Diana Maria Rico Muñoz is an artist, filmmaker and singer, born and raised in the savanna of Bogotá, Colombia. She spent 25 years working with Indigenous communities in Colombia, studying the art of altars of South America, incorporating a gender perspective in her narratives, and placing her knowledge at the service of preserving endangered territories and bringing light to disappearing cultural forms.
She is interested in researching the new hybrid art practices that have emerged in the past three decades when sacred plants and their associated ceremonies arrived in the cities, influencing artists and contemporary art forms. With Richard Decaillet she is a co-founder of 4direcciones Audiovisual, which started as a production company. It has since evolved to become a multidisciplinary artistic collective that invites various actors to participate in a space for dialogue between the ancestral practices of the native peoples of Colombia and people living in an urban context.
Rico Muñoz’s work focuses on using the technological tools of our time to talk about ancestral technologies through the language of art. Her artistic practices explore co-creating with non-human entities and designing novel rituals that question dogmas. As an audiovisual artist and student of the art of Andean altars, she examines how contemporary altars work; where analog and digital technology tools coexist and the union of “natural” elements with electronic or “non-natural” ones happens in a coherent manner. In 1998, she began a thorough study of the art of altars of America, participating actively in ceremonies of Yagé, Peyote, San Pedro, Mushrooms, Coca and Tobacco. She completed her four-year vision quest ceremony in 2009 and is a Canupa carrier and a Temazcal officiant. In a more recent work, Guaca Roja Altar XR, she discovered an interesting format of technological relationships while working with a group of women as if they were creating a new form of technological devotion. She is particularly interested in deepening the study of the intrinsic relation of material and immaterial culture in the format of an expanded documentary installation.
While at OpenDocLab she is working on A Hybrid Altar to Coca, the latest in a series of works that intend to address the misunderstandings, clash of values, and (potentially) disastrous consequences that have so far been inherent to the Western (mis)understanding of the coca plant, due to its association with cocaine.