Extraordinary circumstances have propelled me into a collaborative project with the Indigenous Inga people of Colombia. Devenir Universidad is an assemblage of artistic productions emerging from this encounter and sustained collaboration which started with a field trip in 2018. As an Amazonian community, the Inga have acquired great knowledge about their living forests with whom they have coevolved. Their accumulated knowledge is invaluable for protecting and restoring the forests and the diversity of living beings and cultures that inhabit them. Yet decades of armed conflict and an enduring history of colonial occupation of territories and the Indigenous way of life have left the communities without a viable system to foster their epistemic cultures. With modern science establishing itself as the only verifiable truth, the Indigenous communities have been put into a vulnerable position not only by colonial conquest and its disowning practices, but also by modern western science and its premises of objectivity. Indigenous people, on the other hand, entertain a subjectifying relationship to the natural world, they encounter the other as person, as mind. This fundamental attitude generates an entirely different relationship to the living world.

Devenir Universidad acts as an artistic response to the desire of the Inga community in the Andean Amazon to take the politics of education into their hands. I was touched by the idea that considering all the violence, political and economic pressures the Inga are facing on a daily basis, they decided that it is a university that will make the difference.

Devenir Universidad - becoming university - is by no means the name of the future University. Rather, it is a discursive, processual and design space that stimulates the conceptual development of this learning institution. At the same time, it is an art project comprising an online publication, the video installation Vocal Cognitive Territory based on interviews with numerous Inga speakers, an audiovisual archive building a territorial memory, as well as publishing activities and public events to reach a global audience. A comprehensive exhibition has recently opened at the Art Museum of the National University of Colombia (UNAL) in the beautiful Monastery San Agustin in Bogota, serving as a platform for outreach and mediation for the Inga in the capital city. As a living collaborative organism, the project engages in multispecies research in the Amazonian rainforest with different human and other-than-human people thinking and acting together with the territory. Above all, Devenir Universidad brings together the collective effort to co-create an indigenous University in the South of Colombia involving the leadership of the Indigenous Inga community: the elders, iachas, taitas (traditional medics), mamas (healers), educators and community leaders represented by Hernando Chindoy. Since my first field trip to the South of Colombia in 2018, which was commissioned by the curator of the art museum at UNAL, Hernando and I have collaborated closely together. We started the process with a 4-day kick-off meeting in Mocoa, inviting dozens of Inga and a few academics from diverse academic fields, to brainstorm together on the nature and meaning of this future university. These conversations, speeches and ceremonies were video recorded and edited for the online platform to provide a rare testimony of such a dialog between indigenous and western concepts of research and education.

I was very grateful for this unique opportunity to step outside the art world and make a difference on the ground, in the material and political reality of Indigenous people. Throughout, I had to invent my own place in this intercultural process. I saw my initial role in organizing and funding field meetings, creating a group of interdisciplinary academics who could support the process, and forging international partnerships, as with the architecture department at ETH in Zurich, where Anne Lacaton took on the project for a two-semester studio including a field trip to the territory. There are two architects¹ in the academic team who are currently doing important foundational cartographic work in the territory, mapping the needs and skills of each Inga region to determine what part of the university will be best established there. There is a pedagogic team and an architectural-cartographic team interacting on a regular basis. The Inga do not have professional architects yet but they do have several architecture students standing in exchange with the ETH students and who participate in field trips and cartographic activities. They will certainly play a leading role in the minga (collective community action) of building the first infrastructures, hopefully taking place in 2023.

In this way, the project supports several dimensions in the materialization of this new institution of higher education and research - the Biocultural Indigenous University. Thriving forests is a biological as well as cultural issue, which is why we want to include the term “biocultural” in the name of the University, merging nature and culture, rather than positing them as polar opposites. The concept is rooted in the fact that biodiversity and epistemic diversity have co-evolved over millennia in these forests, they are completely entangled, so much so that if one of them dies the other one also disappears. The ancestral knowledge of the forests is critical for the survival of the forest. Hence supporting Indigenous communities is an excellent way of saving the Amazonian forests. Deeply inspired by the biocultural paradigm the project intends to drive discourse from an extractive to a more generative and imaginative relationship with the territory.

As an aesthetic companion, Devenir Universidad is in many ways a parallel endeavor of creating this future university, or “pluriversity” as the Inga suggested, they mutually interpret and fertilize each other, acting as a repository of the visual and intellectual memory of this process of collaboration. While the word university stands for the omnipotent western knowledge system displacing and devaluing other forms of knowing, pluriversity, in contrast, embraces the plurality and equality of other knowledge forms. Education has been used as a powerful instrument of colonization in Colombia and the Indigenous communities and their living, cognitive territories have been deeply affected by the missionary impact. In this respect, the university is clearly a political strategy for the Inga whose land and forests are continuously reduced and destroyed.

This new learning institution holds a vision for a future founded on ecological concepts of mind, knowledge, and the inherent intelligence of life.² Indigenous people in the Amazon view knowledge as embedded in the environment rather than imported information to be reproduced. This fundamental premise favouring place and practice based forms of learning was emphasised throughout the Mocoa meetings. Knowing something means becoming part of a field of meaningful relations with all species and with the social and historical relations connected to that space. This complex field of ecological relations is what indigenous people in Amazonia call territory, it is intimately connected to knowledge, wisdom, perceiving and caring. In this sense, we project a real territorial university, collectively processing the ever-changing interactions between the different entities involved in meaning and world-making.

The actual layout of the university infrastructure is also connected to the fact that the Inga have a dispersed territorial constellation, made up of a series of indigenous reserves in Putumayo, Nariño, Cauca and Caquetá, as well as in pockets in the major cities Bogota, Cali and Medellin. Hence, the future University will be a decentralized network of various sites and paths across the entire territory, that allows for river-learning, forest-learning, chagra-learning in their research gardens. The territory is what holds all the knowledge, it is the maximus teacher. What is becoming University is not primarily the Inga people but the territory itself. It will not only be a territorial university but also, first and foremost, a universitarian territory.

Notes

1 Juliana Ramirez Rodrigues from Studio Bosque, Bogota, who runs a studio at the University of Los Andes; and Santiago del Hierro, Ecuadorian architect and PhD candidate at ETH.
2 Forest Mind (2021) a video installation by Ursula Biemann and an artist book of the same name published with Spector Books (2022) is an artistic research on the intelligence in nature and the interconnection of all life which emerged from this long-term endeavor with the Inga university.