A lack of power

This graduate report, more than a formal description of the artistic developments I have gradually acknowledged, is a personal and perhaps arbitrary recollection of ideas that might help the reader–and me–understand the nature of the gestures that have evidently influenced the work I have produced in the past two years. These words belong to an inevitable act of introspection that seeks to validate some of the questions that have directed my artistic investigation throughout this time.
I believe my work derives from two different and yet relevant positions: on one hand, the need to find meaning out of brutal events that have indisputably marked the course of history, specially in Colombia–my home country–where victims appear to loose their voices in a context ruled by indifference and apathy; and, on the other, the desire to understand what controls the reception of violent imagery as we depend on how social location, collective identification and political affiliation dictate the way we perceive the world. Each project mentioned in this report is a result of studying obsessively the political kidnappings that have been taking place in Colombia in the past twenty years, as a response to an allegedly abuse of power induced by the government against Las FARC, one of the most powerful guerrilla groups in Latin America. However each one is far from being a true document of real events and on the contrary, each one emerges as a naïve interpretation, possibly an illustration, of an ambiguous conflict that has no reasonable explanation but being a natural product of a conservative warfare–which in fact is no less than a reading made by a distant and passive witness like myself.