Video and sound installation with five simultaneous projections, 5.1 sound, and five stills. The installation is situated on several positions in the hall. Sound and voices issue from the central axis, upon which there is projected a video in wide format that is in turn surrounded by five stills. In another end of the hall, three narrow yet greater than life-size projections shift bodies through space in an endless sequence of continuous appearings and re-appearings. Another video has people moving about with their backs to the viewers, closing and breaking the space ad infinitum. The 5.1 sound overflows and penetrates the hall as matter that supports the various axes of the piece. By virtue of the treatment of image and sound, visitors are relegated to the outskirts of the testimonies and subjected to an experience that interpellates them.
A multi-channel video and sound installation with a duration of twenty-four minutes, which explores the legacy left by a festivity that Spanish immigrants brought with them to Colombia and that was later assimilated by a community of the Colombian Pacific coast. The assemblage of the piece rests on two polyptychs with eight horizontal projections – four on each side – that engage in dialogue at some moments and at others generate and unfold circular trajectories. There is as well a ninth circular projection upon sand on the floor. Standing out among the sounds in the piece, that of the machete detonates in the air; it has an echo that resonates in space with its own cultural voice, replicating itself beyond its own boundaries.
A video and sound installation with two or more large-format projections facing each other. Treno, lasting fourteen minutes, constructs a dialogue between the two opposing banks of the Cauca River in Colombia, forcing the spectator to yield between the swell of the waters and calling shouts that go unanswered.The Dolby 5.1 sound acts as the platform for a territory through which the water and the voices flow evoking loss and violence.
Interactive video and sound installation in a specific site: the Museo Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, formerly the Panopticon of Bogotá – built by the architect Thomas Reed in the nineteenth Century – which served for more than seventy years as the Central Penitentiary of the Cundinamarca province. This sound and visual intervention is carried out in the three halls of the museum’s ground floor. In each hall a video is projected which captures the image of that same space as it has been projected on the back wall, creating a space that gets unfolded beyond the physical ramparts as well as real time. As the spectators make their way through the halls, sixteen movement sensors get activated letting out fragments of the voices of Colombian male and female prisoners of British and Colombian jails. At the same time as the spectator wanders through the hall, pairs of voices are heard coming from the columns. When the visitor stops, the voices disappear.
Video Installation
Specific project location with four projections on curved screen generating two arenas.
The visitor enters the exhibition hall and instead of feeling that he is inside he feels outside as the most overwhelming stimulus that he receives are the images on huge screens of cockfights and their own stage, the cockpit”….. “This alternation is interrupted time and time again by the soundtrack: they are real references that transport us to other worlds and by transporting us they transport us to war as well.
CAL Y CANTO
Cal y Canto is a video continuum realized through visual layers that traverse the city of Bogotá in a journey where castaway children, indigence and distress appear as phantoms that cry out for inclusion and representation. The video perambulates from side to side in two halls among multiple medium-format screens deployed in the manner of demonstration placards.
The piece carries a persistent sonority that conveys the befuddlement of the city’s congested streets and traffic junctions as it is punctuated by the loud singsong cries of scavenger women that range over streets and barrios calling for “your bottles and your paper.”
Video installation with four simultaneous projections in a square space.
In Casa Intima, as visitors come to the center of the hall, they find themselves facing a different film on each wall, and experiencing a state of familial loss, of urban violence.
The piece takes as its source the demolition of a house, which had been inhabited by several generations of one single family, in Bogotá’s Chapinero neighborhood. Its owners decide to move out but they take with them all of its constructive parts in order to build it anew in a different place. The piece stands as witness of the demolition, of the final everyday scenes, of the removal, and of the voices of the owners.
VOICE/NET
Arts Council London support.
This is an interface that arose as an offshoot from the video-installation project Voz/ Resonancias de la prisión, which was exhibited in 2005-2006 at the Museo Nacional de Colombia. It is an Internet platform standing as an invitation to hear, listen to, study, recognize and acknowledge somebody that is incarcerated. It is an open structure that intends to disentangle misgivings and elucidate queries regarding society’s violent condition.The platform provides data for a critical and social exploration. Voz/net constructs a multiline narrative where each situation generates parallel routes.
