The history of ethnocentrism, modern anthropology and the questioning of Western systems of thought and representation are central themes in the work of the German artist Lothar Baumgarten (Rheinsberg, Germany, 1944), one of the most prominent representatives of the conceptual art that emerged in the 1960s.

Baumgarten's projects show the logical consistency behind the structures of Western systems of representation-property/otherness, divination/vision, nature/culture. The artist draws on photography, sound, language, the modern graphic tradition, and the investigation of the architectural specificities of the places that host his work.

In its new production, conceived specifically for its exhibition at the Botín Foundation, Santander, The aristocrats of the jungle and the queen of CastileThe native names of the rivers of the Guayana Shield and the Gran Sabana delimit the area and surround the reduced 1:20 scale models of Columbus' ships. Through the articulation of image, text and sound the artist constructs a landscape in which voices from the New and the Old World resonate. This new work refers to the cultural hatching that takes place with the Discovery that marks the beginning of the modern era.

Between 1978 and 1980 Baumgarten lives prolonged periods among the Yãnomãmɨ tribes in the forests of the Venezuelan Amazon, this experience is central in the development of his work, as the author continues a process of research about the way in which the material coming from this trip to the Upper Orinoco should be presented.

Baumgarten rescues legends, names and saves them from oblivion to offer an alternative -poetic, mythical- experience. Thus, in each new presentation, the artist is able to recreate "a new cartography" articulated through photographs, such as the Montaigne Series1977-1985, silver gelatin triptychs, showing the landscape of La Gran Sabana; Maps; Films, Natural GentlemenThe exhibition includes three ethnographic projections made in 16 mm, in the Upper Orinoco (Venezuela), with a duration of 108 minutes; objects, texts and a portable Guayanese Library that the artist has compiled over the years. All the elements compose an intricate path in which diverse times and spaces are conjugated.

Baumgarten incorporates in each intervention pre-existing elements that create a new syntax and provide new meanings. "Art, says Lévy Strauss, is inserted halfway, between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought; for everyone knows that the artist, at the same time, has something of the sage and of the bricoleurThe object is a material object that is at the same time an object of knowledge".

The aristocrats of the jungle and the queen of Castile focuses on the production of unpublished works, specifically for this occasion and gathers the artist's latest research on the first sea voyages to America made from the fifteenth century onwards from Spain. Baumgarten points to the cultural, political and economic revolution taking place at that time in the Western world as a result of the "Discovery". This "total work" gathers a selection of essays from the poetic voice of Ausias March and the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, sounds recovered by the musician and researcher Jordi Salvall and images that combine literature and native voice, from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present day.