I remember that in the cartoons I used to watch as a child, the characters would sometimes arrive at a crossroads, completely lost, in the middle of nowhere. A signpost with arrows (who knows who would have placed that sign in such a desolate place) pointed to where each path led. The only reference they had to find their way on the planet was this pole with signs showing the direction of each road. This is an image that stayed in my memory-imagination of the world. As a little girl, sitting in front of the television on a Sunday morning, before my parents woke up, I imagined distant, absolutely desolate territories where Bugs Bunny or the Coyote chasing the Road Runner would face a decisive moment. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, Bugs Bunny famously regretted taking the wrong turn in one of his classic lines.

Nowadays, facing fate with only one’s body in a space full of uncertainties, trusting a sign, no longer happens. Currently, most of us navigate the world using a GPS with precise directions, estimated travel time, alerts about what lies ahead, and more information. I, for example, have been living in Montreal for four years, and without my phone, I can’t even find the metro. Finding one’s way today doesn’t mean the same. What impressed me about those cartoons was precisely the uncertainty. It required a certain attitude, as we say in Colombia, ‘a la de Dios’ — relying purely on trust and instinct to find the way. It was also necessary to connect your body with the space, look for the sun and ask where it rises and where it sets, lift your gaze to locate the mountain, and feel if the ground was sloped to know whether you were climbing or descending.

When you enter the Biodome — oh! — it's as if that feeling of uncertainty in the middle of nowhere is evoked. A central, open, and completely white space welcomes visitors. A space that seems neutral, or where nothing has happened yet, but where a certain potential is concentrated in a landscape of whites that fascinated me. To be surrounded by walls that were neither flat nor square, but full of curves and bathed in daylight entering through the glass-covered roof in organic shapes, felt intriguing and full of wonder.

In terms of design, this central space in the Biodome — where the adventure begins — is like a blank page where nothing has yet been written. In the middle of the room, there is a signpost like in the cartoons, with arrows that indicate the ecosystems you can visit: “Régions subpolaires, Érablière des Laurentides, Forêt tropicale humide, Toilettes, Sortie.” It is an experience of entering nothingness and asking yourself, “Where do I want to go?” Like the Coyote in the Coyote and Road Runner series, without knowing what waits for you. It was an expansive experience in which I felt as if I were deciding in front of the entire planet. At that moment, I was really happy because I thought, for the first time, I was going to write an ethnography without criticizing the Western culture we live in. I thought now I’ll just focus on the wonderful design of the Biodome. But the first arrow I decided to follow took me somewhere else.

In early April, when we visited the Montreal Biodome, winter was beginning to recede, and my desperate body clung to the hope of feeling the sun on my skin again as a strategy to stay alive. Therefore, entering the Subpolar Regions room felt like a kind of setback in this slow march toward spring. Upon crossing the door, you are greeted by an ice tunnel: the texture of this ice is almost gustatory and seemed to be sweating, as if the walls were alive. It leads into a cold room, where the smell of fish hits you like a wave in the face. It is a relatively small room packed with astonished and excited children. The adults were mediating the experience with sounds (imitating the animals) and gestures of surprise. At the back of the room, you can see a glass case with penguins — tiny penguins. I had never encountered a penguin in real life before. How exciting! How curious!

I approached to see what their skin looked like. It wasn’t smooth like I had always imagined — it had feathers. A dense, textured layer that looked almost like fur, but was in fact made of short, stiff feathers. Fascinated, I watched through the glass as they jumped from the edge of a small pond into the water, diving in perfect italicized zigzags, cutting through the water with their bodies. I don’t know if “aqua-dynamic” is a real word, but they are that.

It was a pleasure to observe their movements so closely. It felt like being inside their ecosystem. But the fascination began to shift as the cold seeped into my bones. The gradual change in my body temperature pulled me away from curiosity. I began to feel an intense rejection of the cold I was already sick of at this point in winter. It’s an ancestral rejection, I guess.  Something beyond my will that feels, more than anything, like a commitment to staying alive. In this new state, the confinement of the last four or five months of winter — without sun, breeze, or plants — emerged. Sitting on a bench, still watching the cute penguins diving into the water, my shoulders and cheeks slowly sagged, and I began to wonder if these little animals felt the same confinement I had felt over the past five months.

They are suited for the cold. I am not. I come from the tropics, from lands far from Montreal. But confinement must hit us both the same. They’re made to endure the cold, but still breathe the fresh, icy air. To feel the sun on their faces, shining. And the sky... the sky in the lands they come from must be 180°, intensely blue. The sunlight must pierce the air with the intensity of cosmic rays, touching their little bodies, giving them something akin to the joy and sense of being part of something bigger that imagination can hold. That feeling we might call radical well-being when nature, in its infinite vastness, affects our bodies. So I wanted to see the kind of sun these little penguins see every day. I began to explore the exhibit, no longer enjoying the staged spectacle before my eyes, but wondering about the penguins' daily bodily experience. I discovered that there were very intense spotlights simulating the sun. They are positioned in such a way that visitors cannot see them. It’s a lighting design carefully planned to please the human eye.

But for the penguins, I don’t think it’s pleasant to have those spotlights shining directly on their faces, from such a short distance. Especially considering the scale of distances their eyes and bodies are used to. We’re talking about immensity. That’s what their bodies are used to. These lights are too close. Too intense. Too white. Too artificial. Too horrendous.

