PART ONE
INFLUENCED BY HOME: COLOMBIA
Editorial Statement In the attempt to find the elusive place where I belong that’s not called home, I sought to look for artists that knew where that place was for them. By searching and discovering the ways that different artists and designers are influenced by their place of origin, RUDIMENT highlights the comparison and unlikely pairings of different cultures to see how they can influence a designer’s work. In my personal search of what has influenced me the most, it’s hard for me to tell the line between the mixture of cultures and how they interact with each other. My filter of home is blurred by both my Chinese and Colombian ties. By exploring both of these culture’s through the lens of other artists, I have gained a new understanding of how people always seem to come back to the place they feel that they belong. RUDIMENT represents my collection of discoveries and realization that sometimes, where we feel like we belong lives also in the constraint of our memories and how we perceive our past.
A.WIJAYA
Doris Salcedo
10 DORIS SALCEDO Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia. Salcedo’s understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. Salcedo trained in sculpture in the mid-1980s at New York University but, unusually among artists of her stature from outside the US and Western Europe, has continued to live and work in the place she came from, Bogotá. Over the years, she says that Colombia – which she has called ‘the country of unburied dead’ – has given her a sustained perspective, a ‘structure that allows me to understand what is happening everywhere’. What is happening everywhere, from US churches and elementary schools, to Brussels, to Pakistan, is what Salcedo calls a state of undeclared civil war, in which ‘there are no longer soldiers and civilians, you can no longer locate a specific battlefront, but it could be anywhere.’ The political violence that has remained Salcedo’s subject throughout her career is defined in part by its borderless-ness. Salcedo’s sculptures evoke how the home can transform from a safe space to a danger zone. Sanchez’s family knows that pain. Violence drove grandfather, mother and aunts from their home in the countryside to the outskirts of the city of Cali. Sanchez, like all of her friends in Colombia, grew up hearing stories of trauma. She says her mom and aunts saw “dead people floating down the river,” and also horses coming down the mountains carrying corpses. Sanchez says their stories “always involve violence and bodies being hurt.” As she speaks, Sanchez stares at the dysfunctional furniture. “When you have this table pushed through the cement,” she says, “the table has to continue working like a table anyway. So you can lose your mom, you can lose your dad, you can lose your family, but you have to continue living because you have kids. You need to keep pushing and going on. “The artist, Doris Salcedo, didn’t lose a family member personally in Colombia’s long war. But she sits with survivors for days and hears their stories. “What I do,” she says, “is I try to empty myself of everything that I could feel or desire,” in order to put the strangers’ losses “in my center. And from there, I start the sculpture.”
11 DORIS SALCEDO “Violence takes away language, the possibility of telling a story. On the contrary, art is a language. It’s giving form, it’s giving meaning. It’s giving dignity back”
In the beginning of her career, Salcedo’s art was focused on the civil war in Colombia. But since the late ‘90s, her work has expanded to address violence in other parts of the world. A couple of years ago, Salcedo proposed a tribute to young people killed by gunfire in Chicago. She wanted to erect a plaza on the grounds of a former housing project. Drops of water would come from the ground and gradually spell out the names of gun victims. When someone walks through the plaza or when the wind blows,
the water would be swept away, but then the droplets would gradually form into names again. “I wanted the sculpture to work the same way our memory works,” she says. “We are able to remember for a short period of time. When there is a massacre in the [United] States, you remember the victims for, I don’t know, a month or a year, until another massacre comes. And then we tend to forget the previous victims and remember the most recent ones.” Salcedo allows herself a paradoxical combination of directness and indirection, and insists on keeping her political engagement strictly within the boundaries of the work itself, within the realm of art, which has its own rules (‘I’m not trying to be political or pedagogical outside the piece. Every one of my pieces contains what I need to say, and it is there.’). ‘It would be a trap to try to portray violence,’ she says, in any literal way. ‘Because violence is exerted whenever you show it, whether in art, or in cinema, or in reality. When you reproduce a violent act […] violence is being exerted and re-enacted once again, and I don’t think we need that.’“I’m trying to articulate what violence has taken away from victims,” she says. “Violence takes away language, the possibility of telling a story. On the contrary, art is a language. It’s giving form, it’s giving meaning, it’s giving dignity back. So, it is doing the opposite of what violence does.”
