It’s tempting to think of Cali when considering opening an artist residency or referring to it as a place for creation and a source of inspiration for artists from different latitudes. Cali might seem like a city significantly affected by the course of history in terms of progress, but when we think of Cali as a natural ecosystem, we find it is a city that—because of its geographical location—becomes a place with environments predisposed to contemplation, conversation, and the enjoyment of time—activities that suit artistic life well or that allow for leisure as a fundamental raw material of thought.

Cali is a city of around two million inhabitants, located near Colombia’s Pacific coast. It has historically been recognized as a city open to external cultural expressions, such as salsa music and cinema, as well as a space of cultural resistance and a certain culture of critical thinking as common sense.

Cali has a milky light, somewhere between clear and overcast. Sometimes the mornings are very bright, with abundant sunlight bathing the plants and trees, and other times it turns gray quite often, making everything look bleak, almost sad, as if precariousness becomes more visible. It’s reasonable to think of the sun as something that creates the feeling that everything is fine—perhaps that’s why people who don’t get much sun tend to work more? Well, here there’s plenty of sun, sun that becomes spicy, that cinnamon-coats the skin. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to lie by a pool in Cali and do nothing.

Cali is a dream crossed by a river, as Eduardo Carranza once said—or better yet, by seven rivers. The river is an element that unifies Cali’s culture. In Cali, going to the river is a must—or rather, bathing in the river. The river takes away everything you are until you come out. It is that natural, spiritual element that connects people from Cali with their ancestry, with their past—a place for deeply existential conversations. The river is the music that caleños use to renew themselves and perform spiritual cleansing.

There are several Calis within one. There is the Cali of the 1940s—the old Cali, as it’s called—which preserves many colonial elements in its architecture. Then there’s a Cali that mimics or simplifies the colonial style to give it a modernist flair, where neighborhoods were founded and neighborhood life emerged. This is where we find the Cali with the marked accent of the neighborhoods that are now part of the downtown commercial area, filled with the voices of street vendors and the stories of local characters. The urban neighborhood Cali is full of almond and acacia trees.

There is also a mafioso Cali, shaped by violent narratives and aggressive imagery. That Cali has also spread and made its way into popular culture, and even at times into positions of power, where we see political figures tainted by a narco aesthetic—an aesthetic that, even in the crypticism of certain architecture, has managed to take root.