In Bogotá, the mountains are never out of sight. They rise abruptly along the city’s eastern edge, forming a green wall that shapes the capital’s light, weather and sense of place. For Colombian artist Marina Sánchez, the ridges that surround the Colombian capital’s cardinal points are also more intimate: a constant presence, a point of orientation and, increasingly, a subject of quiet urgency.

Her latest exhibition, Panorámicas de la Sabana, runs from 5 to 29 March inside the colonial  Museo del Chicó, where 26 acrylic-on-canvas works reinterpret the high-altitude plateau of the Sabana through a distinctly chromatic lens. Installed in the museum’s Salón Colonial, the show brings together landscape, memory and abstraction in a series that feels both personal and outward-looking.

Sánchez has long been recognized for her expressive use of colour but this body of work marks a measured shift. While her earlier practice leaned towards abstraction, here the forms are more legible—ridgelines, shifting skies, traces of vegetation – yet never fixed. Instead, they dissolve through layered pigments and gestural brushwork that privilege sensation over strict representation.

What distinguishes Sánchez’s approach becomes clear in the work itself. The Cerros are not rendered as stable topography but as shifting, atmospheric forms. Bands of diffusec green rise and fold into one another, interrupted by flashes of cobalt, ochre and lilac, while a dense, unsettled sky presses down with quiet intensity. The composition resists stillness. It moves – closer to inclement weather than landscape.

Rather than mapping terrain, Sánchez constructs it through colour. The mountains appear to breathe, their contours dissolving at the edges as if seen through mist or memory. There is no single vantage point; the eye travels across the canvas, tracing lines that feel at once familiar and unstable.

“I want to show the relevance of these giants that often go unnoticed,” Sánchez says. For Bogotá’s residents, the hills are omnipresent yet rarely examined beyond their silhouette. In her telling, they become active participants in the city’s identity – “guardians” that accompany an urban landscape marked by rapid, and at times impersonal, expansion.

The project began during the pandemic, when isolation altered both her routine and perspective. Working from home, Sánchez found herself drawn to the view outside her window: the slow fade of light across the mountains, the subtle shifts in colour at dusk.

“Being away from people – family, friends – I was left with the sky and the light of sunsets,” she says. “I wanted to replicate something I hadn’t fully appreciated and, in doing so, feel part of nature.”

Her visual language, however, is not shaped by Bogotá alone. Sánchez has exhibited in New York City and Milan – cities where she has also lived, and whose pace and structure have informed her approach to rhythm and composition. If Bogotá provides the grounding geography, New York and Milan introduce a contrasting sensibility: verticality, movement and a heightened awareness of structure.

These contrasting narratives – from urban to rural, isolation and engagement, are visible throughout Panorámicas de la Sabana. Linear gestures – suggestive of passing headlights or urban flow – cut across certain canvases, briefly suspending the stillness of the mountains. It is a restrained intervention but an effective one, hinting at the tension between expansion and preservation.

Colour, in Sánchez’s palette, is not decorative but foundational. Greens shift from luminous to dense; blues dissolve into shadow; entire forms recede into haze. The landscape is reassembled through pigment, hovering between recognition and abstraction.

She describes her work as “chromatic poetry”, a phrase that aligns with her broader intention: to create space for reflection. “I want to offer a moment of calm beyond the difficulties that surround us,” she says, “despite the inevitable conflicts, wars and inequalities.”

In Bogotá, that impulse carries particular weight. The Eastern Hills and peaks to the West are not only a visual constant but a fragile ecological system—central to water sources and biodiversity, yet increasingly under pressure from urban growth. Sánchez’s paintings do not argue this point directly; instead, they suggest it, allowing atmosphere and colour to carry meaning.

For the artist, colour remains essential. “It would be difficult for me to imagine the world in black and white,” she says. “Colour is vitality. It gives strength and solidity. It is pure magic.”

That conviction runs through the exhibition. The hills emerge not as backdrop but as presence—shifting, watchful and quietly insistent. In Sánchez’s hands, they ask to be seen again, and more carefully this time.

Panorámicas de la Sabana runs from 5 to 29 March at the Museo del Chicó (Carrera 9 No. 93-38, Bogotá). Admission is free.

Singapore has never been shy about scale. But this season, the city’s appetite for monumentality takes on a distinctly Latin American accent. For the first time, the work of Colombian master Fernando Botero makes his Singapore debut with the largest exhibition of his work ever showcased in Asia.

Spanning galleries, inter-active theatres and extensive public gardens, the landmark show presents more than 130 works, positioning the city-state as a hub for global Botero immersion. As the largest presentation of the Medellín-born artist (1932-2023), and timed to coincide with Singapore Art Week, Botero in Singapore unfolds across gallery walls, immersive media spaces and public gardens.

“My father loved Singapore,” remarked the artist’s son Fernando Botero Zea to The Strait Times, highligting that with this retrospective, the country now “has the highest concentration of Botero per capita”.

At the heart of the programme is Heart of Volume, a major gallery exhibition at IMBA Theatre, presenting more than 100 works drawn directly from the Botero family collection. Spanning seven decades, the exhibition traces the evolution of what the artist famously described not as exaggeration, but as “volume”: a formal strategy that lends weight, humour and authority to everyday scenes, portraits, still lifes and reimagined art-historical references.

