The local administration asked us to make a proposal for the Arzobispo River, a water channel that crosses the Teusaquillo district in Bogotá. They wanted to recover the zone in order to have a more appropriate use of the public space around the channel. The Arzobispo river used to have complicated sanity conditions, and the areas surrounding it were subject of safety issues, all of this as consequence of poverty and contamination. In Bogota’s development plan, space revivals involved city transformation through plastic, graffiti and theater interventions. We designed an installation that would take up one kilometer of the river side, and we engaged people using artificial lights and interactive resources to make them occupy the space. The intervention was an interactive route that had three stages where people could play with interactive installations, all of them related to artificial light and nature.

The first stage consisted of 200 solar Led lights placed on the ground, and it had the first light sign on a route of about thirty phrases with thoughts about nature, the city and the river itself. People were invited to walk through the lights and start their journey across the glowing signs. At the second stage, over a pedestrian bridge, there was an adaptation of Color Talks, working with three modules and 300 meters of Led lights hoses connected from the bridge to the trees to make them hang over the river, and we invited people to sing to the microphones placed by the water, so it was like they were singing to the water. At the third stage, we installed proximity sensors on the trees, so when people went to hug them, lines of led lights on the top of the trees were activated, inviting people to have a direct relationship with nature and provoking an immediate response with a simple technology adaptation.

This installation had to be activated for two weeks, so we tried to make it enduring. The Arzobispo river and is a place where several homeless people inhabit, they tend to look for shelter under its bridges, and that is were we had installed the wires and cricuits. By day two there were not even half of them left, they had been stolen or destroyed. Keeping the installation active for so long led us to meet those homeless people, earn their trust and interact with the actual inhabitants of the river. At the end, we learned that installations occur in spaces that already have their own dynamics, and that the logics of the space must come before those oft he project. We learned that you cannot simply go anywhere and leave your stuff there, instead, it is your responsibility as an artist to place the installation where it can best be developed depending on the environmental conditions.