Interest in the unfathomable plane of human existence is one of the themes that has most distinguished François Bucher’s work over the course of nearly a decade. Speaking of that which is as omnipresent and true as it is impossible to articulate is clearly a thorny road to travel, but contemporary art’s malleable language offers a fertile approach to that search. What metaphors do we use to refer to the incommensurate? Bucher looks at communication protocols between the human and the non-human that function at a level he calls “interdimensional” to identify a sort of cosmological code that attests to a singular, irrevocable truth in the universe. The idea of the code and the technological metaphor is essential to understanding the process of a mestizo Western artist intent on interpreting and translating the knowledge forms he enters into contact with but that lie outside Western ontologies. Because of their rationality, science’s systems and languages—to a certain point—conveniently adjust to this attempt at translation.
In a recent text produced in the context of HWK’s Anthropocene Campus in Berlin, on the research he has carried out for some years in the Santa Marta Sierra Nevada’s indigenous Kogi region, on Colombia’s Atlantic coast, Bucher makes reference to a “maintenance” practice the Kogis operate at a “hyper-dimensional” level once a year, at Bogotá’s Museo Nacional. The museum holds a mummy from the Kogi culture that ought to be in Kogi custody, in Kogi territory and by no means in a permanent exhibition in a museum. As part of this ritual—which the institution sponsors and sanctions—two perspectives on history and material culture are placed into confrontation: the Western gaze, that focuses on conserving the physical presence of the displayed artifact, and the indigenous perspective that restores the energy-related communication of the artifact—which is not considered an artifact—to an immaterial level, in conjunction with its territory of origin and the information that flows between them. Bucher also speaks of other artifacts from the civilizations of la Sierra called tumas, that act as energy connectors to elements from the Sierra, its systems and its inhabitants. He understands these objects as devices from a technology that serves to keep “the code of the Sierra” stable and vital—and the reason why tumas that archaeologists steal or that are displaced bring on instability in their territory of origin. He speaks of his conversations with El Mamo Román, of the Sierra’s Wiwa tribe, who insisted on the importance of tumas currently held captive in European ethnographic museums being returned to the Sierra. Simply put, their forced removal has led to multiple ecological disruptions. The physical manifestation of such instability is visible; the indigenous language that describes it is not metaphorical and is the expression of something we can understand as hard, non-Western science. In his text, Bucher interprets the Sierra’s physical and metaphysical ecology according to concepts that come from interdisciplinary humanities and artistic research that have led to projects like the Anthropocene Campus at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