Seen up close, the discipline behind Botero’s apparent abundance becomes clear. Small watercolours and intimate studies reveal a careful calibration of colour and balance, while larger canvases demonstrate his lifelong dialogue with European painting traditions—from Renaissance composition to modernist distortion—filtered through a distinctly Colombian sensibility. The effect is quietly didactic without ever feeling academic, a curatorial tone well suited to Singapore’s measured cultural landscape.

If Heart of Volume offers intimacy, Garden Grandeur delivers spectacle. Extending across the Silver Garden at Gardens by the Bay, ten monumental bronze sculptures bring Botero’s work into the rhythm of daily life. A towering Horse—more than three meters tall and weighing three tonnes – anchors the display, joined by familiar figures such as Adam and Eve, The Dancers and Woman on Horse. Installed against a backdrop of tropical greenery and glass conservatories, the sculptures feel less like foreign imports and more like temporary citizens of the city.

This democratic impulse was central to Botero’s thinking. As his son, Fernando Botero Zea, noted at the opening, the artist believed that public art should be touched, photographed and shared—an ethos that fits neatly with Singapore’s highly social public spaces. Here, Botero’s bronzes become meeting points and landmarks, their generous forms softening the city’s precision with a dose of playfulness.

The exhibition also introduces Life in Fullness, the world’s first immersive Botero experience: a 45-minute audiovisual journey narrated by his son, combining archival footage, animation and storytelling. It is a humanizing counterpoint to the grand scale elsewhere, framing Botero as father, provocateur and craftsman—an artist whose work often invites smiles, but is underpinned by a serious engagement with power, politics and art history.

Beyond the artworks themselves, Botero in Singapore signals a broader shift. Latin American artists have long been underrepresented in Southeast Asia’s major exhibition circuits, despite Singapore’s ambition to position itself as a global cultural hub. This collaboration—between IMBA, the Fernando Botero Foundation, and Colombia’s diplomatic mission—suggests a growing appetite for narratives that extend beyond the usual Euro-American axis.

There is also a certain symmetry at play. Botero’s art, with its emphasis on presence rather than speed, arrives in a city known for efficiency and control. His figures occupy space unapologetically; they slow the viewer down. In Singapore’s gardens and galleries, that insistence on taking up room feels less like excess and more like quiet persuasion.

As Singapore Art Week draws international collectors, curators and critics to one of the most affluent cities in Asia, Botero’s debut is both timely and long-overdue. It is not a retrospective weighed down by reverence, but a confident, outward-looking presentation that invites the public in – free of charge in the Gardens, and without intimidation indoors.

Botero’s Singapore moment is less about spectacle than about accessibility. His volumes, for all their heft, carry a lightness of spirit, and a persuasive contribution that art should always coexist alongside everyday life.

Colombia’s goldenberry symbolized the country’s push into high-value fruit exports. Now, it faces a turf war at home from a fruit with far greater global recognition: the blueberry. While blueberry cultivation has expanded rapidly across Colombia over the past decade, producers say the industry remains far from becoming a fully fledged export powerhouse.

Colombia currently has close to 1,000 hectares planted with blueberries, concentrated mainly in the Andean departments of Boyacá and Cundinamarca, which together account for almost the entire cultivated area. Smaller projects are emerging in Antioquia and other regions, bringing national production to an estimated 20,000 tonnes a year.

That marks a dramatic rise from just 40 hectares planted a decade ago. In the past two years alone, between 150 and 200 additional hectares have been planted, reflecting growing interest from investors and farmers seeking alternatives to traditional crops.

Yet despite this momentum, industry leaders warn that Colombia’s blueberry sector still lacks the scale, investment and coordination needed to compete seriously in international markets.

“Blueberries are one of the fastest-growing fruit crops in Colombia, but we are still very far from consolidating a true export agroindustry,” said Camilo Lozano, vice-president of Asocolblue, the national blueberry growers’ association, in an interview with La República.

Lozano argues that Colombia’s potential far exceeds its current footprint. “The country could easily reach 5,000, 6,000 or even 10,000 hectares,” he said. “But that won’t happen overnight. We need more investment, greater scale and the entry of larger producers.”

Peru offers a stark comparison. In 2012, Peruvian blueberry exports were worth just US$400,000. Today, they exceed US$3 billion, supported by more than 22,000 hectares of plantations. Colombia, Lozano notes, shares many of the same advantages that fuelled Peru’s rise: favourable soils, competitive labour costs, efficient logistics and the ability to produce year-round.

“These are the same conditions that made Colombia the world’s leading exporter of cut flowers,” he said.

Blueberries are particularly attractive because they are already deeply embedded in global consumer markets. In North America and Europe, they are a staple product, unlike many tropical fruits that require costly marketing campaigns to build demand.

“In the United States and Canada, consumers already know blueberries,” Lozano said. “You don’t have to explain what they are or how to eat them.”

At present, around 90 per cent of Colombia’s Arandano exports are destined for the United States, with Europe a distant second. Asia remains largely out of reach due to phytosanitary barriers and long shipping times, which can exceed 30 days by sea.

