Altiplano Cyborg is a living organism that emerges as a collective, communitarian, and inter-species creation, questioning the colonial, violent, and extractivist relations against territories and life. Situated in Bogotá, Colombia, we propose an approach developed as several communitarian projects, meaning projects with self-organized communities, in some of the ecosystems of the city. The high-Andean forest or pre-páramo, which configures the mountainous borders of the city and that has been destroyed mainly for timber extraction, dating back to the conquest and colony. The wetland, which once extended the length of the city and has been crossed and intersected by buildings and streets. And finally, the urban forests, which arise from the city’s configuration, thereby reducing nature as a landscape.

 

While the expansion of human technologies over the territory takes place, microorganisms in the soil find means to adapt and survive in the environment that humans have developed. Through previous research together with the microbiology laboratory CorpoGen, in the “Other tiny forms of life” creation groups, among other microbiology and molecular biology processes, we have used the metabarcoding technique to sequence the DNA of the organisms that inhabit the soils of the mentioned territories and got to know their diversity through metagenomics. In their DNA our history is written, and the remains and traces of a world prior to colonialism and the presence of the first humans in this territory.

 

From that genomic information, the sculptures are created. Generative construction out of self-made clay mixed with a sample of the soil of which the DNA was sequenced. Sculptures that are materially and poetically generated and constituted by the microbiome of each territory.

 

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On a global scale, in turn, in the current tales, the living is reduced to a useful or bio sustainable tool. The question arises about the possibilities for other relations beyond utilities, markets and progress: would it be possible for our technologies to be part of other organisms? What would happen in possible encounters where humans do not intervene?

 

Our previous project Internet for bacteria proposes the creation of near-impossible mediating devices for the hyperconnected bacteria, a symbiosis among bacteria and the internet, to emerge as a queer form of life. An idea that extends in this project, where the territory, the highlands, becomes the hybrid organism.

 

Interconnected through the internet, the four ecosystems digitally interact and share information to co-evolve. This is the fabulation we can witness through our digital simulations and the multiplicity of layers offered by the AR. A tale that allows us to co-create new ways of inhabiting and being, of existing, in the territories.

 

With a biocentric approach, Altiplano Cyborg emerges as a hybrid superorganism that through human-created communication technologies connects old and new ties among the living, for mutual aid. A symbiosis among soil microorganisms, humans and the technologies of the living opens possibilities for a common existence, beyond the species and the territories' frontiers, with the poetics of a symbiotic hyperconnected biosphere.