
The exhibition features the following activations:
Tuesday, 4 March
7 pm | Tower II
Performative conversation with Bárbara Santos, Reynel Ortega (indigenous sage) and Stephen Hugh-Jones (anthropologist from the University of Cambridge)
Wednesday, 5 March
7 pm | Laboratory
Talk from the anthropological perspective by Stephen Hugh-Jones, accompanied by Bárbara Santos and Reynel Ortega. Moderated by Nayla Saniour, project coordinator at Atelier itd and an experienced facilitator of multi-actor collaboration
Thursday, 6 March
11 am | Tower II
Performative conversation with Bárbara Santos, Reynel Ortega and Stephen Hugh-Jones
Saturday, 8 March
11 am | Tower II
Activation with Bárbara Santos
ARCO 2025 with Amazonia as the central theme
In this edition, ARCO revolves around Amazonia, highlighting its vital role in the global ecological balance and the challenges it faces, such as deforestation and the threat to its indigenous cultures. Through different art projects, the fair turns the spotlight on the environmental crisis that is endangering this ecosystem, using art as a tool for action and awareness-raising.
