Con los ojos en el cielo y los pies en la tierra

Con los ojos en el cielo y los pies en la tierra brings together a series of sculptures, photographs and video works developed through a research project connecting the astronomical observatories of Bogotá and Berlin.

The project follows the figures of Francisco José de Caldas and Alexander von Humboldt while tracing a broader history of how different cultures have observed, measured and oriented themselves within the universe. Rather than separating scientific instruments from ancestral knowledge, the works reveal how observatories, ceremonial sites, maps and optical devices all emerge from a shared human need to establish a position from which to understand the world.

Each work approaches this question from a different material perspective. An obsidian stone is presented simultaneously as an ethnographic object and as the optical material once used to observe eclipses. A bronze cast reproduces the drawing traditionally attributed to Francisco José de Caldas before his execution. Güñelve reconstructs the geometry of the Southern Cross used by Indigenous communities in the Atacama Desert, revealing its unexpected correspondence with the radial plan adopted in European observatories, including those of Berlin and Bogotá. A video records the continuous rotation of a telescope accompanied by Muisca music, while the history of the Bogotá Observatory recalls that it was built on the site of an earlier Muisca ceremonial centre from which the sky had long been observed. The project also brings together the geodetic origins established at the Berlin Observatory and the bronze marker defining the zero point of Codazzi's coordinates in Bogotá, two parallel attempts to locate the world from a fixed point of reference.

Together, these works approach architecture not simply as a container for scientific observation, but as a cultural instrument through which different societies have sought to locate themselves within the cosmos.

With artist Tomislav Topic