Filigree Artists of Colombia

In the first steps the skillful worker receives the stone which has been reduced to dust,..rubs it over a wide tilted plank pouring water over it all the time;There, at the Cauca river shore a few meters from the ancient Puente de Occidente, that minute figure bent down over his tools and somewhat imprisoned by the storm clouds and the mountains that form the river canyon, was a faithful reminder of the indian tradition of paying tribute to their gods through gold. then, the earthly matter in it, disolved by the water, runs down the plank while the one that has the gold in it stays on the board due to its weight.
When I saw Aicardo López working it was like no 2000 years have passed since Diodoro of Sicily, the Greek historian from the 1st century b.C, described like this how the ancient egipcians extracted gold from the bowels of the Earth. Aicardo's tools, a man in his 50s with the tan and wrinkles of someone used to working under the sun, were so traditional like the egipcian's: a type of beaten wooden box, over it a strainer for the larger stones and the only testimonies we were in the 21st century were a construction worker helmet that served as a water bucket and a shovel.They molded their figurines in beeswax covering it with a layer of clay and putting all this in a fire the wax melted out of the clay block leaving the empty shape inside ready to pour in the tumbaga, a copper and gold alleation just like it's done nowadays, maybe taking the form of one of the famous 'poporos' inspired in nature. However the first filigree instructors, The gold bar, one of the most malleable metals in the world, stretches and stretches unimaginably to the point when it becomes a thick thread that the artisan then passes through ruby discs with different callibers until what was a small gold bar is now a thread as thin as hair. Now the true art begins. With this thread many things can be done. Braided for example, it gives a beautiful relief. Benitez, meanwhile, is working on a ring for a 'quinceañera'. Life for the people of Santa Fe is marked like a pendulum by their gold jewels.the art of creating figures with gold thread, in Santa Fe de Antioquia weren't the indian gold artisans but people from Mompox where curiously gold was not mined but hoarded up in the era when the Spaniards stripped their colonies from all the gold they could gather.