Artistic creation is one of the foundations of the Calanoa Project, which manifests itself in workshops and collective creation gatherings in the visual arts and music, in inhabited spaces, in the construction of a sculpture garden, and in ongoing research into local gastronomy.
Marlene and Diego Samper are the creators and managers of this aesthetic experience that is Calanoa.
Beauty lurks everywhere, as Borges said. You only have to be attentive to discover it.
The experience of art in Calanoa, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, is a search for understanding of nature, a journey that returns to its sources: recognizing natural poetics, accepting aesthetic appreciation as a form of profound knowledge.
Seeing, listening, and feeling deeply is the invitation we offer as you tour the Calanoa gardens and discover the works that grow and transform in an ongoing dialogue with the living forest, a continuous aesthetic experience where each work is intertwined with the others, which are woven into a larger work and simultaneously merge with the landscape.
Perception is the ancient wisdom of the senses, and if it is with the senses that we discover the world, it is with the imagination that we invent and reinvent it. In this journey of natural aesthetics, imagination is the fundamental instrument of navigation. It is imagination as an existential state, as a subversion of reality, as an act of freedom.
In the Lichen Garden, the same lichens that cover the tree bark grow and cover the surface of the canvases, slowly transforming them. Living paintings, they are also a theater of shadows when the lights project the forest canopy onto them.
In the garden, there are instruments for listening to the rain, unexpected thresholds, and creatures that speak of mysteries.
The Wild Symphony is born from listening to an archaic and profound music: the eternal murmurs of a landscape, the permanent pulse of life in the Amazon rainforest. Professional musicians and local singers come together to create music that emerges from listening to the living jungle and responding to its song, a music that resonates with the pulse of life.
Food is a feast of the senses: flavors, aromas, colors, and textures. Gastronomy in Calanoa explores local products and traditions where smoke and wood-fired cooking are fundamental ingredients. It is a search for roots, for the ancestral essence in flavors.
Their greatest strength lies in the creativity of the people. It is in respectful dialogue with others and with the place, in the recognition of the profound values of traditional culture, in the living memory of one’s own history, that community and identity are built, that hope and the future are constructed. It is imagination applied to conservation; it is culture for life. The Calanoa Foundation has promoted collective mural painting and photography projects with children.
