Mourning
Duelos (Mourning) is a video installation work of nine synchronized images that, together with three sound levels, embrace the room and evoke an endless mourning that continues to happen in Colombia.
In a country where many events remain unfinished, where the air is charged with hope, frustration and destroyed memory, I presented the work Mourning (2019) as a moment that crosses facts and stories of present and past times. From a persistent action that in the face of forced disappearance confronts us with impenetrable, heavy and immense layers.
I proposed to generate a moment of public mourning as the central axis of the work, to produce a polyphony of image and acoustic vibration, between space and time full of silent stories about to speak. Of absent and falling traces of the individual and collective in the face of frustrated excavations in the area of the Escombrera, Comuna 13, Medellín.
The Search book was at the entrance of the exhibition to receive testimonies from mourners. It was a document that remained in the archives of Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria.
Clemencia Echeverri
Discussion on the work Mourning by Clemencia Echeverri at Fragments, space for Art and Memory.
Speakers: José Roca, Laura Flórez, David Medina with the moderation of María del Rosario Acosta.
Mourning (Duelos) has no argumentative narrative but it does have a dramaturgy. The piece begins with projections on the floor of the enclosure. It tries to communicate the sensation of smallness and impotence of the spectator before the enormous scale of this mountain-cemetery, inhabiting the exhibition space with visual and auditory images; the sound and the penumbran establish a tone of gravity and that “telluric pain” is accompanied by murmurs, whispers, pieces of words, barely enunciated phrases. Cascades of voices like broken glass, pieces of lives broken forever.
The video installation proposes an enveloping space of video projections that occupy walls and floor, in which the spectator is immersed, involved. The absence of color subtracts anecdote from the image, giving it the serious and somber tone of testimony. The sound here is the protagonist: it is neither univocal nor hierarchical, it assaults the participant from multiple points of speech. Sometimes surreptitiously, like the unintelligible whisper of many voices trying to make sense of the inexplicable, sometimes forcefully, like the thunderous noise of the machine, of the rubble falling down the mountainside.
José Roca, Curator
Mourning brings us together in a shared and fragmentary exhibition, always together and incomplete, to the chorus of the missing lives that vibrate in the fabric of our bodies here and now: the cry that reverberates in the affective, shattered and indelible senses of the present. In its brutal attunement with the clamor and the claim that disturbs the law of all discourse and all consensus without remainder, Mourning resonates the mutism of the underworld in this world: it listens to the gravity of the language of disappearance, it sings with it.
Juan Diego Pérez, Philosopher.
TECHNICAL DATA
Multichannel video installation
9 projections
Sound 11.3
Fragments,Art and Memory Space, Bogota.
Creation Award (2019). Ministry of Culture of Colombia.
