Carolina Caycedo: Fuel to Fire

October 7, 2023 – January 14, 2024

Fuel to Fire is a single channel video that brings the viewer into a pagamento or payback of gold to a body of water. This ritual was performed for the wellbeing and conservation of the Paramo de Santurbán, a moorland ecosystem within the high mountains of Northwest Colombia, which holds large -sought after- deposits of gold. The pagamento is an indigenous ecological and economic fundamental protocol, that maintains the flow and balance of life cycles on earth. When accumulation happens, sickness arrives, and so it’s necessary to give back by letting go of something that is dear, that implies labor, or that is highly symbolic.

About the Artist

Carolina Caycedo (London, 1978) is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles. Her immense geographic photographs, lively artist’s books, hanging sculptures, performances, films, and installations are not merely art objects but gateways into larger discussions about how we treat each other and the world around us. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity. Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice, she contributes to the reconstruction of environmental and historical memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. Informed by Indigenous and feminist epistemologies, she confronts the role of the colonial gaze in the privatization and dispossession of land and water.

Caycedo is a 2023 United States Artists fellow and 2023–24 Getty Research Institute Artist in Residence.