Even in established markets, Colombia struggles to meet minimum volume requirements. International buyers often request several containers per week, but domestic supply remains too fragmented to deliver consistently.

“Today, we get clients asking for five containers a week, and we can’t even fill one,” Lozano admitted. “Only two companies export blueberries by sea on a regular basis.”

The domestic market, however, tells a different story. According to industry estimates, formal blueberry sales in Colombia exceed 200 billion pesos (about US$50 million) annually. Imports — mainly from Peru and Chile — add another 50 billion pesos, highlighting the gap between local demand and national production.

That imbalance underscores both the opportunity and the challenge facing Colombian growers. While consumption is rising, domestic supply remains insufficient, and many producers lack the technical expertise and capital required to expand efficiently.

Asocolblue, which brings together 28 producers, has repeatedly warned that blueberries are not a crop for improvisation. Establishing a commercial plantation requires high upfront investment, technical knowledge, strict quality standards and long-term planning.

“This is not traditional agriculture,” Lozano said. “It’s an agro-industrial business.”

The association operates technical, export and marketing committees aimed at professionalising the sector and ensuring that growth does not come at the expense of productivity or sustainability.

For farmers who succeed, the rewards can be significant. Blueberries offer relatively stable international prices and allow producers to integrate into global supply chains, generating employment, foreign exchange and long-term income. “It allows the producer to make a qualitative leap — from farmer to agro-industrialist,” Lozano said. “It’s essentially an agricultural factory.”

For now, Colombia’s farmers across the Altiplanto Boyacense are enjoying their blueberry boom, but the story is more one of promise than parity with terrirorial rivals, such the uchuva and feijoa. Whether it can replicate the success of its flower industry — or Peru’s meteoric rise — will depend on how quickly investment, scale and coordination catch up with ambition.

Musical instruments are far more than tools for producing sound: they embody the cultural identity of a territory, carrying spiritual meanings, collective memory, and the deep-rooted expressions that shape a community’s history. Colombia en un Aliento 2026 (Colombia in a Breath 2026) invites audiences on a sonic journey through the country’s wind instruments, encouraging reflection on how human breath and aerophones have shaped identities, spiritual practices, and spaces of encounter from pre-Hispanic times to the present day.

Conceived as a national cultural project, Colombia en un aliento: instrumentos de viento que narran un país (Wind Instruments That Tell the Story of a Nation) brings together ancestral knowledge, popular traditions, and contemporary artistic creation. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the initiative connects past, present, and future via a wide-ranging cultural program structured around four thematic lines.

El soplo como rito de la vida (Breath as a Rite of Life) explores the symbolic and ritual significance of wind instruments among Indigenous and Afro-Colombian cultures, where blowing air through wood is understood as an act of vitality, spirituality, and connection with the natural world. In these traditions, breath is not merely physical – it is a force that sustains life, memory, and the sacred.

El viento del encuentro (The Wind of Encounter) focuses on the social and communal role of wind instruments in fiestas, carnivals, and collective celebrations. From village plazas to major public gatherings, these instruments create shared rhythms, reinforce bonds of belonging, and transform music into a space for encounter and social cohesion.

Alientos universales, músicas locales (Universal Breaths, Local Music) examines historical processes of cultural exchange, mestizaje, and adaptation. It traces how wind instruments introduced from other parts of the world were reinterpreted across Colombia’s diverse regions, giving rise to musical expressions deeply rooted in local landscapes, histories, and identities.

Respirar el future (Breathing the Future) looks toward contemporary creation techniques, from experimentation with digital technologies to new sonic languages. The section reflects on current artistic practices in which tradition and innovation coexist, opening pathways for composition, teaching, and cultural narratives.

Together, these four thematic pillars support spaces for reflection and research, that strengthen Colombia’s sound identity. From making local knowledge visible and fostering cultural innovation, more than a series, Colombia en un Aliento / Colombia in a Breath proposes a collective experience – an invitation to understand wind instruments as symbols of life, resistance, and social cohesion.

As a year-long project by the Cultural Subdirectorate of the Banco de la República – Central Bank – this initiative will continue in 2027 with a new thematic focus on the human voice as a sonic element, expanding its exploration of sound as a carrier of memory and meaning.

The initiative will be officially launched with the public conversation “El soplo y los instrumentos: sonidos que cuentan historias / Breath and Instruments: Sounds That Tell Stories” on Tuesday, February 3 at 5:00 p.m. in the Audiovisual Hall of the Luis Ángel Arango Library (BLAA) in Bogotá.

The event will feature José Pérez de Arce, Chilean musicologist and leading authority on ancestral aerophones; Humberto Galindo, Colombian researcher and director of the Museo Mundo Sonoro; and Luis Fernando Franco, composer and co-founder of Guana Récords with more than four decades dedicated to musical research and creation.

The conversation will also be streamed live on Banrepcultural’s YouTube channel, opening this shared reflection on breath, sound, and identity to audiences in Colombia and internationally.

For more information visit the cultural page of the Central Bank: https://www.banrepcultural.org/noticias/instrumentos-de-viento-en-colombia-en-un-aliento-2026

Beatriz González, one of Latin America’s most influential contemporary artists, whose boldly colored, deliberately unrefined paintings and installations confronted Colombia’s long history of political violence, public mourning and social inequality – while also reshaping the country’s most important public art collection – died on Jan. 9, 2026, at her home in Bogotá. She was 93.

