A Dispatch from Trompito Alto
Keel-billed Toucan. Photo by Walter Kitundu
In the opening sentences of 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez describes the fictitious piece of northern Colombia where the seven generations of his narrative will be set: "At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."
I've spent the last seven days a hundred miles from where García Márquez was born, leading the first cohort of this year's Living in Data retreats. To get to the lodge where we're based, we waded across the Rio Piedra, the "river of stones," set with huge rounded rocks that dry white in the sun.
It has been a week of extraordinary things. We've had morning visits from enormous keel-billed toucans and troupes of tiny critically endangered tamarin monkeys. We hiked high up into the hills to visit a Kogi village, and we marveled at the nightly chorus of ping-pinging glass frogs and strident cicadas.
In the afternoons we've brought our observations and memories back to Frana Lodge to make art. This first group got caught up in painting, making pigments from the-iron rich soil and sitting for long hours exploring modes of representing memory and experience. We structured our time together around themes of scale, connection, boundaries, and time, with daily provocations designed to reframe thinking and to sharpen the way we notice.
The next retreat cohort starts tomorrow. We'll take a day to get grounded and then head up to the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where we'll search out endemic hummingbirds, tarantulas, toads, and porcupines. I'm eager to see what kinds of ideas and methods of art making bubble up from this group.
Dates for the 2027 Living in Data retreats will be announced in December.
–Jer
The first cohort of the 2026 Living in Data retreats gets watercolor technique lessons from Carolyn Castano
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