The Art Museum of the National University of Colombia integrates a Cultural Heritage program that proposes to work transversally, through art, memory and bioculture. Selva Cosmopolítica (Cosmopolitical Jungle) is a program initiated in 2012 by researcher, producer and curator María Belén Sáez de Ibarra in collaboration with several artists, which focuses on the exchange with the communities that inhabit the territories of the Amazon rainforest. Within the framework of the program, experimental projects and long-term research are developed with working teams from the artistic, scientific and philosophical fields, in collaboration with indigenous people, on the basis of their knowledge and epistemologies.
María Belén Sáez de Ibarra clarifies, that "from a biocentric and cosmopolitical approach, we want to recognize the Amazon rainforest as a cognitive, semiotic, historical and political entity at the heart of an ethics for thinking and acting in affirmation of life, which includes other ways of knowing, conceiving and imagining possible worlds, in the midst of the planetary humanitarian and environmental crisis."
After the exhibition El Camino Corto by Miguel Ángel Rojas, the program took shape in 2014 with the group show Selva Cosmopolítica, continuing in 2016 with El Origen de la Noche, in 2018 with Conjuro de Ríos, and, in 2022 and 2023, with Forest Mind, Vocal Cognitive Territory and Devenir Universidad.
Ten very conflictive years worlwide have passed since the opening of Selva Cosmopolítica at the Museo de Arte UNAL in 2014, which Universes in Universe had the opportunity to visit and feature at that time. In these 10 years, new and old conflicts broke out in the region, as well as wars in the world; pandemics, populisms, hatreds and uncertainties have emerged. In the current situation, unfortunately, the planetary human-environmental crisis seems to have been relegated to the background, out of the current focus. In view of this, Universes in Universe publishes here a totally renewed presentation of Selva Cosmopolítica in the conviction that its proposals, reflections and searches have become more relevant and necessary than ever.
