Look through the four viewfinders and discover different ways of perceiving the environment. Move closer, shift your position, crouch down, or stand taller. Each image represents how a spider, a bird, a bee, and a fish might perceive this very place. 

Can you figure out which is which? 

Explore some of the landscapes Alexander von Humboldt encountered during his journey through America using your sense of touch. 

Salvador Rizo Blanco was a painter, director of the drawing schools, and steward of the Royal Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada. Classified as a pardo within the colonial social order, he played fundamental role in producing the scientific images of the expedition. 

His career reflects the contradictions of colonial society. Although he held an important position within the Royal Botanical Expedition, he also participated in the purchase of enslaved people for the expedition. Despite his significance, his name has occupied a secondary place in traditional accounts of the history of science and art in Colombia.

In 1822, a text entitled Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo, traditionally attributed to Simón Bolívar, appeared. In its opening lines, the Liberator recounts an imagined ascent of Chimborazo, following in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt, whose expedition transformed the ways the Andes were observed and represented. 

We share the opening of this text as an invitation to discover how the same mountain could inspire scientific knowledge, imagination, and political thought at once

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new ways of understanding America emerged. Scientific observation, supported by measuring instruments and new forms of visual representation, transformed the ways in which nature was studied and depicted. Yet these images did not reveal the world in its entirety: they made certain aspects of the territory visible while leaving others beyond the frame. 

The Royal Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada (1783–1816), led by José Celestino Mutis, brought together artists and naturalists to study the region’s flora. Classifying nature also meant making it intelligible for economic and political control. Much of the knowledge about plants came from Indigenous peoples, yet scientific descriptions rarely incorporated the meanings and relationships that these communities had developed around them. 

During his journey through America, Alexander von Humboldt developed an approach to studying nature based on the relationships between climate, altitude, vegetation, and life forms. In his Essay on the Geography of Plants, Humboldt represented these connections in the Physical Tableau of the Andes, an illustration showing the distribution of vegetation according to altitude across the profile of Mount Chimborazo. A translation of this essay was later published in the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada. 

These forms of representation influenced painting and the construction of images of national identity in the early twentieth century. Measuring and drawing not only made it possible to understand nature but also to transform it into an intelligible, ordered, and governable object. 

What do we fail to see when we look at the world only through images? 

Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent brings together observations on the geography, nature, and societies of Spanish America, based on the results of the expedition undertaken by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland between 1799 and 1804. The edition on display is a Spanish translation. Through works such as this, the knowledge produced during scientific expeditions circulated between Europe and America.

A comienzos del siglo XIX, Europa y América atravesaban profundas transformaciones políticas, sociales e intelectuales. En ese contexto, se consolidaron redes de circulación de ideas que conectaron a diferentes actores de la esfera científica y política. Estos intercambios no solo buscaban conocer el mundo natural; también hicieron parte de proyectos políticos que buscaban explorar, clasificar y controlar el territorio.  

En este escenario se cruzaron las trayectorias de Alexander von Humboldt y Simón Bolívar. Tras regresar de su expedición por la América española (1799–1804), Humboldt propuso una nueva forma de comprender la naturaleza basada en las relaciones entre clima, altitud, vegetación y formas de vida. Sus investigaciones circularon rápidamente entre Europa y América. 

Bolívar también hizo parte de este ambiente intelectual. Sus viajes por Europa lo acercaron a las ideas y debates de su tiempo, que influyeron en su manera de pensar el futuro de América. 

Humboldt y Bolívar formaban parte de una amplia red de intercambio de ideas, donde cartas, publicaciones y encuentros permitían compartir conocimientos sobre los territorios americanos y debatir su futuro. En 1804 ambos coincidieron en uno de los muchos espacios de intercambio intelectual de la época: los salones parisinos de Fanny du Villars, familiar lejana de Bolívar.  

The exhibition explores how the scientific and visual practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to shaping a particular image of the American landscape and its natural world.

One of the exhibition's central themes examines the intellectual networks that connected figures such as Alexander von Humboldt and Simón Bolívar, who shared a historical moment defined by the exchange of ideas about nature, knowledge, and the future of the continent.

Through a dialogue between historical objects and works by contemporary artists such as Maria Theresa Negreiros, Liliana Angulo, and Juan Cortés, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the relationships between knowledge, power, and territory, and on how these ways of understanding the natural world continue to resonate today. It also encourages audiences to consider which forms of knowledge, territories, and ways of life were left out of these representations.

Es de imaginarse el permanente movimiento que debió haber en la cocina en la Quinta de Bolívar en las primeras décadas del siglo XIX. María Luisa, cocinera de la Quinta de Bolívar, compartió la responsabilidad de servir al Libertador junto con Petronila, encargada del aseo, y José María Álvarez, jardinero español.

Posteriormente, cuando ya se había establecido el Museo Bolivariano en la antigua Quinta de Bolívar, este espacio se adaptó como una pinacoteca y esa fue su función durante la mayor parte de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Después, durante el proceso de restauración de 1990, se decidió recuperar el ambiente doméstico que la cocina y la despensa tuvieron, gracias al descubrimiento de su ubicación por los residuos de hollín en el muro oriental que da a la huerta, junto con otra serie de elementos, como grasa animal y vegetal, el canal de desagüe, los hornos y la ventana que daba luz al lugar.

Además de ser espacios destinados al almacenamiento de los alimentos y algunos implementos utilizados para las preparaciones, las despensas también eran el lugar donde las personas se reunían para consumirlos.

En el caso del Libertador Simón Bolívar, su alimentación era similar a la de la mayoría de los neogranadinos de la época, pero, con el tiempo, sus costumbres cambiaron significativamente a causa de problemas digestivos y de los frecuentes viajes. Bolívar, por ejemplo, consumía más legumbres que carne y prefería las frutas a las apetecidas colaciones. El Libertador también prefería acompañar la comida con un buen vino de Madeira o de Burdeos y en las celebraciones disfrutaba de la champaña. El prócer venezolano escogía alimentos americanos, como la arepa y el ají, y no tanto los europeos, como el pan y la pimienta.