Cartographies for a Water Tree

Abstract

Cartografías para un árbol de agua (Cartographies for a Water Tree) explores the relationship between science, technology, and landscape through a visual re-reading of historical river maps from Ecuador and South America. Based on maps from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the project extracts and transforms river outlines—such as those of the Guayas and the Amazon—into tree-like or vegetal structures. This process of translation and transmutation challenges the modern impulse to measure and classify the world, proposing instead a poetics of flow and coexistence. The works engage with scientific drawings by Darwin, Haeckel, Whittaker and others, in which the tree becomes a metaphor for knowledge and evolution. The resulting cyanotypes operate as mnemonic cartographies: images that condense memory, territory, and time, revealing a symbolic landscape where science and myth intertwine.