I dreamt about the Salto del Tequendama, although I had never been there. I knew the waterfall only through photographs and the stories of colleagues and friends, which had become entangled in my dreams. In the dream, I dropped a video camera down the waterfall to record the fall. It spun through the polluted waters of the Bogotá River. I do not remember whether I watched from a distance or whether I was falling with it, dazzled by the dirty water.
I imagined the pollutants as lines of colour flowing closely together. I woke up agitated, realizing that, for some time, I too had been falling. The dream that gave rise to these paintings came before I encountered the work of Ailton Krenak. After reading Krenak, those lines of colour became parachutes, slowing down the fall.
“Why are we so afraid of falling when fall is all we’ve ever done?,” asks the indigenous leader and thinker Ailton Krenak as a provocation not to be afraid, and to turn the act of falling into something exciting and edifying, perhaps even as an act of healing. He insists on the need to build “colourful parachutes” that help us to slow down and to allow our dreams and imagination to inform our actions.
To know more visit entre-rios.net/caer
As exhibited in Live Streams at Art Exchange, Essex University. Colchester, UK