Esteban Igartua at Enhorabuena Espacio, Madrid

“The forest creaks, but the jungle does not.

The jungle bubbles over, full of eyes: life grows in it the way lava grows in volcanoes.” [1]

They ventured into the jungle following the light of the new moon. They forded rivers and lakes of salt water. They “carefully mapped the hundreds of square miles between the Sierra Nevadas and the Rocky Mountains, the British domains of Canada and the Tropical Republic of Mexico, correcting at every step the errors that spoiled the maps.” [2]

In their minds they carried that blurred image from the illustrations made by Von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland around 1799, when they set sail aboard the corvette Pizarro, leaving Coruña to reach New Spain, New Granada, and Peru. “We ran around like mad from place to place, unable to make clear observations because when we caught some rare specimen, we abandoned it as soon as we saw another even more curious beside it,” Von Humboldt wrote to his brother Wilhelm in one of the preserved letters.

Life grew wild before the eyes of the European expeditionaries, just as it was now unfolding before them. “You, who step on the grass / and recognize the fragments, / give it a different shape / each day, but you do not name it.” [3]

They had read the 33 volumes of Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, but what appeared in those texts had nothing to do with the unknown nature spreading around them. Plants that turned into stone, branches resembling arteries, singular living bodies that vibrated and made them vibrate with them. [4]

They continued their journey and came upon a structure with a few small square windows still intact and traces of human life among the rubble. They entered through them and found graffiti that read: “We resemble the virus more than the flower.” [5]

They moved down empty corridors until they reached an immense window through which the world seemed to vibrate differently. On a table they found a notebook. On the cover, a single word: VIGÍA. Inside were a series of drawings that seemed to have come from the hands of a strange specialist in botany. “Life before, after and against nature,” [6] they read in a note in the margin. Beyond the glass, life was growing feral, and inside they continued discovering what the notebook concealed. “A hole in the fabric of reality.”