Juanita Escobar “Orinoco -frontera de agua-”

On the froth of turbulent waters, ambitions spiral, an eternal water wheel carrying countless fevers and delusions, whether prevailing or defeated. “Orinoco – Water Border” is a visual and literary essay that spins various stories and voices from the Orinoco border between Colombia and Venezuela. In its vortex, one feels the suffocation, the shipwreck, and the drift, but also the dreams and dignity of those who have forged a life independent of any state. It seems many official maps have forgotten its people, ending or cracking upon reaching certain places, marking incomplete destinies. Perhaps they fear reaching certain corners, fleeing from the people, making them feel they do not fit? Here, in the Orinoco, the map falls into an abyss. Here, the frontier becomes a body, an intimacy, bearing different names of people and places that form the cartography of this nameless country: The land of the Orinoco.

The main character of this story is the woman: the Indigenous woman (from the Sikuani, Amorúa, Piaroa, Puinave, Curripaco, Saliva tribes), the Venezuelan woman, the Colombian woman, and the woman of the plains. She inhabits the surroundings of this frontier, nomadically or sedentarily, and she guides us along this river. She crosses its deepest borders. Her skin is the sand of the savanna, her emotions are the river’s water,

her dreams are blue like dragonflies at night, her play sometimes forgotten, sometimes her love drowned, not in a puddle but in the torrents of Maipures or Atures. The earth has marked her with its trace, and in her gaze, rivers flood.

What would happen if we placed the Orinoco River, its people, and its savannas at the center of the world, or at least at the center of Colombia? What if we also changed the way we describe them? If instead of calling them inhospitable lands, unproductive or endless deserts of grass, we recognize them as territories of ancient indigenous cultures and centuries-old plains cultures? If instead of wanting to transform or “reforest” them, we understand that they safeguard over 30% of Colombia’s freshwater? It is an amphibious geography adapted to seven months of water and five of drought. My heart has anchored to this land-of-water, to the country of the Orinoco. With the illusion of touching its wandering silence, of reaching it. A silence that travels unimpeded, as if it had reached its land, the Plains, where it finds its most extensive geography. Gradually, this silence has been captured in the half-light of my images, giving me hints of its direction, its depth. There, where the faint voice becomes a proud roar.