Her death was announced by the Banco de la República, Colombia’s central bank, where for more than four decades she played a decisive role in shaping the institution’s cultural mission and its vast art collections. In a statement, the bank described her as “an essential figure in Colombian art and culture” and “a masterful narrator of memory.”

González was not only a prolific artist but also a historian, curator, educator and critic — a rare figure who helped define how Colombia would see its art, its past and, ultimately, itself. “Artists exist so that memory is not thrown in the trash,” she once said, a line that came to stand as a quiet manifesto for a career devoted to preserving what official histories often erased.

Born in Bucaramanga in 1932, González came of age during La Violencia, the brutal civil conflict that engulfed Colombia between 1948 and 1958. That formative experience would leave an indelible mark on her work. After briefly studying architecture, she enrolled at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, graduating with a degree in fine arts in 1962. She later studied printmaking in Rotterdam and counted among her teachers the influential critic Marta Traba, who helped shape modern art discourse in Latin America.

González’s early work drew attention for its irreverent treatment of European art history and Colombian popular imagery. Her critical view of “good taste” led her to reject academic refinement in favor of what the art critic Germán Rubiano described as an approach that was consciously unpolished and deliberately opposed to sophistication.

She appropriated masterpieces by Manet, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, flattening their compositions and translating them into the visual language of curtains, furniture and household objects. Armoires, beds, trays and even wallpaper became supports for paintings marked by compressed figures and bold color palettes — a strategy that blurred the boundary between high art and domestic life.

One of her earliest and most discussed works, The Sisga Suicides (1965), reimagined a newspaper photograph of a young couple who drowned themselves in a dam outside Bogotá. Rendered in vivid, almost cheerful colors, the painting exposed the uneasy coexistence of tragedy and banality in Colombian public life — a theme that would recur throughout her career.

By the 1980s, González’s art took on an increasingly overt political tone. Press photographs of presidents, massacres and grieving families became central to her work. She painted them repeatedly, transforming news images into objects of repetition and contemplation, as if to ask how a society becomes accustomed to its own suffering. “It’s been a critique of power that has permeated my work,” she told ArtReview in 2016. “For that very reason, I don’t think of it as ‘political’; it has an ethical commitment.”

Her focus on mourning was particularly stark in works depicting mothers weeping after the 1996 Las Delicias massacre, in which dozens of Colombian soldiers were killed by the FARC guerrilla. These images, stripped of sentimentality, confronted viewers with grief as a collective, inescapable condition. The depth with which González addressed both individual and collective mourning stands among her most significant contributions to contemporary art.

That macabre clarity intensified in the 2000s. In Anonymous Auras (2023), one of her final major works, González installed more than 8,000 printed silhouettes of workers carrying corpses across the wall niches of Bogotá’s Central Cemetery. The figures – anonymous, repetitive and almost ritualistic – transformed the cemetery into a monumental archive of loss, honoring victims whose names were never recorded.

“Artists exist so that memory is not thrown in the trash”

Parallel to her artistic production, González exerted extraordinary influence as a curator and cultural policymaker. Beginning in the 1980s, she became a close collaborator of the Banco de la República’s cultural division, serving as a researcher, curator and longtime member of its advisory committee on visual arts. In that role, she helped guide the formation of a national art collection with a distinctly Colombian focus, while insisting on dialogue with international works of the highest quality.

Few individuals knew the Central Bank’s art collection as intimately as González. Over more than forty years, she worked alongside successive generations of curators, historians and collectors, helping to consolidate one of the most important public art collections in Latin America.

In 2020, she donated her personal archive and library — nearly 100,000 documents — to the Banco de la República to ensure free public access. The archive documents not only her artistic practice but also her work as an educator, curator and historian, and provides an unparalleled record of Colombian art, politics and visual culture.

Her institutional impact reached beyond the Central Bank. At the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO), she founded the influential School of Guides, a pioneering program for museum education that trained figures who would later become leading artists and curators. From 1989 to 2004, she served as chief curator of the Museo Nacional de Colombia, where she reorganized the permanent collection and helped redefine the country’s historical narrative through art.

International recognition came steadily. Her work appeared in Documenta 14, the Berlin Biennale and the landmark exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.” Major retrospectives were held at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the CAPC in Bordeaux. In 2026, the Barbican Centre in London is set to host her first major retrospective in the United Kingdom.

González received numerous honors, including Colombia’s Premio Vida y Obra and honorary doctorates from the University of the Andes and the University of Antioquia. In 2025, the city of Bogotá awarded her the Civil Order of Merit, recognizing her invaluable legacy and profound influence on the nation’s cultural life.

Yet she remained skeptical of accolades. She preferred to speak of discipline, research and responsibility — and of the obligation, as she saw it, to bear witness. From a childhood habit of collecting film-star postcards to a lifetime spent gathering images of state violence, Beatriz González devoted herself to the stubborn preservation of memory and to an unapologetic voice in Colombian contemporary art.