I entered that room inspired and happy, and I left feeling deeply sorry for those penguins. Trying to escape that feeling — that revelation — which struck me unprepared, I hurried out of the room. Once I passed through the exit door, the beautiful sunlight touched my eyes again. The triple-height ceiling of the curving white hall that welcomed me back into its neutrality, with its fabulous skylight-filled roof, sharply contrasted with the lack of sunlight in the penguins’ world. It took me a while to recover from this. Opening myself to the experience again wasn’t easy. I sat in the middle of nowhere for a while, next to the signpost, prolonging the minutes preceding decision, when everything is still possible.

I needed to go to the bathroom, which was several hallways, staircases, and doors away. A wide palette of whites and grays, diversified by shadows, gleamed in the absence of color all the way there and back. I pressed the elevator button and waited in front of a fascinating design of glossy grays that reflected my diffused black silhouette.

The doors opened, and the floor was gray, bordered by shiny silver metal; opaque gray walls, white ceiling. The space was large. The floor again was gray, but darker. The column was also painted gray. The door, the bench, the water fountain, the wall to the left — all in different shades of gray. What wasn’t gray was white: a wall, the ceiling, the lights.

Then, a hallway with the walls covered with white rectangular tiles in long and short sizes, wide and rough cement surfaces, and shiny metal surfaces full of reflections. Tiles of many shapes shining and reflecting the white light coming from multiple sources.

I reached the bathroom, and the walls were white shiny tiles, with stainless steel areas reflecting in gray and black the shapes of people entering and leaving. The sink was gray, the bathroom stall doors were white, the ceiling was white.

This entire journey felt like ginger when eating sushi. The Japanese, interested in intensifying the gustatory and tactile experience of eating to the maximum, use ginger to reset the palate so you can better experience the next course.

The white and gray design of all the non-ecosystem areas, and walking through these spaces, was a break from stimuli, a relief. I felt quite fascinated by that pause. In that exquisite neutrality, a reflection emerged: in this museum of ecosystems, numerous human bodies likely hailed from diverse ecosystems, each shaping them with unique sensibilities. I, for instance, come from the tropics and bring a tropical body — and that’s how I read, feel, and interpret the ice in the penguin exhibit. And surely, all of us, with our different bodies and sensibilities, experience these various ecosystems differently. And I mean, not only the humans, but also the plants, the little birds, the fish.

And I felt that a museum of ecosystems has the particularity that the bodies who visit it inevitably become, even if only temporarily, part of its ecosystems. That is to say, in an art museum, when you look at a painting, there’s a clear line separating the canvas from your being. But when your body visits an ecosystem, you are participating in that system. And your body will want to enter into some kind of homeostasis with that system. And that ecosystem will also want to enter into some kind of homeostasis with you.

I was then able to make a new decision. And so, I decided to go to the tropical ecosystem.

Upon entering, the first thing I noticed was the density of the warm, thick air. I felt the humidity pass through my nose and throat with the same satisfaction as eating a typical Colombian dish. The smell of the plants and the multiplicity of greens overlapping in layered textures, along with the sound of a waterfall, instantly organized my organism. I then remembered Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian writer, who in an interview with the newspaper El Heraldo said:


“When I fly from Paris to Cartagena, as soon as I disembark here, I notice that everything in my body and mind readjusts and perfectly aligns with the entire ecological reality around me. I came to the conclusion that this is an ecological environment, and that it’s extremely dangerous and serious to be taken out of it. If you blindfolded me and dropped me here, I’d know I’m in the Caribbean because my body functions in a way it doesn’t function anywhere else, and my mind, everything—it’s a readjustment due to a total identification of the body and the mind with the environment.” (ELHERALDO.CO, 1994)

Then I wondered whether, although all humans belong to the same species and are biologically capable of surviving in a wide range of ecosystems—from freezing cold to extreme heat—our sensibilities, shaped by culture and experience, may not adapt as easily. That’s what Gabriel García Márquez is suggesting: that his organism can only tune itself when it’s in the ecosystem that raised him.
 Sensibility (Chamois et al., 2023) is a historically and culturally situated way of perceiving, feeling, and interpreting the environment, emerging from the interaction between the body and the surroundings, but shaped by sociopolitical context. These are learned bodily grammars that orient what and how we feel in a given culture and time.


Upon entering the Tropical ecosystem, I felt a particular pleasure, like a waking and reorganization of my cells. With the same layers of epidermis of my human-Canadian colleague, I perceive tropical humidity differently: for me, it’s rest, completeness. For my colleague, with whom I met in that room, it seemed to feel sticky, and her expression made me understand she was uncomfortable. What I mean is that the diversity on display in the Biodome—of ecosystems, plants, and animals—is unknowingly crossed by a vast diversity of sensibilities, which, despite sharing the same morphology and basic DNA structure, makes us, in terms of experience, as diverse as the starfish and the pelican, or the otter and the penguin. Sensibility is an embodied and relational capacity of bodies to respond to the external world, crossing dichotomies such as biological/psychological or individual/collective. When I walk through the streets of Montreal in winter, I am a pelican living in the otter’s forest.


In those days, I had spent several weeks asking myself: What is it that I’m missing? Do I need to sleep more? Do I need to drink more water? Eat more fruits, more vegetables? Am I lacking certain vitamins? Am I spending too much time sitting? Do I need to socialize more? The sensation was so vague that no answer seemed to fit. It felt as if the air lacked oxygen and the water didn’t quench the thirst. That’s why it was incredible to enter the Tropical Forest room and, through its air, remember myself, and in its colors, rediscover joy, and in its sounds, feel the desire to jump.

I think it’s fascinating to have the opportunity to be in an ecosystem so far from my homeland, and in a matter of seconds, be able to enter my own world. As if in the Biodome, time and space folded to allow for instant travel.