Connected Teams Seasonal School Colombia
“Cartographies of Coloniality”

The Connected Teams Seasonal School 2026, “Cartographies of Coloniality,” addresses a range of case studies in the Departments of Cundinamarca, Boyacá, Huila and Cauca in order to rethink the history of art and heritage from the interrelations between environmental crisis, digital transformations, and community activism. Cartographic representation was key to the invention, exploration and colonization of these regions and the Americas in a broader horizon. Early maps spatialized the extent of the “known world,” a process that dovetailed with the forceful expansion of the Catholic church and the exploitation of riches, gold specially but also land and labor. An overarching question of the Connected Teams Seasonal School therefore is if, and how, cartography may be recast as a tool for decolonization to map other understandings of space and time.

The School will be divided thematically and temporally in two parts: 1) Heritage Between Rivers, Deserts and Mortuary Landscapes (July 17th– 23rd); and Heritage Between Art and Religion (July 24th–29th). On both wings, participants will collectively address practices of digital documentation and archiving as well as the transcultural and ecological dimensions of archaeological sites, salt mines, museums, churches, historical archives, community initiatives, Indigenous territories, and landscapes shaped by centuries of colonialism and environmental change. The School thus invites new art historical perspectives, digital approaches, and forms of collaboration in the study of the agency of rivers and bodies of water, cartographies and territorial representation, the coloniality of power, deserts and desertification, cultural and natural heritage, the materiality of the past and the present, mortuary landscapes, religion and its impacts, salt and its place in history, sound and performance, tastes and food, as well as the impacts of tourism and other industries.