Written on the Land
The ongoing civic movements in Colombia have revealed profound tensions in the official narratives of the past. Photography might just give a clue to the creative methods the country needs to establish a plural and dialogic vision of the past and present, where different voices and narratives are exposed.
There is an ongoing battle over the way the past is memorialized in public space in Colombia. In the past months, the Misak indigenous people toppled the statues of Spanish conquistadors like Sebastián de Belalcázar and Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in Popayán, Cali, and Bogotá. Even the statue of Antonio Nariño, a creole martyr of the independence of Colombia in the 19th century, fell in Pasto. If the fall of the Spanish conquistadors denounced a longstanding violence in the way the Spanish invasion of the Americas is incorporated into national historical imagination (mainly by celebrating Spanish invaders as heroes), the fall of the patriotic figure of Nariño exposed tensions inherent to the relation between southern region of Colombia and the political center of Bogotá. These events have brought to the fore that many Colombians no longer accept that the Government of Colombia memorializes the past mainly by erecting statues of powerful men.
By exalting male figures as the heroes who built the nation, those statues present a flawed vision of the past. From the point of view of a historian, it is evident that this type of monument aims to silence the past, as Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot once put it. Instead of recognizing the past as an arena of exchange, where many voices are uttered and heard, the statues impose a rigid narrative of the past and the present, which continues to exclude most popular sectors of the country.
Cristina Velásquez’s photography explores other ways of seeing and representing the country and its past. Vulnerable, sensitive bodies abound in her images, to replace the monumentalized, stereotypically-male figures of the statues. Her pictures in many ways reproduce the traditional studio, centering a sitter against a background. Yet, hers is a displaced studio, that is not entirely under her control. She leaves her own living environment to visit rural areas, builds improvised studios in a form of collaboration with her sitters, and seizes a new, unconventional reality. The settings and postures are improvised and they are furtive. The moment she captures is only possible in a fleeting encounter between the artist and the sitter. Those moments are not necessarily heroic, overly masculine or feminine, or essentialized as different; yet they are full of dignity and humanity. Playing against a backdrop of stereotyped images of Latin America, which have deployed gross simplification to represent the region as barbaric, Velásquez’s images conceal at least as much as they reveal. There is something that evades the viewer in each one of them: faces partially or completely hidden, turned away from the viewer; bodies behind layers of fabric or framed in ways that replace the face with a torso, a hand, or a hip.
Velásquez’s photography invokes the pervasiveness of ritualized, yet lively senses of place. Inscribed rocks, housing in the mountains, or even a grassland with an imposing electrical sound system. The images recall that these are lived environments, ritualized in their own ways by the people who inhabit them. Through labor, modern and vernacular materials, and social action, public spaces are already in many ways memorialized and meaningful. The textures in the landscape and the marks in a rock are like inscriptions in a map, traces of the steps of those who walked through those spaces before. They evoke in many ways plural forms of inhabiting them; many layers of history have shaped them.
Social protest has extended for over three weeks in Colombia. In Bogotá, a number of the movements have taken over the symbolic site of Los Heroes (literally, the heroes)—a prominent crossing of major avenues that has the statue of Simón Bolívar and a memorial for the leaders of the wars of independence. Multitudes of mostly young people have resignified the site. One night they lit Bolívar on fire and drew the face of a Misak woman in one of the walls. The monument has come alive, joining a playful and lively artistic setting. Yet, the protests have been met with a disproportionate, violent response by the police, the military, and many public officials. Their response shows that there is a great need to find new ways of memorializing the past in Colombia. There is a great need of a more pluralistic, dialogic, unorthodox arena, were a diversity of voices and narratives are exposed. In that, we can learn from Cristina Velásquez’s artistic method. Displacing the studio and establishing new conversations between artists, humanists, and grassroot communities might create a type of public arena that allow for more inclusive and multiple narratives of the past.
Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez
Assistant Professor of History and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
University of Connecticut