The first time I went to Boquerón was in 2005. My best friend invited me to drink yajé. I wasn’t sure where I was going or what was going to happen. I trust her and I was excited about going on a trip with her. Also I was following my intuition, it was the right thing to do. Something called me. Much has been written about it, personal experiences told with detail and studies done on the biochemistry of its components. But there is no language and no way to communicate what it is. After the ceremony, sitting on a rock, looking at the leaves above my head, waiting for it to take effect I started wondering what was it. That was one of the first questions that started to unveil with beautiful answers in front of my eyes. Streams of knowledge and lessons came around. Things to complicated and at the same time too simple to put into words. Still I want to transmit them, somehow. I went there 2 more times to drink yajé. In 2007 I went to that place to make video and sound recordings that I would use later that year.

Rio Sumapaz hasn't been the only attempt or piece of artwork I've done in relation to my trips to Boquerón. In 2007 while I was pursuing a BFA at the Andes University in Bogota, Colombia. I did a video installation as the final project. It was called Ciclovidere, the jungle video and it made part of the final projects collective exhibition. It consisted in 4 videos synchronized and projected from different places in a room; they recreated 6 different screens with different dimensions. Some were projected side by side to make a large screen. Some were divided through mirrors. I wanted to create an immersive contemplation space. The images in the video actually correspond to two different places, one is Boquerón, the other one is an island in the Caribbean called Providencia.

In 2008 I moved to Chicago for the first time. Since I still wanted to work around the same subject, I had to start reviewing the footage I had captured. That is when I started working on different still compositions. I would take fragments of video, and export them as a sequence of still images. Then I would reassemble them to make bigger pictures I planned to use at some point. One of them became the base to elaborate on the drawing and painting I would later do.

In 2009 before I moved to Colombia for the rest of the year, I re-edited the videos from Ciclovidere and put them together for a presentation at the MU-FI Shorts Independent Music and Film Fest. That took place at “The Abbey” in Feb 19th.

Back in Colombia I was working on large-scale drawings with small detail. I wanted to keep working on the idea of immersive images that expanded the visual field. But after designing different setups of projections I stopped working on it for 2 reasons. First, the cost of handling a multiple number of projectors and screens was out of budget. Also the lower the degree of technology, the higher the degree of manipulation. I can reshape paper and fabric but not a TV screen. The still montages I had done in 2008 came out of the “pending projects” folder in my hard drive and I started tracing drawings over the images. The idea was to make up the detail (non-existent in the stills) while drawing. The drawing would be printed and then traced by hand on a piece of translucent fabric. The project titled Contranopia had as result a big drawing (125” x 118”) that participated in “Rellena”, a collective exhibition. Was by those days that I traced the long drawing of the river.

In 2010 I came back to Chicago. Married and settled, the possibility of going back to Boquerón looks at best, remote. Working and reviewing the same subject, keeps the memories fresh. I traced the long river drawing into a piece of fabric and then decided it needed to have color. Actually I used a remaining piece from the fabric I used for the big drawing. Looking at the color of the river I can almost taste yajé in my mouth.Yuk.