The National University of Colombia, aside from being one of the most important institutions of the country, is also a kind of National legend that has taken a place (in my mind at least) as a memory seen through a TV screen and the blurry face of an anchorman. For others, it’s the place where they took their kids to ride on bikes during the 70s or where they drank the best cup of coffee after class. The impressions are as many as the more than seven million inhabitants of Bogotá. Luckily for me, impressions can be re-written and a place that lacked charm can be transformed into an experience worthy of repeating.
Rainy. Like a traditional day in Bogotá, the trip to La Nacional started out rainy with the possibility that the next morning could be as sunny as Melgar. People, grass, mud, and that universal college campus feel were everywhere. First stop: A wave-shaped graffiti that decorated a wall of signatures and stains. Second stop: the Leopoldo Rother Architecture Museum (originally meant to be a printing press) that held the Habitamos (We Inhabit) exhibition, a show that even though will have closed by the time I publish this piece, is worth highlighting. And what did Habitamos propose? It provided a glance of the city – as Gustavo Zalamea states, a vision that “has the strength and the capacity of imagining, creating, and trying, among other things, utopia.” This was a realistic, magical, and ingenious approach to what it means to live and occupy a space of one’s own while trying to create a new experience that is sometimes so familiar to our desires, yet so distant from everything we know; all inside a city as eclectic as the capital of Colombia.
Particular things that caught my attention (in the chronological order of my visit): 1) the series of images by Zalamea in which Bogotá appears as a fantastic dream and 2) a whale plunging in the city, letting us see only the moment that reveals half of its body in the water (an instant I also imagine interesting from the bottom of that surreal world Bogotá is underneath). And so is the work of this Colombian artist born in the 50s that has discovered in the path of his career that art and the city are like the root and the tree, without knowing for sure which stands for which.
On display after Zalamea were pieces by the art collective Ciudad Kennedy (Kennedy City) from their exhibit Memory and Reality, a series of photographs of installations that were made more than eight years ago by different artists, among them Fernando Cruz, Luis Carlos Barragán, Camilo Martínez, and Michael López under the direction of Raúl Cristancho. An image that was trapped in my memory: the staging inside a typical house of the Kennedy neighborhood in which different household objects and furniture from homes around the block were organized to create a new version of a living room, a place that reflected the ideals and regards of another time and an almost unknown Bogotá. Up ahead were the photos that showed human sized cartoon cutouts of John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie standing in the middle of typical scenarios of Colombia and Bogotá: a variety store or a street food cart. So, what other things were presented? A series of images that speak of the urban identity of one of Bogotá’s microcultures, one that after its baptism (the neighborhood was named after JFK’s 1961 visit) had a homogeneous and massive development that, today, plays an important role in the history, evolution, and aesthetic of the city that contains it.
Next stop: the work of María Consuelo Garcia, a series of photographs portraying the facades of homes, pieces that are accompanied by an installation of intervened bird cages in which questions arise about protection and containment, adornment and security, as well as many others that follow when we realize that cities oblige us to live our private space in ways that are constantly ironic. Both irony and contrast are subjects that reappear in the exhibit with a touching cruelty; the first image (that I will describe given that I have no photo to show) is one of the most beautiful: a close-up shot of several washed-out tones of sepia, beige, and smoke where a glassless, frameless, paintless window let a lace curtain show. The second image (of which I do have a photo and will still describe) is of a house made of what seems to be a metal sheet painted in red and equally illustrated with windows, flowers, door locks, and other decorations that reveal, in a childlike manner, the hopes and optimism of the people who inhabit it.
The Under the Bridges series by Fernando Cruz, also looks at those hidden and forgotten places that, for some of us, only exist as geographies of the city: cement covered corners that are, for others, foster homes, opportunities to escape from the weather, or the only thing that resembles refuge. Cruz’s photos explore the city as a compartment and as a place of strange and surreal beauty were huge rocks restrict the space and abandoned objects, tombs, and perspective adorn it. Elements like the ones seen in these images are present throughout the entire exhibition room, highlighting the curatorial interest for making the artist an active participator in the social scenario as a catalytic converter that through his view and action stimulates tangible processes for their praxis.
And so, after walking through the exhibit, the general question that comes up is about the space that holds the show, the LR architecture museum. It is a place that invites you to inhabit, socialize, or, if you want, disappear gracefully. The Habitamos (We Inhabit) exhibition found a perfect ally for the presentation of a body of work that speaks of the shapes and designs mankind builds to sink into and live in.
The final part of the visit showed a series of photos that portrayed Armero, a long-lost town in the department of Tolima buried by a mud avalanche that was a product of the explosion of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in 1985. These images sat across from a series on the San Andrés and Providencia islands, the two places and perspectives looking distant and with no resemblance from the lens of the artists. One looked like a place trapped in a time one likes to think of as the future and the other like a trapped version of the past where life still remains. In my eye the two places spoke of an isolated habitat.
That is how the first part of the visit is over. We leave the building and start walking towards another exhibit at the Museum of Art on the same campus, and as we wander the Universidad Nacional, it looks neverending and greener than ever, especially since it had been raining nonstop. In the next blog post we will arrive at the Hannah Collins show, The Revelation of Time, a selection of photographs and films curated by María Belén Sáenz and David Campany, that you should visit if in the city before it closes on November 27.
