Juan Cortés, a Bogotá-based artist, presented two projects: his award-winning project, “A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains” (Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica 2023) and “Supralunar”, an intricated machine that represents the role of dark matter in the formation of galaxies. The work was sponsored by Hyphen Hub as part of his residency and collaboration with Arts at CERN.

A Tale of Two Seeds is a sound installation that explores the expansion of the current technical agro-industrial colonization in Latin America, in general, and in Colombia, in particular. The work is composed of three parts:

A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains uses subterranean and surface recordings of the soil and recordings of electrical conductivity in the soy and amaranth plants to present a sonic testimony of the changing sounds of the Andean landscape after the arrival of genetically modified (GM) monoculture soy expansion in the last decade. For some time now, soy monocultures have been threatened by the amaranth plant. Such is the hypnotic force that soy has on amaranth that industrialists are devoting a large part of their capital to developing technology to uncouple and neutralize the spell between the two species. This work draws attention to the fact that amaranth—before being classified as a parasite by multinational agro-industrial corporations—was a plant that occupied a valuable and sacred place in the lives of many indigenous peoples and is an essential grain that circulates outside the predominant agro-industrial matrix.

The installation is complemented with two video works:

• On Vegetal Politics explores food sovereignty, deforestation, and the preservation of biodiversity through the story of soy monoculture and its expansion in South American territories. This work is a reconstruction of an algorithm commonly used in agribusiness to model the growth of transgenic crops on any type of soil. The main objective was to subvert this technology using it to model and demonstrate the enormous efficiency of the amaranth plant when pitted against GM soya.
• Botánica Transgénica is a web 3.0 and blockchain artwork that, through search algorithms and web scraping on the internet, aims to register as Colombian intellectual property the codes patented by foreign agro-industrial companies on our living organisms. The project has a specific focus on the patents of genetic modifications of plants. Through a subversive symbolic act, this work seeks to question genetic extractivism, the very idea of genetic ownership of living bodies and the extent to which foreign companies are privatizing our food sovereignty, in Colombia and across the Americas.

During the evening, Cortés also presented “Supralunar”, a work created with sponsorship from Arts at CERN and Hyphen Hub. The artwork invites us to experience discoveries made by the American astronomer Vera Rubin on the relationship between dark matter and the rotational movement of galaxies. It proposes a poetic approach to dark matter, visualizing this strange and unknown entity that scientists believe supports entire galaxies, stopping them from being torn apart by the extreme speed at which they rotate – but which we cannot see or detect yet. Placing one’s chin onto the vibrating plate causes the skull’s bones to act as an amplifier for the sound produced by the electromechanical gears inside. At the same time, the frequency of the lights inside, visible through a lens, creates a simulation of the morphogenesis of a galaxy through light and sound. Paradoxically, “Supralunar’s” construction—reminiscent of an ancient clock—allows us to comprehend through everyday, classical mechanics a phenomenon that is based on the abstract theories and unseen constituents of modern physical cosmology.

This piece has been commissioned by Arts at CERN followed by an exhibition tour titled “About Seeing Sound”, which was curated by Barbara London.