Cristina Lleras
Curadora Museo Nacional
El proyecto VOZ de Clemencia Echeverri busca un acercamiento a la antigua Penitenciaría Central de Cundinamarca, que por más de 70 años funcionó en el edificio que hoy alberga el Museo Nacional de Colombia. Se parte del presupuesto de que cuando un lugar de confinamiento cambia de uso es necesario desentrañar todas las capas de sentido que estos lugares acumulan1, pues la estructura de una penitenciaría, el edificio y sus espacios interiores —desde donde Echeverri formula su instalación sonora y visual— son inseparables de los eventos que llevaron allí a la gente y del contexto social en el cual aquellos ocurrieron, como lo anota Lucy Lippard2.
María Margarita Malagón-Kurka
Crítica
El juego de El Gallo, herencia de un antiguo ritual y punto de partida de “Juegos de herencia”, le había llamado la atención a Clemencia Echeverri hace diez años, durante un viaje realizado a través de Colombia. En un período de especial dificultad para recorrer el país, ella y un grupo de artistas lograron visitar regiones de difícil acceso, siguiendo y presenciando sus fiestas y carnavales tradicionales. El resultado de tal exploración fue la obra Quiasma: experiencia audiovisual bajo un territorio en tensión (2004).
INTERPELLATIONS APROPOS OF CLEMENCIA ECHEVERRI’S VERSIÓN LIBRE
Gustavo Chirolla
Philosopher
In Versión Libre [Loose Interpretation], as in other instances such as Funeral Song or Inherited Games, Clemencia Echeverri utilizes the totality of the hall as the space for her installation, in such a way that we, the onlookers, may find ourselves always “within.” When Boris Groys argues that the installation is the paradigmatic form of contemporary art, he ascribes to space the corporeity that is inherent to this artistic practice. The notion of space itself as a material implies, in this case, that elements of a heterogeneous nature may find there a way to be summoned sand situated, a warp that assembles and connects them.
INTERVIEW
Jose Ignacio Roca:
You started off in the arts as a sculptor. When did you shift your attention towards video? Do you feel that video and installations provide a more adequate language for the type of projects that you have been producing for a while now?
Clemencia Echeverri:
Before sculpture, painting was the natural media that I approached in order to recognise everyday experiences and to fix personal moments that had been etched in my memory; but the canvas started to leave behind empty spaces along its margins. For that reason I investigated other alternatives. I was living in Medellín when the city proposed an urban renovation project that included the arts. As I started developing proposals for urban sculptures, I had to deal with an interesting juxtaposition between the parameters that architecture puts forth – its scale, its materials – and the pedestrians. During the process, and for about ten years, those premises proved themselves limiting because of their extreme pre-determination of the ways of doing and perceiving. The way in which the present, in its simultaneity and its relations, started to subordinated my gaze differentiated the working ways that an approach to sculpture requires. Then, as I recognised differences in the ways of approaching the processes, I hit a brick wall and decided to break with the way I had been doing things previously. I was ready and willing for a change and to turn the corner. I sensed that I was doing it then, but starting from the various experiences I had accumulated.
In the eighties, Colombia suffered the most violent and complex moments in terms of social order that had prevailed for the previous fifty years. The media set the alarms off, and its role as a protagonist has had a disproportionate effect upon everyday life since then. These circumstances attracted my attention and increased my interest in getting closer to the real, in contemplating direct experience, the affections, the accumulation of unforeseen relationships, what we are, indeed – and the archives as well.
Gustavo Gómez
Filósofo y Crítico de Arte
En su proyecto titulado “Juegos de herencia” Clemencia Echeverri llama la atención sobre un ritual que se realiza cada año en El Valle, un pueblo de la región del Pacífico en Colombia, que consiste en enterrar un gallo vivo, con la cabeza afuera, para luego ser decapitado con un machete.
Como sucede con frecuencia cuando se indaga sobre la genealogía de un legado cultural, aunque parece que este ritual tiene precedentes en España no son claros sus orígenes, así como tampoco se puede demarcar con precisión su sentido, que encuentra resonancias en los ritos masculinos de iniciación ligados a la guerra. Frente a esta aparente oscuridad, vale la pena considerar que aunque tendemos a privilegiar la claridad, quizá el carácter enigmático que rodea a esta práctica cultural es lo que nos llama la atención, lo que nos incita a pensar.
VOZ, RESONANCIAS DE LA PRISIÓN [Voice, Prison Resonances]
Marta Rodríguez
Art critic
Sound had a leading role in the video-installation Voz, resonancias de la prisión, presented at Bogota’s Museo Nacional, late in 2005. On that occassion, the pre-recorded voices of various men and women serving prison terms became the central element in a process that started in 2003 and concluded in 2005.
Says Clemencia Echeverri, “I traveled to England in 2003, to follow through with an artistic project. I wanted to make contact with Colombian natives that might have experinced difficulties in that country. Initially, without pre-established reasons, and with few misgivings and apprehensions, I took it upon myself to visit some Colombian inmates of different British jails, and did the same in Colombia afterwards.”2
That episode was the source for two central elements that brought about the video-installation: an auditive experience and an spatial one. Her sojourn in jail made Clemencia Echeverri feel that she had entered an “isolated and artificial world,” cut off from regular life, and ruled by the sound of “shaking keys,” keys that ring through an expanse of long, silent and hermetic corridors. The voices of the interviewees appear afterwards: “Voices perhaps without a childhood, without parents, without affections, without education, loaded with maltreatment, filled with humiliation.” Those were recorded as the artist engaged in long dialogues with the prisoners.
