We went to Fragmentos, a space for installations that tend to have strong connections with what happens in our land, in our earth.

Among the pieces that caught my attention were

1. María Isabel Arango’s work Palabras, palabras, palabras is an enormous printout of words from the book Colombia, a fragmented country, a divided society by Palacios and Safford. The printout hangs on the four immense walls of the main space. You are invited to take away a word with you (they cut it from the fabric as watchers ask for one of those words). It was eerie to watch the long long list of words, and the spaces where they have been taken. They gave me the word local. María Clara took the word libre (free).
2. María Leguízamo’s work SORBO consists of pieces of wood picked from the Magdalena River after hundreds of kilometers. The wood is rounded by having hit so many obstacles on the way (some of them perhaps human bodies thrown to the river), and evokes bones, animals, faces.
3. David Medina’s work TODO NOMBRE ES MI NOMBRE (Gramática Nacional) proposes several interventions into very well-known works by Colombian writers, with 10% of the words removed and changed by other books’ words, and a map of those permutations. The result is beautifully crafted and opens up amazing re-readings. Medina also collected statistically the list of most common family names in Colombia, and then prints in books (that resemble archival material) a reassembly of 5 million (10% of the Colombian population, the 10% that has suffered displacement) names, randomly put out and printed. The result is random yet enormously similar to the real map of Colombian people who have been displaced.
4. Mónica Restrepo’s Mater/Madre invites people to walk on clay and embed into that clay paper mâché made from archives, as she invites us to think of how earth (or land) and paper often fight against one another (through archival deeds). She invites visitors to create a womb with clay, with their feet and hands. The womb will dry and will be scattered in the neighborhood.
5. Ana María Montenegro’s LA CLARIDAD is a video that follows the story of a former Colombian soldier who was hit by lightning four times already, and has survived. I have to documentation of this video here.

I do have documentation/photographs of the works of Arango, Leguízamo, Medina and Restrepo. Enjoy.

We found the exhibit very eye-opening!