Errores Fundamentales
2026
Multichannel Installation
16mm transfered to digital video, color, stereo, sound
20’ in loop
Errores Fundamentales (Fundamental Errors) traces the historiography of the cinchona tree through its operative fictions. Native to the Andes, its bark, used to treat malaria, became a strategic resource for European colonial expansion from the seventeenth century onwards. The project follows the circulation of cinchona between the Andes, European herbaria and botanical gardens, and colonial plantations, attending to the fictions, omissions, and errors inscribed in the writing of its colonial history. This research leads to Cañaris, in northern Peru, one of the territories where wild populations of Cinchona still survive and where the Comunidad Campesina San Juan Bautista de Cañaris resists mining exploitation in its territory.
Built through the re-reading of historical texts and the staging of archival materials, the installation examines how certain fictions produced by colonial science and natural history continue to operate in the present. Combining diaries, travel notes, fables, and testimonies spanning four centuries (1663, 1798, 1857, 1952), the project weaves together four narratives: a countess miraculously cured of malaria in Lima; a Shuar man transformed into a jaguar devouring a colonial soldier; a Bolivian watercolorist traveling with an English trader of alpacas and cinchona; and an encounter between an Amazonian community and a U.S. botanist during the largest search for a medicinal plant in history. These narratives extend from seventeenth-century accounts to the mid-twentieth century, entering into dialogue with contemporary testimonies from the Kañari community in Lambayeque, one of the last remaining habitats of wild cinchona.
Developed through a reading and writing group, the installation is conceived as a collective stage without a fixed form. Bringing together video projection, archival materials, and a six-channel sound system, the work activates incomplete narratives at the margins of the archive through distortion, displacement, and rotation, creating a space of apparitions and shifting perspectives.
Actividad realizada con la ayuda del Ministerio de Cultura
With the support of / Con el apoyo de
Museo Reina Sofía Research Residency — Museum of the Commons / L’Internationale
Museo Reina Sofía Research Residency — Museum of the Commons / L’Internationale