(T)HERE. 2013 (Installation)
HERE-THERE. Sala de arte suramericana. MEDELLIN.
Curated by Alberto Sierra Maya (1944-1917), this exhibition features work from 2009 to 2013. The installation is composed of more than 50 works that make up a system through a subtle narrative. With this work, the artist reiterates his concern for visualizing urban phenomena caused by veiled socio-economical and political actions that escape our immediate perception.
They left the door open; we don’t know if they did it on purpose or not. We entered out of curiosity. Behind the desk, there was no one; the chair was empty. However, it didn’t seem to be deserted. “What is all of this doing here?” we asked as we checked out everything inside. We saw maps, models, front pages of newspapers, magazine clippings, ads, slogans, material samples, debris, etc. We proposed several hypotheses: It could be both an architecture or advertising agency, a deposit for materials or the site of a newspaper. We even thought that it could be a military barracks where they were planning the next attacks on the enemy over there or the bunker of a terrorist organization here.
We exceeded appearances when – rummaging through the desk drawers – we found El Gordon stationery. Everything we had seen changed its countenance radically. So, this was the ongoing projects of a demolition company or a single demolition project led to full completeness, or the manifest delirium of planning the perfect demolition in which all options are contemplated, in which the smallest detail is planned so that the desired accident works perfectly without leaving any suspicion of the true intent of its creator. Planning an accident? Some of us laughed at the nonsense. Then, as we looked around again, we got scared when our security was suddenly threatened. And, what if the few things we thought were stable – the walls of our own homes, the asphalt paving on the streets, the streetlights – were vulnerable? And if something or someone had conceived from the start its own collapse and expiration and made us believe everything was an accident? We became silent; we became still. “But why is all of this here?” we asked ourselves when we noticed just how much there was: photos of buildings, images, maps; it was from there. Someone dared to venture that it was a model: From here to there and from there to here. “A demolition model? But how is that possible? We became still once again. Someone thought, standing up and picking up the partially destroyed cardboard hammer from one of the shelves, without daring to say it out loud, that here, in El Gordon, reality – here – ends up ruining the imagination, there.
Being in constant transit, neither here nor there, or simultaneously here and there. Versed in customs measures, translations and exchanges. Victim of searches and interrogations. He knows that everything there has an impact here, as if the here and the there were – in the end – the same thing, as if a fine line joins them, impacting each other.