Arid rumors in
humid directions
Estrada moves through colonial cartographies by following their detours, listening to their noise, and investigating their gaps. In Rumores áridos en rumbos húmedos (Arid Rumors in Humid Routes), the artist composes, from sixteenth-century maps, an installation of charcoal and gold leaf drawings on linen. Conceived individually, each banner takes part in a vast cartographic composition that unfolds through space, made up of ornaments, echoes, and waterways that would lead to the Ciudad de los Césares, a mythical city in Patagonia - rich, prosperous, and unattainable. Here, cartography relinquishes any scientific pretense: it is rumor itself, the echo of an impregnable - perhaps nonexistent - city, that for centuries fueled the European imagination and guided conquistadors along routes doomed to failure.
Installation view
Format - variable dimensions
Technique - charcoal and gold leaf on linen, wood and rope
If colonial cartography projected onto the world a desire to possess it, Estrada exposes its limits and fissures: there are territories that persist precisely because they refuse capture. The enchanted city operated both as mirage and trap, diverting conquest through fiction. From the perspective of the Indigenous peoples of the south (particularly the Mapuche and Tehuelche), the myth also became a symbolic stratagem: narratives of hidden riches and illusory paths disoriented colonizers, turning rumour into a strategy of resistance.
By reconstructing these impossible cartographies, Estrada reinscribes the map as a territory closer to fiction than to conquest. What remains here is not the promised gold, but the rumor that cleaves through colonial logic itself: the cartographic detour, fabulation, the noise that tears open breaches of meaning as much as of space for those who were made the object of this cartography. Against the logic of conquest, what endures here is rumor - and with it, all that resists becoming a map.