After 3 gatherings throughout the year on cinchona, we would like to close 2024 with a last space of conversation around what it would mean to fabulate with this tree at a political and aesthetic level. This task of a thousand faces will be triggered by Ursula Le Guin's beautiful text, “The theory of fiction as a carrier bag”, which will allow us to rethink the links between harvesting, the life of this plant, fiction and politics. In this space we will weave variations and versions of what it would mean to recreate the future, the bonds of affection and interspecies relations. We will have the opportunity to screen the short film entitled “Quinine machine”.

In this sense, the space has the vocation to provoke a conversation about the forces of vital transformation of an imagination that is nourished by history, challenges the plantationocene and creates from the vibrations of this tree.

Participants: Sebastián Wiedemann & Iván Darío Ávila

Moderator: Santiago Arcila

In this approach we propose a philosophical and political approach to some of the ruins left behind by the reverberations of the colonial catastrophe associated with the cinchona tree: abandoned plantations and factories, parasitic ecologies that mutate, workers who insist on continuing a work that no longer turns a profit, ghosts that cling to and depend on the debris. The quinine extracted from this tree to cure malaria was clearly a material that fundamentally altered the course of history. Thinking through the phantasmal field of this world-historical substance leads us to imagine other forms of the post-colonial world we inhabit.

From this angle, we are interested in bringing to the table the continuity of two types of trajectories tied to the ruins of quinine: on the one hand, those that feed the fabric of a certain logic of imperial sovereignty present today; on the other, those that are re-edited, like the eternal return of a ghost, in the emancipation movements that return again and again as attempts at the transformation of a plebeian sovereignty. How to think the survivals of quinine? What forms does the debris take on when we try to look at it from archives that do not want to be trapped by the colonial archive? Are there inhabitable worlds that flourish from the ruins of quinine?

Participants: Federico Nieto (Otros presentes) & Nicolás Hernández-Díaz (Revista Micelio).

Moderator: Santiago Arcila

To think about the problem of opacity, obscurity, absence and ignorance about pre-Columbian knowledge. We will emphasize the bodily dimension of the relationship between human, malaria and quina. Here the issue of the ecology of malaria, the issue of the lagoon and oblivion, of the omission in the range of colonial practices on the tree: what the enlightenment represses and produces, the repression of pre-Columbian knowledge, the dimension of the unconscious and the pulsional, the problem of light and darkness in the concrete practices around the tree, etc.

Participants: Juliana Hurtado, Bárbara Santos, Andrea Lehner, Juan Arturo García.

Moderator: Santiago Arcila

To think about Cinchona as an aesthetic, economic and political vector of domination: colonialism, image and commerce.
In a counterpoint between past and present, we will discuss the place of cinchona in the colonial period and its place in the gestation of one of the central antecedents in the genealogy of current narcopolitics. We will emphasize a certain logic of value-power that redistributes the system of domination over the biotic and abiotic fields.

Participants: Juan David Cárdenas, Alejandro Cortés, Diego Moreno, Juan Cortés.

Moderator: Santiago Arcila