El bosque en llamas

Bosque en llamas is the first solo exhibition of artist Nohemí Pérez (Tibú, Colombia) in New York. From an exhaustive work of documentation, Pérez activates her emotional memory to create a series of charcoal drawn and embroidered canvases that evoke Colombian nature. However, these landscapes, which could be portraits of an idyllic landscape, are fragments of a painful reality in a war whose victims are not only human beings. The forced displacement of communities and ecosystems is one of the tragedies facing this region, which has been subjected to armed conflicts, industrial exploitation systems and other colonial strategies that have put both its natural and social environment in crisis. The burning of territories is a technique used by the systems of power and control to appropriate land that is left unused after devastation. Colombia is one of the countries with the greatest diversity of fauna and flora in the world.

Paradoxically, this biological richness does not prevent millions of hectares of jungle and countryside from being razed daily to make room for more efficient and competitive agro-industrial systems for global markets. Nohemí Pérez, who grew up on the perimeter of one of the areas hardest hit by multiple types of violence and crime, brings to the table a pending discussion about the direct, but at the same time invisible, victims of this conflict. Birds, reptiles, insects and endangered plant species are the protagonists of this series that can be understood within the logic of Pérez’s work, as a continuation of Panorama Catatumbo. Nohemí’s work of portraying nature begins as a need to remap her memory. Born in Tibú, the jungle, the animals and the peasant communities were part of her daily landscape. This continuous presence of the natural world has been reflected in her work both conceptually and materially. The use of charcoal, for example, is tied to the presence of minerals and hydrocarbon exploitation in the region. The plants that Pérez portrays are both memories and testimonies. On the one hand, Nohemí visits territories that have been scourged by violence and that paradoxically have protected their natural wealth, and at the same time exercises her emotional memory to create relationships between natural species and reality.