Children in their return_ENG

Children in their return, 2025
Clemencia Echeverri
Immersive video and sound installation.

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Three strong aspects emerge in this powerful new work by Clemencia Echeverri, which marks a different direction from her previous works:

1. The conception of the exhibition space
2. The sublime is emphasized
3. A new concept of “nature”

Regarding the first, the images no longer adhere to a given space; they instead generate a space that no longer has anything to do with the original location. In short, the central polyhedron of the piece emphasizes the new space suggested by the work. Regarding the second point, the sublime is now added to the ever-present uncanny in all her works as an unusual force. If the sinister arouses fear, a disturbance from the familiar that becomes strange, in this work the sublime reigns supreme. The viewer is overwhelmed by the immense, by the immeasurable nature of an unfathomable nature. And third, there is a new concept of “nature” that gives this work capital importance: it is no longer the victimized nature that contemporary ecology has turned into a commonplace bordering on fanaticism. Now, in this work, there is no separation between nature and man, but rather body to body, because we too are nature. In the work, nature is no longer the motive for our mortalizing action against it, but rather it surpasses us. The victim is not the planet as in traditional ecology, but ourselves. The “Infants on the Return,” the initial theme of the work, disappears in the process of realization, because as with all good art, the theme disappears to avoid the anecdotal.

– LUIS FERNANDO VALENCIA