Estudio RIEN 






ERRORES FUNDAMENTALES
Mauricio Freyre 
Peru,  España

MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
L’Internationale
Museum of the Commons

A film that explores how fictions, omissions, and distortions have shaped Western natural and scientific history by tracing four foundational narratives of an Andean tree that unknowingly molded global geopolitics. Through the genealogy of the quina (cinchona) tree, a species native to the Andes once exploited as a colonial weapon for its anti-malarial bark  the installation examines how a plant became a strategic resource for imperial armies, enabling European expansion across tropical territories in Asia and Africa. Its use persisted until World War II, when synthetic substitutes replaced it.

Combining diaries, travel notes, fables, and testimonies spanning four centuries (1663, 1798, 1857, 1952), the project weaves together  a ¹ condesa miraculously cured of malaria in Lima; a ² Shuar man transformed into a jaguar devouring a colonial soldier; a ³ Bolivian watercolorist traveling with an English trader of alpacas and quina; and an ⁴ encounter between an Amazonian community and a U.S. botanist during the largest search for a medicinal plant in history. These narratives intertwine with fragments from the artist’s own research, which began with unclassified botanical archives at Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden and extend to contemporary testimonies from Kañari (Peru), one of the quina tree’s last habitats, now threatened by copper mining.

Conceived as a scenario rather than a fixed form, the installation unfolds as a stage set, a backdrop where a triptych of off-screen voices interlaces historical and contemporary fragments around the quina tree. Foundational texts, archival traces, and field notes converge with a present-day voice that speaks from lived experience. Their narrative spans from seventeenth-century writings to contemporary testimonies, ultimately closing with those of the Kañari community in Lambayeque, one of the last remainiang habitats of the cinchona.

Presented as a single-channel film or a multi-screen installation, the work can be activated through live performance and an accompanying soundtrack in which readers, voices, synchronized lighting, and sound intervene. The projected images operate as short loops, generating visual rhythms in dialogue with the spoken word and the soundtrack. These images draw from diverse sources, including the documentation of research journeys and refilmed archival material of varied nature.