Clemencia Echeverri sees in her prison narratives a wish to “establish some sort of contact” with the memories, with the past of those men and women that, because of multiple circumstances, find themselves isolated from ordinary, common life. “They visit sites of childhood, parents, school, feelings and attachments. At times, it is difficult to keep going. They cry, stop and make connections. They expunge or evoke desired and unfortunate encounters. There are moments of repose. Some spin their yarns, others revise them. Laughter breaks through: “In my house the floors were impeccable, because Mother was so strict …” They go over lived-in spaces remembered by heart. Time passes silently. From there, they return to the beginning, to narrate it, to relate in detail, trace it; they cry out their demands; anger ensues. “In my house it was different, just poverty and violence.” They go back through the years, return and cry. They find lime in layers, wall, school, another wall, house, parents, family. … The encounters go on increasing. They see the mother who at times looks after things, and the father that keeps watch and does not care. … “I hated him. I hated him, hated him. My dad hit Mother all the time. I’d give him Sinogan drops to put him to sleep.”
This personal experience of Clemencia Echeverri gave rise to the auditive and visual intervention that took place on the ground floor of the Museo Nacional, Bogota’s former Panopticon, which was built by the architect Thomas Reed in the 19th Century. In those ground-floor halls, nowadays turned into part of the Museum, we see first and foremost an excellent architecture; the memory of its past is left a bit behind, thanks to the new function given to the vaulted, white space. As she intervenes the site with her experience, Echeverri evokes its past by means of a video that captures the image of the same enclosure, which is projected upon the actual wall; and she literally creates a space that unfolds itself beyond the physical ramparts and actual time. As the spectator walks through the endless gallery, motion censors in the lateral vaults set off the voices of those men and women that conjure a remote past where, one by one, the events of their former times and their confinement start appearing.
Sound is an important component of the video-installations that Echeverri has produced so far. In Casa íntima [Intimate House], women’s voices and domestic sounds led us into everyday routines in old households that, because of the city’s modernization, are at risk of extintion. In Apetitos de familia [Family Appetites], the noise of fireworks, the human voices and the shrieks of pigs about to be slaughtered set the tone for cultural celebrations where partying and violence cohabit. In De doble filo [Double-Edged], the sound transports us from an ambiance of domesticity into threats and foundering anxiety. In Exhausto aún puede pelear, [Even Though Exhausted, He Can Still Fight], a stabbing sound intensifies the tearing effect of fighting cocks’ talons. The voice of a female ragpickers calling for “bottle and paper” accounts for the sound of the specific city that Cal y canto represents.
All quotations of Clemencia Echeverri in this text are taken from printed matter that is part of her projects.
THE VOICE AS OBJECT
VOZ / RESONANCIAS DE LA PRISIÓN [VOICE / PRISON RESONANCES] (2003-2005)
María Victoria Uribe
Antropóloga
This piece, which was exhibited in the ground-floor halls of Bogota’s Museo Nacional, explores the solitary and confined world of Colombians imprisoned in England’s jails. The physical spread of the halls is turned into an endless expanse, as each hall’s space itself is projected on the wall at the back of the enclosure.
Politics of the cry in a Threnody
By Gustavo Chirolla
“It is not the poem nor the song that can intervene to save the impossible testimony; quite the opposite, it is the testimony that can perhaps make the poem possible.”
Giorgio Agamben
From the Greek, trenos, lament and oide, song, Treno is precisely, as the name suggests, a funereal song, an audiovisual trenodia. It would be a mistake to interpret this work as the representation of grief, a symbol of a particular violence and the suffering that goes with it, or as if it offered a bridge between terrible suffering and the experience that the art instills; in both cases, one would not achieve anything other than the dramatization and beautification of the victim.
Maria Belen Saez de Ibarra
Curadora
"Mortal, whate'er, who this forbidden path
In arms presum'st to tread, I charge thee, stand,
And tell thy name, and bus'ness in the land.
Know this, the realm of night- the Stygian shore:
My boat conveys no living bodies o'er;
(…)
The ghosts rejected are th' unhappy crew
Depriv'd of sepulchers and fun'ral due:
The boatman, Charon; those, the buried host,
He ferries over to the farther coast;
Nor dares his transport vessel cross the waves
With such whose bones are not compos'd in graves.
A hundred years they wander on the shore;
At length, their penance done, are wafted o'er."
Virgil, Aeneid (trans. John Dryden)
Treno (funeral song) makes the event of death present.
Treno: entre el clamor y la tanatopolítica
Gustavo Chirolla
Filósofo
(versión original en español del texto en inglés).
“No nos sentimos ajenos a nuestra época, por el contrario contraemos continuamente con ella compromisos vergonzosos. Este sentimiento de vergüenza es uno de los temas más poderosos de la filosofía. No somos responsables de las víctimas, sino ante las víctimas”
Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari
(1993:109)
TRENO [Funereal Song]
Marta Rodríguez
The latest of Clemencia Echeverri’s projects, Treno, aims to bring together the power of sound and that of the image. The piece, just as others she has produced previously, harks back to ways of living in the province of Caldas, where she was born. Here the protagonist is, once again, the river (it had a role in De doble filo) – the plentiful Cauca River that spans the region.
Minute Traces
Acidia [Anomie]
Maria Victoria UribeAntropóloga
Part of Clemencia Echeverri’s recent work is constructed on the basis of minimal gestures. Prominent in it is an expressive economy that is forceful by reason of being minimal. A good exponent of that approach is the piece entitled Acidia (2005-06), which takes as its spatial stage the cell of the nun Sor Josefa del Castillo in the Santa Clara la Real Convent, in the city of Tunja. This work was part of the Salones Regionales de Artistas convened by the Ministerio de Cultura.
ACIDIA [Anomie]
Acidia is a work that was exhibited at the Salón Regional of the central zone,3 which took place in the city of Tunja. The piece was conceived for a specific site, the church of Santa Clara La Real.