Aerial view of the music ridges in the Bogotá savannah. Collective Zanjas y Camellones. (decency)
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Colombian artist María Buenaventura’s father owned a large collection of books from the 19th century. She grew up reading old recipe books, traditional novels and travel stories. In these pages, Buenaventura found recipes for cooking captain’s fish, a species he was unfamiliar with. When he asked his father about this animal, he told him that when he was a boy, he and his friends fished for it in the Bogotá River.
Growing up in the capital of Colombia, Buenaventura never imagined that the Bogotá River would have a past without pollution or bad smell. That’s why she says that learning fish from the captain made her sad and ashamed. “Why didn’t we learn this story in school?” he wondered. The discovery of this animal has guided his artistic practice. For 18 years, Buenaventura has been dedicated to finding, documenting and sharing the history of the Bogotá Savannah, the largest highland of the Colombian Andes, through Essen.
One of her key discoveries was realizing that some of the flavors and dishes from old cookbooks still survive, even as souvenirs. Speaking at an event at the Museo la Quinta de Bolívar in the Colombian capital during a conference where he cooked historical recipes, Buenaventura told attendees that in the past there had been “very rare” dishes like flan de arracacha. Suddenly, she remembers with a smile, “a very old lady got up from her chair very bravely and said that this recipe was not strange. Your aunt made it!”
The historic recipes were still alive, “and if I didn’t get out of the library quickly, I’d lose them,” he says. In the Bogotá savannah, for example, the vast majority of young people have never tasted the captain fish or know of its existence, but “everyone over 60 and 70 has vivid memories,” adds Buenaventura. For example, after a conference at the Antioquia Museum, three tearful women approached him and told him that when they were girls, their father used to take them fishing at night. “It’s an endearing and absolutely silenced memory,” says the artist.
Captainfish (Eremophilus mutisii) caught in 2021. Courtesy of María Buenaventura
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The captainfish (Eremophilus mutisii) is an endemic species of the Cundiboyacense highlands, found in rivers between 2,500 and 3,100 meters in elevation. It has black skin with olive-colored circles and a handsome mustache that it uses to search for food. In recent years, their numbers have drastically decreased due to habitat destruction and pollution. Opportunities for fishing and consuming skipper fish are scarce.
Ditches and ridges to restore captain fish habitat
This animal tastes “like catfish, like earth, it’s absolutely delicious,” says Juliana Steiner, an independent art curator who lives in Bogotá. In 2021, she organized an exhibition entitled “Mutualismos” where Buenaventura prepared a banquet that included a plate of Capitán fish grilled with achiote and wrapped in a banana leaf.
In 2022, Steiner is invited to participate as a curator in the Common Ground Biennial, organized by Bard University in New York, which focuses on land and food politics. To restore the physical space of the captain fish in the Bogotá savannah, the two women decided to build ditches and mounds, a pre-Hispanic hydraulic system used for three thousand years that disappeared with the arrival of the Spaniards in the Bogotá savannah Andes.
That year they founded the collective Zanjas y Camellones, which built six mountain ridges in the Van Der Hammen nature reserve in the city of Suba in Bogotá. The group and project were led by Buenaventura, Steiner, historian Lorena Rodríguez, landscape architect Diego Bermúdez, and attorney Sabina Rodríguez.
Diego Bermudez (Courtesy)
ridges and ditches
The Muisca were the indigenous group living in the savannah of Bogotá when the Spanish conquistadors arrived. They used the ridges, land elevations between 50 and 70 centimeters, to grow various foods such as corn, beans, squash, potatoes and other vegetables. These types of elevated platforms have been used by different cultures around the world for thousands of years.
Canals and ditches were used to control excess water. According to artist María Buenaventura, “Bogotá had around 100,000 hectares of land cultivated in ditches and ridges.” Some ridges were large enough to support huts, and you could navigate and fish in them.
Bogotá’s savannah has always been flooded. For example, during the last rainy season in Bogotá there were several floods and structural damage to buildings and city streets. This is because the region’s loamy soil has very low permeability. The ridges and ditches allowed the Muiscas to use the floods to their advantage. Additionally, in the pre-Hispanic period, the ridges were used “as fish hatcheries for sea captains,” says Carl Langebaek, an anthropologist, archaeologist, and professor at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá. Buenaventura says they chose to build mounds and ditches because that was the ecosystem where the fish lived best.
system shutdown
The system of ridges and ditches disappeared with the arrival of the Spaniards in the Andes and the cultural genocide of the Muiscas, says Lorena Rodríguez Gallo, a professor in the National University’s history department. She has spent years studying Muisca’s hydraulic system and is a member of the Zanjas y Camellones collective.
