Árbol de la fiebre (Fever tree) is a project whose development announces an all-encompassing and synthetic will. It brings together many of the themes that the visual artist Malú Cabellos has tackled in the past: nature, the preservation of ecosystems, climate change, the defence of the dignity of native communities, ancestral knowledge, coloniality, the rereading of history and national identity. To do so, she uses the formal solutions she has experimented with in her previous works. These solutions are nourished and hybridised with different contemporary artistic disciplines or borrow from the standards and techniques belonging to pre-Columbian or indigenous cultures. She incorporates audio-visual proposals and a transmedia website as well as three-dimensional works; she alludes to the textiles of coastal cultures, intervenes in historical engravings – often copies of daguerreotypes – with iconic marking gestures, using prints made using the Inca “tocapus”, or freely replicates the herbariums made by botanists during colonial scientific expeditions. All these proposals present an approach of a markedly symbolic nature. They renounce a narrative structure and opt for the traces and vestiges/traces of something whose existence is vanishing. A kind of formal syntax that aspires to create a personal expressive grammar, whose main references are Amazonian trees that belong to a whole closely linked to the cultural and geographical identity of Peru: the forests and jungles.

Alejandro Castellote

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Malú Cabellos has a degree in sociology from the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos and a master’s degree in Contemporary Photography-Maldefoco 2015 from the Centro de la Imagen de Lima. She has worked as a photojournalist for Lima’s main print media and as a graphic editor for publications. Since 2007 she has been an audio-visual director of documentary projects with Guarango Cine. She has directed short and medium-length films that have won awards in national competitions organised by the Ministry of Culture.

Her exhibitions include Inka (2022), Isla Azul (2018) and Memoria Inca (2007) and “Rebelados”, the latter presented at the Imago Lisboa Photo Festival in Portugal (2019) with the sponsorship of the Peruvian Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs.

She is currently presenting Árbol de la Fiebre, a transmedia web project about the cinchona tree, winner of the Economic Stimulus for Culture.