GEO: The Devil of the Tropics is a performative and moving-image exploration of the roads consolidated in 19th-century Santander, Colombia, by the German settler Georg Ernst Heinrich von Lengerke (1827–1882), born in Dohnsen and deceased in Zapatoca on July 4, 1882. From July 4 to July 13, 2025, the project took the form of a continuous ten-day walking performance along still-walkable sections of these routes connecting Zapatoca, La Fuente, Guane, Barichara, Villanueva, Las Juntas, Jordán, and Los Santos, through the Suárez and Chicamocha canyons. The documentation of the performance constructs a hybrid narrative in which documentary and fiction overlap, producing a “tropical western.” The journey re-embodies Lengerke’s historical presence while approaching the landscape as a record where geological, historical, and cultural memory remains in motion. By revisiting Lengerke’s road system, the work reflects on landscape-territory as both a political and symbolic construction and as a scar of modernity and colonial processes that continue to shape regional identities in Colombia.

Alvaro Cabrejo Torres is in his second semester of the Master’s programme in Live Art Forms, studying under Prof. JP Raether.