Smuggling into Paradise

Nayarí Castillo. Smuggling into Paradise.

The young Venezuelan visual artist Nayarí Castillo, who currently resides in Plymouth, England, presents in the spaces of Office # 1, her most recent artistic research "Smuggling to Paradise"; where she reflects, through the practice of art exercised as criticism of culture, various discourses and practices which contextualize the extraordinary and paradoxical presence of hippopotamus in the Magdalena River in Colombia.  

In the eighties- reports Nayarí Castillo- Pablo Escobar, one of the greatest leaders of the drug cartel in Colombia, built a recreational park in the Hacienda Napoles, located in the municipality of Puerto Triunfo, 165 miles south-east Medellin. They housed a large collection of exotic animals, many of them brought from Africa through bribes to the authorities. Upon the death of drug lord, the Hacienda was abandoned and became the epicenter of a strong legal dispute. The hippopotamus, animals that were Don Pablo's favorites, started reproducing within the framework of a fully favorable habitat for the development of the species. Recently the presence of a pair of hippos was reported, from the Hacienda Napoles, in the course of the Magdalena River. Which is why the government allowed, through  hunting, the extermination of the alien presence of these aquatic mammals. Environmental groups strongly protested the measure.
        The cry of the Hippos travels through the winds and waters of the Magdalena River, the largest waterway in Colombia, the roar is its way of communication. Some centuries ago, the chronicler John of Castellanos (1522-1607), with overflowing magic description, narrated through his Elegies of distinguished men of the Indies (1585) how the expedition led by the conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, commanding more than a thousand men, raffled indomitable forces of the mighty and turbulent river, the beautiful Magdalena. There, the expedition encountered a menacing landscape inhabited by wildlife, as Castellano wrote, many of the exhausted soldiers "ended  up buried in the living entrails of wild beasts, / who assault on dark nights / the natural and foreign people. "
        Today the "wild beasts" who inhabit the banks of the Magdalena and awaken the imagination of writers and artists are undoubtedly other ones; now it is not the domesticated alligator, bats, wasps, ants, snakes, toads, mosquitoes or ticks, which once managed to disturb the peace of mind and imagination of European travelers. At present the names that star in the epic stories of the Magdalena are essentially different from the past. But the current stories keep the spirit of the chronicles which started to configure the parameters that were used to interpret and understand the new context imposed by the geography of the new world. Understanding the dynamics of this exercise is simultaneously a strategy to understand how the configuration of what we are and what shapes us as signs of identity. It is not in vain that we  were designed and conceived in myths of the "Paradise Lost,"Land of Grace ", or the territory of "the Amazons and primeval forests. "
        Thus, the visual creative Nayarí Castillo assumes in the context of this exhibition, the systematic task of observing, collecting, naming and systematizing those social, cultural, political, scientific and economic problems that revolve around the presence of hippos in the banks of the Magdalena River. This exercise is governed by the mark and the soul of those naturalists of the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth century, who governed by the encyclopedic need of the  illustrated spirit, were responsible for classifying and collecting a large amount of natural samples original of the American continent. However, this smuggling into paradise, placed in visual space like a report of a field experience, is based on irony as a critical tool to uncover those contingent aspects of our own realities, our inevitable forms governed by the tragic confluence of our fictions and realities.

Source: Gerardo Zavarce and Office # 1