| Bandeja de Bolivar |
| Experimental video | dv | color | 3'58'' | Colombia | 2004 |
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© Juan Manuel Echavarria
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To commemorate Columbia's independance from the Spanish Crown, Simon Bolivar orders a porcelain serving plate bearing the inscription "'Republica de Colombia para siempre" (Republic of Columbia forever). "Bandeja de Bolivar" is a series of photographs and a video that documents the destruction of a replicate of this plate that, in the final image, reveals a mound of white powder, easily identifiable as cocaine. Over these last years, Columbia has suffered from violence supplied by the trafficking of cocaine. This violence, which does not seem to have an end, where the guerrillas supervise the traffic and the production. The profits of this illegal business are enormous and the guerrillas have become extremely powerful, forcing the Columbian government to guarantee them an extension of territory to enter into discussions for peace. The government is absent from this territory. In this video, the artist searches to show what came to Bolivar's ideal.
Juan Manuel Echavarría was born in Medellin, Colombia in 1947. After the publication of his novels and short stories, he stopped writing. The Colombian society being dominated by violence and power continually enlarging its drug cartel, he was frustrated by the disintegration of Columbian life and by the social isolation necessary for writing. He started his photographic work by moving towards the exploitation metaphoric possibilities of the photographic image. Echavarria's art aims at arousing a grasp of conscience, of transcending the generalized violence of the Columbian society. The question of the representation of this violence is the pivot around which his work is constructed. He gives a dignity to the victims of the civil war's extremely violent conflict. The conflicts between the army, the leftist guerrilla, and the paramilitaries of the right can be traced back to the 50's, and the drug cartels back to the 80's. Each successive brutal cycle transmits a national psychosis of violence to the country, a state of mind in which the omnipresent carnage and fear are natural states of existence. Juan Manuel Echavarria's beautiful disturbing images evoke the fear and the human loss in this endless war, but without presenting bleeding bodies. These recurrent photographs display men and women, abandoned villages, and their melancholic objects. Grotesque but not horrible reinterpretations of botanic patterns and a dramatization of rituals, that are particular to the Columbian heritage, surround the dead. His work has been shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Languedoc-Roussillon Regional Centre of Contemporary Art in Sčte, France; the New York Museum of Modern Art; the 51st Venice Biennial; the Buenos Aires Modern Art Museum; EMAF Ossnabruck in Germany; the Bogota Modern Art museum; the Kwangju Biennial in Korea, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; and the Oberhausen Film Festival.
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