ARCO 2020

For this occasion we propose a dialogue between two artists from different generations of Colombia, whose work revolve around issues of identity and territory. From this dialogue an idea of cartography is presented from desire and memory; and new ways of understanding the territory are drawn from the experiences of those who inhabit it physically or mentally.

Nohemí’s work belongs to the field of cartography. Her large-format drawings where she reconciles the history of an invisible region and abusively wild nature, gives an account of a territory that does not yet belong to the Colombian geography. Despite encompassing a territory as big as Georgia, the Catatumbo jungle is not part of Colombian mental maps and only appears mentioned as the scene of the darkest dimensions that coexist in Colombia’s war. Images of malnourished families with the fridge on their back crossing the border from Venezuela, women with the face of paramilitaries forcefully tattooed on their bodies, indigenous populations depleted by evangelical groups and the eternal struggle for coca crops, are all scenes taking place in this territory. Nohemí’s practice offers a multiple reading of this region and at the same time proposes a poetic voice that can only be conceived from the territory itself.

In the work of Oscar Murillo, a symbolic code appears to refers to the personal and collective history of a particular and conflictive region of Colombia, which in the same way as Catatumbo, is still not part of the visual or mediatic catalogue of contemporary Colombia. La Paila is a tiny town in the Valle del Cauca, founded to house the workers of the sugarcane plantations of Rio Paila plant, owned by the same family since its origin, the Caicedo. The community that lives in La Paila descends from enslaved people brought against their will from Africa. Although the plants have been modernized and the conditions of the farmers have been standardized, the multiple realities that are intertwined in this region have not been made visible yet. Murillo’s work, understood within the context of Paila, exerts a parallel function to that of Pérez’s work to the extent that they both offer syncretic platforms that allow us to visualize regions ignored from the field of contemporary art.