ANA. I have one single photo of my grandmother. From this portrait, I try to imagine how tall she was, her voice, her ways, her ideas. 

My grandmother died in 1951, thirty years before I was born. Her absence had a profound effect on my father and his siblings. They hardly ever spoke of her. 

My desire to know more about her led me to visit the city where she lived her entire life, Málaga. 

    Unlike the Spanish city of the same name, the Colombian city of Málaga is closer to the mountains than to the sea. It also stands closer to the Venezuelan border  than to the Atlantic and Pacific Colombian coasts.

 There are three access roads. The southern road wiggles over two "páramos" leading to Bogotá, Colombia's capital city. Through the north its connected with Pamplona and Cúcuta (the main border between Colombia and Venezuela). This is perhaps the road in the best condition at present. To the southwest stands Bucaramanga, the departmental capital. To travel from Málaga to Bucaramanga, you need to skirt the Chicamocha Canyon on a road that still today has a poor condition; usually so narrow that it barely fits one vehicle. 

It takes about 5 hours to travel 120 kms on this road. This does not prevent small trucks and mini-vans from passing through here every day, defying the abyss that stretches out on the other side of a steep wall.

Even though it is an ancient curiosity, the interest in understanding the sound manifestations of birds remains latent. It is as if it were a place to which we end up returning/visiting out of sonic curiosity, sometimes in the hope of establishing communication and other times with the desire to exercise dominance. 

This project has its starting point in a scientific article that proposed a cognitive parallel between songbirds and human primates, recognizing in both the possibility of learning and memorizing complex sound phrases to develop a generational auditory memory and communication through language.