Entre hierbas y ensueño (in process)
2025
Lidar Scan video animation 07:44’’
Aluminum sculptures
Entre hierbas y ensueño was created at the Samper Mendoza night market, a place rich in knowledge where those who cultivate and collect medicinal plants bring them directly for sale. In this space, healing herbs coexist with esoteric, ritual, and aromatic plants. Over the course of several nights, I spent time with the vendors, speaking with them about their dreams and the oneiric relationships they maintain with certain plants. Many of them rest by sleeping on top of their herbs during breaks. This image of bodies sleeping on beds of plants struck me as profoundly powerful, not only from an aesthetic point of view but also in its potential to interrupt the productivist logic of the marketplace.
In this context, sleep becomes a subversive act. It creates its own temporality that defies the capitalist demand for constant wakefulness. Dreaming, as a state between the physical body and the ethereal self, becomes a threshold space. The market itself is also a threshold, existing at the spatial and symbolic margins of the city.
Samper Mendoza is one of the few markets in Bogotá that has not been sanitized by urban renewal policies, which often result in the displacement of non-normative bodies and the erasure of informal knowledge systems. Samper continues to resist, along with a network of affections, practices, and alternative economies that challenge the neoliberal push for order and uniformity.
At the end of the process, each vendor selected a plant they had dreamed of or felt a special dreamlike connection with. These plants were immersed in wax, and sand molds were created from them to receive molten aluminum. Once solidified, the plants became metallic sculptures. This transformation from organic to mineral also symbolizes the persistence of the intangible: dreams, memory, and desire made material in a lasting form. In this ritual, sand serves not only as a technical medium but also as a metaphor for the landscape of dreams, a shifting terrain between what fades and what endures.
Credits
Scans: Lorena Solís Bravo
Animation: Paula García Sans
Sound: upsammy aka Thessa Torsing