Read the Banco de la República’s tribute (in Spanish) to Beatriz González, written by Claudia Cristancho Camacho of the Cultural Section and Art Collection. 

https://www.banrepcultural.org/noticias/despedimos-la-maestra-beatriz-gonzalez-figura-esencial-del-arte-y-la-cultura-en-colombia

The US Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has authorized the entry of Colombian shell eggs destined for industrial processing, according to an announcement made by Diana Marcela Morales Rojas, Minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism (MinCIT). This decision expands the export capacity for Colombia’s poultry sector by allowing the product to enter the US market without requiring additional import permits or sanitary certificates from the Colombian Government.

The authorization by APHIS follows technical and commercial discussions between US and Colombian regulatory bodies. Minister Morales Rojas stated that the outcome enables the poultry industry to expand its presence in international markets and integrate into higher-standard value chains.

The regulatory modification is the result of collaboration between the Government of Colombia, the Instituto Colombiano Agropecuario (ICA), the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, the Embassy of Colombia in the United States, and the Federación Nacional de Avicultores (Fenavi), the trade association representing the poultry sector.

Six US facilities have been designated to receive the Colombian shell eggs for processing. These plants are situated in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arkansas, and Georgia. The direct entry authorization for industrial use simplifies the logistics and required sanitary compliance for the export of the product.

Above photo: Colombia’s Minister of Commerce, Industry and Trade, Diana Marcela Morales (courtesy MinCIT)

For a literary festival, silence can be more revealing than speech. The decision by three writers to withdraw from the 2026 Hay Festival in Cartagena over the presence of María Corina Machado, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most prominent figure in Venezuela’s democratic opposition, has exposed a paradox at the heart of contemporary literary culture: a professed devotion to free expression that falters when confronted with an inconvenient voice.

Hay Festival Cartagena, now in its 21st edition, is scheduled to take place from 29 January to 1 February 2026, with parallel events in Barranquilla, Medellín and a special edition in Jericó, Antioquia. Founded three decades ago in Wales and once described by Bill Clinton as “the Woodstock of the mind,” Hay has built its global reputation on the premise that literature flourishes in the presence of disagreement. Its stages have hosted figures as diverse – and divisive – as Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Safran Foer and David Goodhart, writers whose ideas have unsettled orthodoxies across continents.

Yet in Cartagena, dialogue has been recast as contamination.

The Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo, the Barranquilla-born writer Giuseppe Caputo and the Dominican activist Mikaelah Drullard announced they would not attend in protest at Machado’s invitation. Restrepo, winner of the 2004 Alfaguara Prize, had been scheduled to participate in several events, including a conversation with Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra and a session devoted to her most recent book, I Am the Dagger and I Am the Wound. In a public letter addressed to festival director Cristina de la Fuente, Restrepo described Machado’s presence as “a line” crossed.

“I must cancel my attendance at Hay Festival Cartagena 2026,” Restrepo wrote. “The reason is the participation of María Corina Machado, an active supporter of United States military intervention in Latin America.” Granting her a platform, Restrepo argued, amounted to facilitating positions hostile to regional autonomy.

Caputo echoed his reasoning on social media, announcing that “in the current context of escalating imperial violence, it is better to withdraw from a festival taking place opposite the bombarded waters of the Caribbean Sea.” Drullard, five days earlier, said she could not attend an event that “supports pro-genocide and interventionist positions through the mobilisation of those who promote them,” citing Machado’s proximity to the administration of US President Donald Trump.

What remains striking, however, is not merely the severity of these accusations but their selectivity. None of the boycott statements devotes comparable moral energy to denouncing the documented human rights abuses of Nicolás Maduro’s regime: arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture of political prisoners, or the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions. One is left to ask whether the authors’ moral outrage extends to the lived realities of Venezuelans themselves, or whether it finds expression only when filtered through the optics of geopolitics.

The irony is sharpened by the fact that the same US administration helped secure Machado’s escape from Venezuela on December 8, enabling her to arrive in Oslo hours after her daughter Ana Corina Sosa received the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf. “When the history of our time is written, it won’t be the names of the authoritarian rulers that stand out – but the names of those who dared resist,” noted the Nobel Foundation. 

The arguments from Machado’s detractors  warrant scrutiny – and above all, debate. What they do not justify is refusal from Latin America’s self-entitled literati. A boycott replaces argument with absence, moral reasoning with pantomime. It is a gesture that confers ethical purity upon the boycotter while foreclosing the very exchange that literature has traditionally claimed to defend. This is the “line” that cannot be crossed.

The Hay Festival’s response has been characteristically diplomatic In a statement following the cancellations, organisers reaffirmed their commitment to pluralism: “We reaffirm our conviction that open, plural and constructive dialogue remains an essential tool for addressing complex realities and for defending the free exchange of ideas and freedom of expression.” They stressed that Hay “does not align itself with or endorse the opinions, positions or statements of those who participate in its activities,” while respecting the decisions of those who chose not to attend.

That insistence on neutrality, however, also reveals a deeper unease. If a literary festival must repeatedly assert its impartiality, it may be because neutrality itself has become suspect. Increasingly, festivals are asked to function as courts of moral arbitration, conferring legitimacy on some voices while quietly disqualifying others. The result is not a more just cultural sphere, but a narrower one—policed less by argument than by consensus.

