There is a type of knowledge outside the standardized, coming from anonymous sources and resulting from the collection of small experiences transmitted from person to person, from village to village, from region to region. It is the knowledge deposited as a substratum of the culture of places. This type of process motivates the Garden of Delights series, a set of works inspired by popular wisdom and the botany of certain plants and fungi. Latin America is a rich region in this sense, a source of ancestral knowledge transmitted from shaman to shaman from the highlands to the Caribbean. Added to this is the wealth of knowledge brought to the continent by the many Africans brought as slaves.
In this amalgamation, all those primary sources that are difficult for the Academy to trace, but which are nevertheless within the reach of anyone interested
in having a lysergic experience with hallucinogenic plants. It is just this modality of knowledge that Ariamna Contino tries to record with the series.
Garden of Earthly Delights, on the other hand, is an iconic work within the Western pictorial tradition, and its structure allows Contino to establish a semiotic parallelism with his series insofar as the central panel of Bosch's work makes a specific allusion to the earthly paradise.