Audio-Visual Experience in a Territory Under Tension
Daniel Langlois Foundation support
Quiasma is a project conceived by four Colombian artists who embarked in a series of journeys through various zones of Colombia. Their journeys stand as traces meant to rethink our geography and its difficult access, as it is atomized by the prevailing conditions of risk. Quiasma is an entryway for those territories ñ in the context of festivals and carnivals ñ seen as bastions that spur the notion and the preservation of belonging; it is a vehicle to approach cultural traces and marks that come to pass through time.
The working methodology for this piece implied the generation of an interactive DVD, as an open model leading to conceptions, hybridization of data, multiple visualizations, as well as bearings and tensions particular to a specific territory. The information contained in the DVD is related to spatial and temporal elements (locations, dates) and, furthermore, to subjective categories that were present throughout the fermentation of the material.
MUTA – Pack of Hounds
A sound installation with six speakers that, by means of a computer and a sensor, receives and controls the pulsations that visitors trigger as they open the door and enter the presidential box of Bogotá’s opera house, known as Teatro Colón. It is an appointment with a place, a sound, an action and a voice.
Video installation on a double-image screen located at the center of the space.
In this piece the projection screen acts as a membrane that separates an inside and an outside in the everyday order. The video goes from persistence to anxiety as it attempts to maintain and preserve a territory on the basis of the repetitive tracing of the house. The spectator is left on the outskirts of the interior space that is suggested in the resonant movement.
Apetitos de Familia (Family Appetites) is a video produced starting from the familial New Year celebration and involving the sacrifice of the pig. Through eight minutes of moving and still images, it constructs links that are fully sensorial rather than just visual, in order to cross the threshold of the affective. It is a piece that brings memory all the way to the present, linking in the instant fragile encounters with the real.
BUENOS DÍAS – Good Morning
A video fashioned as a fifty-second note for the collective project Portátil (Portable), at the Museo de Arte Universidad Nacional.
Curator: Gustavo Zalamea
Mono-channel projected within a suitcase, implying the portability of its contents.
Frontera is a video work for a double screen with a duration of thirteen minutes, which gives expression to the encounters of a group of teenagers from opposite socioeconomic strata. It is their attempt to prove distances, differences and common meeting grounds, through their own experiences. The piece arose from a workshop/laboratory or mobile action that was realized for the first time in 2006 in the Colombian city of Manizales. In Frontera /Medellín the experience was replicated with twenty young students from two schools with opposite socioeconomic conditions: the Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt Public School and the Colombo Canadiense private school. The youngsters are the film’s actual producers, while they act as interviewers and cinematographers. The process is carried out by way of visits that they pay each other, in which they relate and share aspects of their everyday life with the guest.
The video is a conversation in pairs that tells of the familiarization with the language of violence from the perspective of life in the barrio, of the street experience, of the ways toward cohabitation and tolerance, along with the multiple urban and territorial interferences that are imposed upon young people.
This dialogue opens up the space so that the spectator may approach constantly changing realities.
FOTOGRAFICA
A photographic installation made up of twenty-three pieces that display the unfolding of one of the video camera’s runs as it recorded junctures of the piece “Inherited Games.” It is the crossroad between photographic instants and their movements.
ACIDIA (Anomie)
A calligraphic transcription on a wall of a fragment from the original manuscript of the book Mi vida [My Life] by the nun writer Josefa del Castillo y Guevara. This piece was conceived for a specific site, the Santa Clara La Real church in the Colombian city of Tunja. It was in that chapel that Mother Josefa del Castillo wrote some of the most significant pages of the Latin American mystical literature. Her prayer cell, her austere room and her desk are still there. Through an image that incorporates the strokes of her calligraphy, Mother Josefa’s voice is made present in the latter dwelling, where she did her studies and writing. The work is realized with invisible ink, UV light and timer.