The controversy has unfolded at a particularly volatile moment for Venezuela’s eight-million diaspora. Machado’s invitation coincides with a renewed escalation in US pressure in the Caribbean Sea. On Tuesday, President Trump ordered a “total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving the country, targeting Caracas’s principal source of revenue. His administration also designated Maduro’s government a Foreign Terrorist Organization, accusing it of using “stolen US assets” to finance terrorism, drug trafficking and organised crime.

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before – until such time as they return to the United States all of the oil, land and other assets they previously stole from us.”

Against this backdrop, Machado’s high-profile presence at Hay has acquired a symbolic weight that far exceeds literary stages. Yet it is precisely at such moments that intellectual forums are tested. Fiction, after all, teaches empathy, complexity and the capacity to hold contradiction without retreat. To boycott rather than engage is to abandon that lesson – and, with it, democratical ideals.

The reputational cost to Hay Festival Cartagena may prove lasting – not because Machado was invited, but because the limits of reason and tolerance have been publicly exposed. A gathering that once prided itself on hosting difficult conversations now finds itself unsettled by the very principle on which it was founded.

And there is a final inflection. If Hay’s commitment to dialogue is grounded in a leftist agenda – if certain voices render discussion impossible – then Machado herself should reasonably question the value of her remote participation at the festival on January 30, for a scheduled conversation with Venezuelan journalist and former minister Moisés Naím.

In Cartagena, it is not Machado’s words that should concern audiences, but the intellectual impoverishment by those who chose not to speak to her at all.

Two centuries after its founding in the turbulent aftermath of the Wars of Independence, the National Museum of Colombia is marking its bicentenary with one of the most ambitious exhibitions in its history. Inspirar, conmover y convocar: el Museo de la nación (1823–2023) opens this week in Bogotá, inviting visitors to reflect on 200 years of scientific curiosity, cultural formation, and collective memory in a country still redefining its national narrative.

The anniversary is more than a celebration of institutional longevity. It is a moment of self-examination for a museum conceived during the birth of the Republic and shaped by generations of scientists, historians, artists, and citizens. The museum was created by law on July 28, 1823, and inaugurated the following year, rooted in the vision of plenipotentiary Francisco Antonio Zea. During his diplomatic mission in Europe, Zea recruited a cohort of naturalists – including José María Lanz, Mariano de Rivero, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, and François-Désiré Roulin – to establish a museum of natural history, along with a school of mines, a geography program, and a lithography workshop in the newly constituted Gran Colombia.

These early scientific figures navigated riverways and mountain passes to reach Bogotá, awaiting the young Republic’s final approval of their contracts. Their collections – birds, reptiles, minerals, anatomical studies, botanical illustrations, archaeological finds – formed the foundation of a museum that initially served as a scientific repository for a nation eager to document the vast richness of its territory. Drawings by artists such as Francisco Javier Matís and explorations ordered by Juan María Céspedes gave visual life to the landscapes and ancient cultures the Republic sought to understand and claim as part of its expanding identity.

But as the exhibition demonstrates, the museum’s role has never been static. If the early 19th century emphasized scientific discovery, later decades shifted toward the collection of historical objects, battle flags, ethnographic pieces, and cultural artifacts that broadened the institution’s mandate. Letters exchanged between luminaries De Rivero and Alexander von Humboldt, or between independence-era leaders such as Antonio José de Sucre and Gerónimo Torres, testify to the museum’s early symbolic power. Sucre himself donated the acso– a ceremonial mantle attributed to Atahualpa’s queen – and ordered that defeated Spanish flags be displayed publicly so Colombians could “witness the heroism” of their troops in the war for independence. These gestures turned the museum into a site where political memory and scientific knowledge intertwined.

Two hundred years later, the new exhibition reframes these layered histories through three major sections designed to show how Colombians have constructed, questioned, and reimagined national identity over time.

The first section, Guardar lo que eres (“Preserve What You Are”), looks back at the 19th century through illustrations, botanical specimens, and scientific journalis. These items reveal how the young nation sought to see itself—literally and symbolically—through classification, measurement, and representation. The pieces trace a lineage from early scientific expeditions to the first attempts to map Colombia’s natural and cultural diversity.

The second section, Superar la desventura (“Overcoming Hardship”), addresses conflict and reconstruction. Drawing on flags, legal documents, military archives, and early photographic material, it examines the ways Colombian society has grappled with political rupture, violence, and the challenge of rebuilding. While the exhibition includes objects from independence-era battlefields in Peru, Bolivia, and the Nueva Granada, it also connects more recent struggles with  reconciliation, and justice. The curators highlight that conflict-related objects—whether symbols of patriot triumph or testimonies of displacement and suffering—offer crucial insight into how Colombians understand the past and imagine the possibility of peace.

The third and final section is a celebration of life. Here, archaeological pieces, masks, contemporary artworks, and textiles created by Indigenous communities in Nariño and weavers from Charalá (Santander), emphasize the endurance of living traditions. Rather than presenting heritage as static, the museum foregrounds the constant reinvention of cultural expression—what it calls “a Colombia still weaving its future.”

In total, the exhibition brings together 168 pieces, including nearly 100 that had remained in storage for more than 50 years due to their fragility. Among them are old etchings, rare flags, and objects that once traveled down the Magdalena River to reach the high-altitude capital of Santa Fe de Bogotá. Their exceptional display marks a milestone for the institution and for the country’s historical patrimony.

