With the curatorship of the artist Doris Salcedo and the Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the National University, a memorial action is inaugurated for the people killed during the civil protests in Colombia 2019-2021.
“With ‘Stolen Lives’ we record the tragic and indelible mark that the violent and arbitrary death of our young people leaves on the national conscience.” With this spirit, according to the artist Doris Salcedo told El Espectador , the memory action was thought and built through which, starting next Tuesday, any Colombian will be able to pay tribute to the nearly fifty fatalities they have left in the last month the confrontations resulting from the national strike.
The exhibition will be open to the public free of charge and with prior registration at the Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria headquarters, at Carrera 7 No. 6B-30, downtown Bogotá. It is based on the investigation of the cases carried out by the independent journalism medium Cuestion Pública , which highlights that until May 25, the organization Temblores reported 1,388 arbitrary detentions, 22 victims of sexual violence and 46 victims of assault on the eyes. In addition, the Prosecutor’s Office had reported investigations on 129 missing persons. (We recommend: Doris Salcedo protested against President Iván Duque for misuse of the Fragmentos art and memory space).
The tribute includes photographs and profiles of both civilian victims and police officers. Also to the fourteen fatal victims of the demonstrations of November 2019 and September 9, 2020. “Unfortunately, political violence defines the ethos of our society, since in Colombia the difference between combatants and the civilian population has been erased,” warns Salcedo , who emphasizes that in this way Fragmentos assumes a commitment to the memory of such lost lives. “It is up to us to make visible the experience of the most vulnerable and most anonymous victims of political violence. We believe that to ensure that these tragic experiences are not reduced to the lament, silence and loneliness of the mourners, this unique experience must be inscribed in an action of public memory ”.
As has been the constant in the artist’s work, recognized nationally and internationally and winner of awards such as the European Velázquez de las Artes, it is a memorial with its own names, in which it will be possible to reflect on national violence. This is while walking on the floor that Doris Salcedo herself built with the molten material produced by the rifles delivered by the FARC guerrillas during the peace process and marked by blows by women survivors of the conflict, a space that is now at the service of the art and thought as a counter-monument. “The victims who have died during these protests have faces that we must recognize and names that we must name as a way to mourn their irreparable absence. Fragmentos demarcates a place where the absent can be present ”.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsAnd he insists on drawing attention to the value of life, so deeply rooted in the history of Colombia. “’Stolen Lives’ is an exhibition that seeks to materialize, make real, the act of naming their names, as an attempt to suspend —even if only temporarily— the intentional ignorance with which we surround these painful deaths, today so everyday . Naming the names of these victims is a way of acknowledging the immensity of the loss suffered not only by their families, but by all of us collectively as a society. The death of each person generates an absence and each absence requires that we take responsibility for those who are no longer there, because the only way in which people – murdered during these chaotic and violent weeks – can exist is within us. ‘Stolen Lives’ is an austere, solemn display; it presents the desolation in which the mourners live and also the radiance and meaning that each name and each face has for their families ”. (We recommend: Read an interview with Doris Salcedo, made by Nelson Fredy Padilla, in which he explains the construction process and the meaning of Fragmentos).
The Cultural Heritage Directorate of the National University of Colombia also worked in the curatorship, led by its director María Belén Sáez de Ibarra, who explains that it is a desperate lament for the unnecessary loss of life, which forces us to reflect, to rethink ourselves as a society. “These people who are killed when they desperately cry out for justice have already been robbed of their lives. Because they have been absent from the human project, because they have been despised and rejected by those who share the spoils that this incessant violence of the Colombian conflict leaves behind ”.
Social organizations and journalism are represented in the place. Diana Salinas, journalist and co-founder of Cuestion Pública , appreciated the opportunity for “our investigations” to be part of the event, “because we feel that journalism that contributes truth also contributes memory, even in the darkest moments in which democracy dies” .
Music and poetry will complete a space where aesthetics, ethics and awareness of a historical moment converge. Likewise, it includes the works of two artists who assumed their work from a radical immersion in their historical moments, broken and meaningless, in a fascist and repressive context. “Mandelshtam and Ligeti represent the spirit of freedom that resists oppression as the only full way to exist, that is: to think, understand and act in accordance with that thought and that feeling, in defense of the dignity of life”, says Sáez de Ibarra. This is how Requiem IV Lacrimosa , by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, a victim of Nazi persecution and the isolation of his country in the 1940s, will be heard, and the poem The Century (read above), by the Polish poet Ósip Mandelshtam, who he died in 1938 repressed by the Stalin regime.
The musical interpretation will be in charge of 35 musicians from the Student Group of the Conservatory of Music of the National University of Colombia and the voices of the mezzo-soprano Valeria Bibliowicz and the soprano María Paula Gómez, under the musical direction of Guerassim Voronkov. The opening ceremony will be broadcast via streaming on Tuesday, June 1, at 6:00 pm
* The action will be transmitted via streaming next Tuesday, June 1, at 6:00 pm, from the Facebook Live de Fragmentos , the Facebook of the Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the National University of Colombia and the Facebook and Instagram of Public Issues, as well as other allied media platforms and networks
