Chagra

I started this piece painting flowers with great freedom and enjoying new and joyful colors. I saw that after the flowers, leaves and even fruits started coming up in the composition. I thought of the Amazon rainforest and that's why the work is titled "Chagra": the space where the peoples of this region grow their food. The chagra is a space for life where crops, fruit trees and medicinal plants coexist and it contains profound teachings on how people should co-exist in the same space, just as different types of plants do in the chagra. Women take care of the chagra and in doing so, they transmit their ancestral knowledge to the next generations. For the peoples of the Amazon, the chagra is a living being, a mother that sustains the community and that, in turn, must be sustained. To start a chagra, communities cut down a section of the forest and when the crop cycle is done, they let the land regenerate and open up space in another section of the forest for the next chagra.