Visitors encounter not only objects but immersive environments. A multisensory installation projects shifting images onto suspended fabrics, accompanied by a soundscape inspired by Colombian landscapes and local memories. Tactile stations offer replicas with ink and braille textures, making the experience accessible to diverse audiences. Interactive elements invite the public to create postcards, explore regional museum networks, and engage with a digital map linking Bogotá to 45 co-curated displays in 12 departments across the country. Each participating regional museum is exhibiting an object emblematic of its local identity, extending the bicentenary celebration far beyond the capital.

The exhibition reflects the museum’s evolution since its founding as a scientific cabinet of curiosities. Today, grounded in the principles of the 1991 Constitution – cultural diversity,  coexistence, protection of natural and cultural heritage – the National Museum positions itself as a space where collective histories intersect with citizen voices. The bicentenary, the museum highlights, recognizes that history is not a fixed record but an instrument for understanding present challenges and imagining future possibilities.

The exhibition at Museo Nacional runs until March 15, 2026, and includes guided tours and workshops. Admission is Free.

Museo Nacional. Cra 7 No.28-66.

www.museonacional.gov.co

The Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo has unveiled its 2026 programme, outlining 116 productions and 178 performances across opera, dance, theatre, music, circus and family shows. The announcement reinforces the theatre’s role as one of Bogotá’s leading cultural institutions, bringing national and international artists to audiences across the capital.

A highlight of the year will be the focus on Germany as Guest Country of Honor, with six events in music and dance that reflect that nation’s contemporary artistic landscape. The most anticipated is the arrival of the Berlin Philharmonic, which will perform in Colombia for the first time in its 186-year history. Led by Kirill Petrenko, the orchestra will offer two October concerts – its first appearance in South America in more than 25 years.

The 2026 lyric season builds on collaborations forged with cultural institutions in Colombia, Spain and Latin America, among them Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela, Fundación Juan March, the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia, Coro Nacional de Colombia and the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá.

The season includes new stagings of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (El holandés errante), directed musically by Stefan Lano and scenically by Marcelo Lombardero, and Puccini’s La bohème, conducted by Andrés Orozco Estrada with stage direction by Pedro Salazar. The zarzuelas La tabernera del puerto and El Vizconde will also be presented.

Audiences can expect landmark choral works: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, and Furioso, a musical exploration of the mythical figure Orlando performed by countertenor Xavier Sabata and French ensemble Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu.

The programming in dance, theatre and circus highlights companies working at the forefront of contemporary creation. The Budapest-based dance troupe Recirquel returns with Paradisum, while international dance companies – including Germany’s tanzmainz, Australia’s Sydney Dance Company, the Ballet Español de la Comunidad de Madrid, the Ballet Folclórico de la Universidad de Guadalajara and Chile’s Ballet Municipal de Santiago – offer a unique slate of choreographic perspectives. The latter will perform Swan Lake.

The theatre lineup brings Spanish award-winning works such as El Monstre by Josep María Miró and En mitad de tanto fuego by Alberto Conejero. Colombian companies including La Quinta del Lobo, Grupo Móvil Flotante and La Casa de Atrás will present co-productions with the theatre. 2026 will also see the premiere of Destinitos fatales, Sandro Romero Rey’s tribute to writer Andrés Caicedo ahead of the 50th anniversary of his death in 2027.

Teatro Mayor will again take part in the programming of the Festival Internacional de Artes Vivas – FIAV Bogotá during Holy Week, strengthening its links with the city’s broader cultural calendar.

In its commitment to showcasing Colombia’s artistic diversity, Teatro Mayor will host the launch events of several major national festivals, including the Festival de la Leyenda Vallenata, the Festival de Música del Pacífico Petronio Álvarez and the Festival de Música Andina “Mono Núñez.” International series such as the Festival de Fado, featuring Camané and Sara Correia, and Tango al Mayor, which will include concerts, masterclasses and a grand milonga, will complement the season.

Public-focused programmes – Teatro Digital and Cien Mil Niños al Mayor – will remain active throughout the year, expanding free access for students and encouraging arts accessibility across the nation’s capital.

Teatro Mayor operates as a public-private partnership and with its 2026 programme, reaffirms its role as a key cultural platform for Bogotá – one that connects local audiences with a broad spectrum of artistic expressions from Colombia and around the world.

At the eastern fringes of the Andes, where the Orinoco River Basin unfurls in an ondulating canvas of green, punctuated by majestic rivers and sandstone mesas, lies one of the world’s most astonishing open-air galleries of human existence.

The Serranía de La Lindosa, in the department of Guaviare, is a monumental tableau carved by nature and painted by hands that may have been among the earliest storytellers on the planet. For centuries, these walls stood largely hidden to the world, known only to Indigenous communities and a handful of intrepid explorers. Today, they form the heart of a groundbreaking exhibition in Bogotá’s Museo del Oro: Trazos sobre piedra: Pinturas milenarias en la serranía de La Lindosa, an ambitious, year-long showcase hosted by Banco de la República.

