Sfer Ik Museion Opens a Large Living Artwork and Botanical Garden At Azulik Basin in Tulum

TULUM, México – The En-chanted Garden is a living work of art, commissioned by SFER IK Museion, curated by Marcello Dantas and created by artist Cristina Ochoa in collaboration with Roth Architecture. It functions as a portal of time and ancestral memory. It is already an ecological sanctuary, a biodiversity reserve, a vegetable pharmacy, a school and a space for the exchange of knowledge, where hope for a better world grows, learning together from the cosmogony of the native peoples, to re-create other ways of collectively creating a conscious future, in balance with the rhythms of nature.

We use ancestral technologies to reconnect them with the sacred. The garden is home to diverse communities of species: plants, fungi, lichens, animals, pollinators, insects, bats, reptiles, birds. Transdisciplinary communities: Mayan spiritual leaders, x-meens and herbalist doctors from other latitudes, who give us access to the immense pharmaceutical, mystical and cultural knowledge of their ancestors. Multidisciplinary groups of artists, artisans, scientists, researchers, curious, who bring together various forms of knowledge in this space, seeking communication with the sacred and natural world.

‘One of the fundamental missions of The En-Chanted Garden as a work of art, is the transmission of the living memory and cosmogony of the native peoples, from the testimonies of their own testimonies of its guardians’

The En-Chanted Garden as a work of art at first glance appears through the museum’s portal, it is a carefully designed space that leads to the interior of the jungle and the earth, demarcated by the Mayan ceiba and four directions: A large mirror of water for meditation, to the left the warehouse, and the germinator or Garden of Hope. To the right, the medicinal spiral, to the north the table of knowledge, to the west the compost. In the future, there will be a seed bank, a plant gene reserve and a greenhouse with power plants, the heart of the forest.

In a second look there is a herbal Codex consisting of information cards distributed throughout the garden on boards about 52 catalogued plants, with medicinal and cultural information provided by traditional doctors and Maya priests: Don Valerio Canché, Rodolfo Puch and Leydi Dorantes Cob, illustrated with watercolor paintings by the artist Cristina Ochoa. There is access to QR codes in which these masters talk about their relationship with each plant. Visitors can deepen their knowledge by attending the workshops of the Art and Sacred Ecology program and the different activities and ceremonies that take place. This is how the En-Chanted garden opens as a portal with different dimensions to propose a journey through time from the ancestral memory, the present daily care and the possibilities of a future that we can imagine together.

Manifesto by Cristina Ochoa

We ask forgiveness for the damage caused and the impact that our action may have on the Mayan jungle with the realization of this project. We offer and ask permission with the help of the spiritual guardians of this territory, to humbly enter the jungle, seeking with our efforts and actions to protect and honor the existing life.

• We commit ourselves to respect and care for all living beings that inhabit this sacred territory of the Mayan jungle. We seek the safeguard, preservation and learning of ancestral medicines from the knowledge that the guardians of this wisdom have passed on to us.
• We use art and ritual, in an exercise of political spirituality. They are the tools to protect life and the knowledge of our heritage to remember and create a better future.
• We elevate prayer into duty to care for the earth and the precious ecosystem.
• We will build a relationship based on eco-feminism to support each other in the care and protection of the rights of the planet and its inhabitants.
• We are committed to learning and transmitting what we have received to safeguard and
  communicate the importance of biodiversity, both plant and animal.
• We will make conscious and sustainable use of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other forms of creation for the conservation of the environment.
• We open a space for the community, with free access for the Mayan people and locals.
• We are committed to trans-disciplinary research, saving seeds and plant DNA hand in hand with seed guardians, and creating planting networks to spread and multiply the gardens, orchards, and germobanks.
• We conceive a space for research and learning from different disciplines based on ancestry, art, and science.

Art and Sacred Ecology Program

From the beginning, the work The En-chanted garden is proposed as a trans-disciplinary school with activities, ceremonies, and workshops. We began with the Art and Sacred Ecology program. A set of practical and theoretical workshops every Saturday from 11 am until 2 pm in the heart of the garden, which will be compiled in an audiovisual series with a format of thirty minutes of high-quality video, and other possible shorter formats for cultural diffusion.

LOCATION: AZULIK Basin, Aldea Zama
General admission price: 400 mxn
Reduced price: 200 mxn**
Mayan community: free
Workshops: check the schedule of activities and cost (admin@sferik.art)
** The reduced rate applies to visitors of SFER IK Tulum and SFER IK Uh May on the same day presenting an entrance ticket, as well as residents of Quintana Roo, students, teachers, and senior
citizens with valid local identification.

About Cristina Ochoa

Cristina Ochoa is a Colombian contemporary artist who has been living in México since 2011. Her art practice has been developed for almost twenty years, first about models of consumption and furthermore, the relationship with plants and substances, from a critical, ecological, feminist and mystical approach.

With different strategies, such as making gardens as artworks, workshops, developing processes of interaction with communities in Mexico, Colombia, and other countries. Bringing ancient or popular knowledge towards new ways of living in the contemporary realm, with respect to others and different relationships between ourselves, other cultures, social contexts, and the beings we live with: plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, or what is called environment, creatures that we are not aware of, to create trans-species communities.

Pharmakon and other past projects are part of this research about pharmacy, substances, herbalism, and the history of plants, ethnobotanics, and medicine. Thus, the work has been moving around plants, food, drugs, rituals, and ceremonies, trying to understand our communication with the vegetal and the animal world. Her artworks are urban gardens, forests, jungle,s and other projects to stimulate communication with plants and to preserve and expand conscience.

About Sfer Ik

Founded in 2018, SFER IK is an interdisciplinary arts center located in Francisco Uh May, Mexico. The centerpiece of AZULIK UH MAY, ‘The City of Arts’ set across a sprawling 10-acre creative complex deep within the Mayan jungle, SFER IK offers a unique space to discover the symbiotic relationship between nature, art, and ancestry. An outstanding example of biomorphic architecture, the museum was built to incorporate the nature surrounding it, acting as a shelter of co-habitation for fauna and flora, as well as contemporary design. Its architecture seamlessly weaves in native trees, vines, and natural wildlife. Founded by Roth, a self-taught architect, ecologist, and philanthropist, in 2019 and helmed by leading Brazilian curator and artistic director Marcello Dantas, the museum has staged genre-defining works by bioartists Ernesto Neto, Azuma Makoto, Marléne Huissoud and Cristina Ochoa, among others.

www.sferik.art / @sferik.art