Artist: Ruby Rumié

How are the children? Kasserian Ingera?

It is not a greeting. It is not a formality. It is not something said just to be polite. It is a question that holds everything.

Among the Maasai, the question is never directed at the individual, but at the children. In them, the state of the community can be read: if they are well, something vital still stands; if not, everything begins to fracture. Because in them, the health of a community is measured —whether there is care, time, nourishment, a future.

Children do not produce, do not lead, do not decide. And yet, in their vulnerability, they reveal with striking clarity the state of the world around them. They are the mirror. Sometimes that mirror reflects something broken.

This project did not emerge from that tradition, but from an absence. An old newspaper clipping, yellowed with time, carrying only fragmentary information: the disappearance of children on a distant island. A small, fragile trace, kept among family photo albums. That remnant —almost invisible for generations— was enough to set this work in motion. Not to explain what happened, but to hold a question.

I imagined eleven children running away. They run from normalized violence, from a world that rushes them, compares them, exposes them. They run out of necessity. They run to breathe.

In the story that gave rise to this work, their escape leads them through a volcano. That image —small bodies crossing an uncertain landscape— became a structure of meaning: childhood as a territory of passage, rupture, and transformation, but also as a political space marked by fragility and resistance.

Living in Cartagena, the choice of the Totumo Mud Volcano felt inevitable. Its physical proximity and its ancestral weight make it an active territory: a volcano of mud, at once organic and mineral, healing and unsettling. Pure presence.

To enter it is not easy. There is a very real, immediate, almost primal fear: of being swallowed by that vast grey mouth of mud, of disappearing into it.

And then something unexpected happens: the body floats. It does not sink. Everything in it is contrast. The dense texture of the mud resists submersion. Its warmth opposes the heat of the surroundings. The metallic smell heightens the sense of entering another state. It is there —in that suspended space, where the body cannot fully sink but can begin to shed— that, strangely, we feel lighter.

We are told that mud dirties. Here, it cleans. It releases the body from its social conditions, from its labels. Age, gender, origin, appearance are suspended. The body stops being position and returns to matter. To beginning.

This is not about the absence of form, but about its interruption. The mud operates from that force: it unsettles, overflows, resists classification. When it covers the body, it does not hide it or beautify it —it reveals it. The mud does not decorate. It interrupts.
In a time saturated with fleeting images and bodies shaped by inhuman standards of beauty, covering oneself in mud becomes a quiet form of resistance —a way of stepping outside those demands. The mud protects without hardening, holds without fixing, connects without separating. There, where form gives way, the body becomes territory again.

The children gather around the volcano and remain there. The gesture is simple, contained. Their bodies do not act or perform: they are. Each one holds a red ribbon that descends from the summit into their hands. The volcano ceases to be a threat and becomes a womb.

I do not intend for this work to rest on answers or certainties, on fixed or dogmatic conclusions. It situates itself in listening, in looking, in staying with a reality that strikes us in silence.

Perhaps this entire path —the mud, the volcano, the escape, the children— does nothing more than bring a question back to the center, without metaphor or consolation, as an ethical measure that cannot be avoided:

How are the children?