The exhibition that opens on November 28 is the most extensive institutional undertaking yet to unravel the symbols, narratives, and cosmologies that animate a rock-art tradition stretching back tens of millennia. Far from a display of a lost civilization, the Central Bank’s ambition matches that of the cliffs themselves – massive escarpments where hunters, shamans, and master painters returned generation after generation to leave visual testaments of their world.

The story of La Lindosa begins, in many ways, with a single mark. A red smear – thin, elongated, always intentional – painted on the rough face of a stone wall deep in an expanse of canopy and tropical rainforest. To an untrained eye, the pigment blends with natural iron deposits. But to archaeologists who have studied the region for years, it marks the threshold of an extraordinary visual universe. That smear belongs to a constellation of tens of thousands of pictograms across Guaviare and neighboring Amazonian massifs, including the monumental cliffs of the PNN Chiribiquete National Park. Together, they form one of the world’s oldest and largest rock-art traditions.

Archaeologists describe La Lindosa as a cultural landscape, a place where art, geology, ecology, and spirituality intertwine. The Serranía’s towering sandstone walls were formed by tectonic forces millions of years ago, creating natural canvases that humans began to paint long before the earliest agricultural societies emerged.

Only recently have researchers begun to grasp the full temporal depth of these murals. While Europe’s famed Lascaux cave contains roughly 600 images dating to the Upper Paleolithic (between 15,000 and 13,000 BC), the paleo-Indian paintings of Colombia could be far older. In Chiribiquete, analysis of natural dyes, superimposed layers, and stylistic continuity suggests that some images may date back as far as 35,000 BC. La Lindosa shares many of these motifs and techniques, hinting at a cultural horizon that may reach back to the earliest chapters of human imagination.

This immense chronology is not just a scientific revelation – it is a window into a world where every figure, every line, carries meaning. The murals of La Lindosa are filled with scenes of ritual dances, hunting parties, geometric patterns, spirit beings, and animal-human hybrids. They depict jaguars, monkeys, fish, snakes, birds, and the silhouettes of humans with outstretched arms. In some panels, the figures appear in motion; in others, they stand in tight, nearly choreographed formations that suggest communal ceremony. The dazzling variety of imagery points to a worldview rooted in transformation, reciprocity, and ecological intimacy.

One of the most compelling findings to emerge from recent research is the specialized nature of the painting tradition. Archaeologists believe that the most experienced storytellers – shamans, ritual specialists, or highly trained painters – scaled treacherous escarpments to reach spaces associated with spirits and cosmic forces.

These elevated murals often contain the most complex iconography, executed with astonishing precision. Younger or less experienced painters worked closer to the ground, contributing simpler figures or layering their work atop earlier compositions. Over centuries, entire cliffs became palimpsests: surfaces where multiple generations added, corrected, reinterpreted, and echoed the narratives of their ancestors.

The Banco de la República’s exhibition, under Judith Trujillo’s curatorship, mirrors this layered history. Visitors encounter immersive installations, high-resolution photographic panels, pigment analyses, and interactive 3D reconstructions that recreate the sense of standing before the colossal walls themselves. Rather than isolating images, the exhibition places each pictogram within the broader landscape – its geology, myths, and ecological rhythms.

To step inside the exhibition is to enter a world where the boundaries between art and survival dissolve. The rock art of La Lindosa was not decorative; it was a method of world-making. It engaged with spirits, conveyed moral codes, transmitted ecological knowledge, and anchored communities in a landscape that could be both bountiful and unforgiving. Many murals appear near water sources, ancient pathways, or natural shelters – places where human life pulsed most intensely.

Just as telling is the continuity these images embody. Despite colonization, displacement, and the fragmentation of Indigenous territories, the symbolic vocabulary of the Amazon endures. Elements of this cosmology survive in the ritual practices of several Indigenous groups today, whose elders regard the panels not as archaeological remains but as living documents.

As Colombia confronts the pressures of illegal mining, deforestation, and climate change, the need to protect sites like La Lindosa has become urgent. These walls hold traces of human existence long before national borders or written histories were printed. They extend the timeline of pre-Columbian identity back tens of thousands of years, reminding visitors that the Amazon and Orinoco watersheds have always been at the center of innovation, imagination, and spiritual awakening.

Inside the Gold Museum’s hallowed halls, visitors will pause before the vivid reds – their unexpected brightness, their persistence through rain, wind, time. These pigments, ground from seeds, minerals, and endemic plants, were not chosen at random; they were sacred. They signaled life, danger, transformation. They were meant to endure.

Whether the ancient painters imagined their work surviving 30,000 years is just one of many unsolved mysteries. Their names may be lost, but their visions endure – a vast, breathing archive that continues to astonish and challenge us.

Guests to this landmark exhibition are not mere spectators either, but participants in La Lindosa’s vast “Sistine Chapel” – an offering handed-down to generations, and carried forward through the endless corridors of time.

Visitor Information – Museo del Oro

Museo del Oro, Banco de la República
Cra. 6 No. 15-88.

Exhibition runs until November 27, 2026.

Opening Hours

• Tuesday–Saturday: 9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
• Sunday: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
• Monday: Closed

Admission: COP $5,000

Follow the exhibition on social media: Instagram @MuseoDelOro #LaLindosa #MuseoDelOro