Fragmento: Unbordered Chaka

There is a museum in Bogotá - Fragmentos. Un “espacio del arte y memoria.” It is a Spartan space where the floor is the foundation of both art and memory. It is made of the melted-down weapons of the FARC-EP and created by the artist Doris Salcedo in collaboration with women who were victims of sexual violence during the armed conflict (Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria. 2026, “Inicio.” Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia, https://fragmentos.gov.co/).

I have begun a narrative process of storying the Andes, described to me as “El Ande” by Muisca elder Atabanza (Cota, Cundiamarca, 2025) as part of a project that will eventually fold into my dissertation work, but also feels like it is its own project - fragments, moments, elements of the Andes in tiny bites which moves across time, space and memory in a new way of storying (for me).

I have begun referring to these bites as fragments - like the museum - the structure is made of things melted and swirled together to make something both ancient and new, at times punctuated by pain, at others ecstasy, but always ceremonial in nature.

This is an initial invitation into this process of storying that feels interwoven with multispecies relatives, ceremonial dimensions, and futurisms where past, present, and future melt and reshape, to make these fragmentos del ande.

Below is a Fragmento #2 in my exploration. This is also part of HOJA SPEAKS - because it is from her point of view.

My leafy flesh buzzes as I enter the borderlands—the chaka space.

A dizzying rainbow swirls over and through me. I see the colors of the Nustas—the sacred energies of the high places—vibrating in a spectrum of protection. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. They wrap around me like a chumpi belt woven from light and the soft souls of baby alpacas, those not meant for this Kay Pacha season.

Through the mountain mist, the bridge clears. I see my sisters waiting.

Hermana Bay. Hermana Rosa.

Ñañay, ɣuahatsa. Ayllu.

Their leaves rustle like the shuffling of thick wool skirts. They pull their bright shawls across their leafed chests against the rising chill. We reach out, and the mountain fog parts to let our almas touch.

The spine of my leaf zings from the energy of our connection, coming from across the four directions to this point where our souls meet on the bridge.

They are a fire burning inside me.

When our stories weave together across time and space, we stoke a flame like Mama Nina at dawn on Q’ollority and in the earthen womb of the Paramuno cabildo.

The world is our ceremonial house, our sacred cabildo on a timeless hilltop.

We exist beyond the peaks of the highest Andes. My 8,000 years of beingness flows through my veins, buzzing to transfer memory, a transfusion of Eldership, from my territorial spine into my sisters’ veins.

I weep into the mist. My tears carry their own memories - molecules of pain over the generations of leaves before me. So much pain brought us to this bridge. Human violence done to our body, and through our body to our allyu, our muisca, our runa. Human violence imprisoning our leaves with their wire borders, piercing our heart with the spikes of their hate.

I miss the caress of skin-against-skin, touching my children in the North in the common ways of daily kintus. Our ordinary intimacies, stripped from our lives, our love, our familial threads that weave the blanket of our love.

I pull my own shawl tighter, as the wayra becomes more severe, responding with its own whistling song, like an ancient chant to my grief.

I weep again in gratitude. My love for my migratory sisters is greater than the power of the pleiades.

It is good we don’t use words because there are none big enough for my gratitude. I reach out and touch them, leaf-to-leaf, skin-to-skin, and our spines explode in light and fuerte, our collective power a fire that burns through borders.

In our core, beyond these territorial constraints, we are born and die unbordered. We are eternal beloveds. Our touch is our transmission, and they carry the power of our collective memories, our lifelines - born and reborn, across the chaka, into the North.

For now, my leaf body is bordered, but my ceremony is infinite. My soul calls across the misty rain in joy and celebration, reverberating across the bridge of time and space, into my sisters, into the ceremonial fires of my relatives in the North.

“Hampui! Hampui! Hampui!”

“Haylli! Haylli! Haylli!”

I weep. I die. I am reborn. And I remember tomorrow, where the borders will crumble under our collective fire.