Illustration of the Sabana de Bogotá 600 years ago. The image is based on the research of Lorena Rodríguez and shows the Muisca ridges and canals built around the Bogotá River. Santiago Florence
When “the natives lost control of the land,” the system became unsustainable and stopped working, Rodríguez says. As he explains, for the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula in the 16th century “it was impossible to imagine the development of civilization in mid-water”. For them, proximity to water was associated with illness. Additionally, the conquerors failed to recognize the value of the Muisca polycultures, in which different species such as corn, beans, and squashes were planted in the same area.
The Spanish and later the Colombian states tried to dry up the savannah of Bogotá and promoted urban expansion, cattle ranching and monocultures. However, we can still see traces of the system. Steiner recalls visiting farms on the outskirts of Bogotá as a child, where she “jumped and played in what were then thought to be small mountains.” It is possible that “las montañitas” are the traces, the memories on earth of the Muisca hydraulic system.
Ridge and ditch construction in the 21st century
With the support of the Bogotá Botanical Garden, the Zanjas y Camellones collective found a piece of land in the Van Der Hammen Natural Reserve on which to develop their project. The plot was chosen because it is constantly flooded and is in a place full of contrasts. It is close to the Bosque de las Mercedes, one of the few native forests to survive in the savannah but surrounded by willow trees and eucalyptus (a tree native to Australia). It is very close to the Conejera wetland, an area protected by the diversity of the ecosystem, where several residential developments are being built.
Before construction began, Abuela Blancanieves, a representative of Suba’s Muisca Council and a member of the collective, held a wetland payment ceremony, asking permission from the country to encroach on the wetland. After the ceremony, the members of the collective began to mow and remove from the plot the African grass (Cynodon plectostachyus) that was brought to the savannah for cattle feeding. Professor Rodríguez recalls that after mowing the grass, they “heard a very faint sound, like the earth was talking,” she recalls. And suddenly water started gushing out of the ground.
This area of the Bogotá savannah has a very high water table, which means that the water table of the aquifer is very close to the surface (on the land where the ridges are built, it is between 60 and 70 centimeters). The water continued to pour out of the ground for almost two hours. About 30 people worked that day. Some cried with emotion, others said, “The savannah is alive” and “we are water,” Steiner recalls, adding that the moment was “like magic.”
Guido Caicedo is one of the gardeners at the Bogotá Botanical Garden who participated in the construction of the ridges and says that this type of planting is “an art”. After taking the measurements, they dug up dirt to form the four-foot-wide trenches that they later used to build the ridges. Caicedo says it’s like putting a raised platform “in the middle of a pool.”
The collective built six mounds on which to plant corn, arracacha, French beans, lupins and tobacco. Everything has grown successfully and with very little supervision, also thanks to the fact that the plants on the hill are irrigated thanks to the ditches and canals. The system is closed, meaning it is not connected to the wetland or any water source, so there are still no captain fish. The shape of the ridges “emerges from the study of old aerial photographs,” says architect Bermúdez, who has been working on the hydrological and territorial planning of the savannah since 2016. These photos, taken in the 1950s, provide evidence of the extent and location of the savannah of the Muisca ridges in the Sabana de Bogotá.
Two gardeners building the ditches and ridges in the Van Der Hammen nature reserve. Guido Caicedo
Previously, the Botanical Garden had attempted to plant native trees in this area, but these could not survive due to the country’s constant flooding. However, once the technique used by pre-Hispanic groups was adopted, the plants could grow with ease. For this reason, Rodríguez is convinced that this technique can offer specific solutions in certain areas of the Cundiboyacense highlands.
The conditions of the savanna have changed radically in the last 500 years, making it no longer possible to build hill ranges for large-scale agriculture, as was the case in Bolivia. Aquifers have receded due to overexploitation and the Bogotá River and its tributaries are contaminated and “completely controlled by cement corridors that do not allow them to go beyond the limits we have imposed,” says Rodríguez. Without controlled flooding, the medians cannot function.
The future of the ridges in the Van Der Hammen Reserve depends on the Botanical Garden. Steiner hopes this space can become a living classroom where students can learn and interact with the pre-Hispanic past, using pre-Columbian technology as inspiration for the present and future of the savannah. At the very least, the curator hopes that Bogotá residents will stop “turning their backs on the Bogotá River.” And maybe in the not too distant future, it’s possible that the captain’s fish will return to the rivers and to the Sabana de Bogotá.