October 1-4, 2025
Talking with the Jungle was a gathering that brought together artists, researchers, leaders, and knowledge holders from various countries to reflect, through contemporary art, research, and lived experience, on the multiple realities of the tropical rainforest.
For four days, the program featured concerts, public interventions, lectures, audiovisual screenings, listening sessions, performances, and a talking circle, creating a space for cross-disciplinary thought around the interdependence between nature and culture, spirituality and politics, memory and territory.
The gathering began with a concert by Los Mirlos at the Pablo Tobón Uribe Theater. The legendary psychedelic cumbia group drew more than 600 people to a party that transformed the theater into a dance floor, immersing us in the sounds of the Amazonian territory and setting the stage for the days that would continue to bring us closer to the jungle.
Over the course of several days, the urban space was activated by the kené weaving of Olinda Silvano and Wilma Maynas Inuma, whose mural intervention transformed the textile gesture into a shared surface and living memory. The conversations expanded the territory to other geographies: Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim built bridges between the Sahara, the savanna, and the rainforest to consider interconnected climate struggles; while Ana maría Garzon Mantilla, through the Fossil State project, critically examined the material and symbolic archives of oil in Ecuador. Hernando Chindoy contributed an interpretation where plants, education, and Indigenous governance intertwine as the living intelligence of the territory.
Olowaili Green’s cinema brought the memory of the Gunadule people to the present through animated stories about grandmothers, songs, and cultural protection, while Luciano Mutumbajoy’s words delved into the spiritual and political dimension of yagé as knowledge that sustains life.
In the performance space, Eblin Grueso and Rafaela Kennedy activated the body as archive, territory, and act of resistance, proposing a sensitive reflection on violence, ancestry, and diversity. The circle of words and the conversation “Narrative Weaving: Between Kené and Molas” brought the participants together again in a dialogue that understood weaving as a form of non-alphabetic writing, collective memory, and a practice of care.
This is how Talking to the Jungle was experienced
Rather than offering definitive conclusions, Talking with the Jungle fostered a space for cross-disciplinary thought that invited participants to question the separation between culture and nature, and to understand interdependence as a fundamental condition for sustaining life.
This gathering was part of the Medellín Cultural Season, which brought together more than 1,000 artists and 200 organizations in nearly 50 venues across the city.