Fragmentos del Ande

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.

The fire burns bright inside the cablido, where Atabanza reaches into his ceremonial bag for the next story, the next memory across time. We are building ceremony from the fire upwards. First we stoke the flames, then we stoke the stories. Each story a brilliant emerald of memory across time and space of Bacata, an ancient city now colonized by more memory forgotten than memory restored. Today they call it Bogota.

He hands me coca leaves and instructs me to store them, like a squirrel’s pouch, on the interior of my cheek. The ceremony is building. The fire burns brighter.

He moves through the topography of time, his geologist mind recalling the way the Andes was once contiguous, unbordered by arbitrary lines made by violent conquest. He reminds me the thing I know in my gut, that the mountains decide the territorial lines.

“El Ande,” he calls it, the land borders made by mountains, because it is not a set of mountains broken up by nations but one mountain body, violated by arbitrary lines of separation.

I listen as I store Mama Coca in my cheek,and he begins the practice of stirring magic across tierra, alongside the plant elders of wider Muisca territory. Here, he reminds me, we don’t just chew Coca, we also work in partnership with the ceremonial sibling, tobacco.

Next we add the tobacco paste, curated over long ceremonial nights of picking and churning the tobacco leaf until it is whipped into a sticky goo. “Be careful,” he warns as he leans in with the spoonful of paste, this is strong medicine.

Like a layer cake of ceremonial practice, the paste sits on top of the coca, and a molecular transformation begins - plants dancing as they transform and permeate the inside of my cheek.

As we build the layers of ceremony, Atabanza moves around the circular hut of his cabildo, shaped with dirt and clay by the hands of three generations of Muiscas. He circles the space, a storyweaver and a smoke dancer, carrying the memory of the land and the people into the echoing margins between the crackling flames.

I feel a kind of dizzying clarity as I layer the ceremony in my mouth. Sometimes I feel my tongue, and sometimes it sensorially dims, to make room for the senses of prophecy. As my eyes tear from the gathering smoke, nearly suffocating in the small space, I feel the beat of the earth Gods below, and the calling of Bachue, beckoning me to her sacramental womb, inside the depths of Iguaque. She reminds me she is the mother of these lands and we are all her descendants.

Atabanza dances through smoke again, weaving around the circle of the cabildo. This time, he comes with Rapè, the second tobacco we build on the ceremony Mama Coca laid the foundation for, as she sits patiently on the inside of my cheek.

Breathe in deeply through your nose, Atabanza reminds me. This is the tobacco for clarity. It is an opening. I breathe in deeply through my nose as he pushes the air through the pipe to bring Mama Tobacco into my body.

Alert. Awake. Alive. Aware.

She brings these gifts to me like an offering.

I feel so grateful for her presence, a new ceremonial Auntie. A surprising ally.

She takes me to Laguna Guatavita and sprinkles me with dust of gold. I press my toes into the cool earth at the bottom of the lake.

I am in the cabildo. I am in the river. I am with Bachué. I am her memories. I am her future.

I am the descendant of golden elders and a serpent Goddess. I am born from the deepest, coolest earth in the depths of the laguna. I am born of the underworld.

I can remember it all. It is clarity.

The fire burns my lungs.

The coca thrums in my veins. The tobacco lends me her memories, and through it I see the prophecies across time.

I am Muisca, eternal. I am all of us as I settle into the ceremonial feast layered on the inside of my mouth.

Atabanza calls me from the edge of my linguistic awareness, and lifetimes of lineage shrink back, out of ultimate clarity, into bite-sized intuition.

“Hermana,” he says, as he stares into my eyes, “did you hear el Ande calling?”