12 DORIS SALCEDO
13 DORIS SALCEDO “I always wanted to be an artist. I cannot name a date when that came to me; it has always been there. Living in Colombia, in a country at war, means that war does not give you the possibility of distance. War engulfs reality completely. In some cases, people can be killed or wounded at war, but in most cases war just distorts your life. It throws a shadow over your entire life. War creates a totality and you are embedded in it. It’s like being engulfed in a reality. Political events are part of everyday life here, so art and politics came to me as a natural thing, something that has been very much present in my life from the start.” “I think war everywhere has a different aspect now, because I don’t think war is waged between two nations any longer, or not the main war. I think war is waged at different levels. And those levels that are subtler are the ones that really destroy the life of a big section of the population. I believe war is the main event of our time. War is what defines our lives. And it creates its own laws. War forces us to generate some ethical codes in which we exclude a whole part of the population; once they do not fit into in our ethical code, then we can attack them and destroy them because they are not “human.” So it’s a tool to expel people from humankind. I think that’s the main event, and that’s why it worries me so much. You see that there are civil wars going on everywhere on a daily basis. You are reading about these events and these events are really shaping the way in which we live. That’s what I’m trying to show in my work—that war is part of or our everyday life.”
“War is what defines our lives. And it creates its own laws.”
“We know in the Third World that rationality does not fix every problem. In the Third World we see things in a different way. So you have to make your life out of chaos. You have to organize your life out of disorder and that’s why I’m working on this chaos. I’m working on this pain. I’m making work out of war, out of the most chaotic and most extreme situations.”
César López
16 CÉSAR LÓPEZ Violence is often – and mistakenly - considered a quick and concrete way to solve problems. For this reason it is usually tackled with an equally quick and concrete approach: more violence. The Colombian musician César López, though, since 1994 fights violence with a much more subtle and abstract weapon: the sound of his guitar. “It was inevitable,” says López. “When you live in a country like Colombia and you realise that your talent and your instruments can be used to serve your people, you don’t have any other choice left.” López’s first project was the “Invisible Invincible”, an initiative to support street artists and acknowledge the social impact of their work in their communities. In 2003 he then created the Battalion of Immediate Artistic Reaction, a team of musicians who were rapidly reacting any time there was an act of violence. The Battalion gathered where the event had taken place and played there, to comfort the families of the victims and spread anti-violence message.It was during one of these performances that López, looking at how one soldier was carrying his weapon, got the idea of turning guns (escopetas) into guitars (guitarras) and created the ‘Escopetarra’. Both symbolically and practically, López turns the destructive force of deadly weapons into something creative and positive. “It is much more than just playing, it is an educational mission.” “The object in itself is nice,” explains López. “But what is really important is what you do with it. I have played with the Escopetarra in front of prisoners, gangs, soldiers, rebels and young people. It is much more than just playing, it is an educational mission.” During his career Cesar has built a total of 22 Escopetarras, converting Kalashnikovs handed over by guerrilla fighters or militia soldiers who had given up the armed the struggle. “To see combatants crying in front of me and taking the decision of leaving the guerrilla forces has been one of the most touching and thrilling moments of my life. But I am not saying they did it because of me or because of the Escopetarra, it is just thanks to their good will.” In August 2013 López is to receive another three rifles and to turn them into the last Escopetarras. However, this is not the end of the project.
17 CÉSAR LÓPEZ “Using art as a tool for social transformation and to prevent violence is a hypothesis yet to be verified”
“All of them have told me how difficult it is to go back to a so-called normal life,” says López. “Many don’t even know how to take decisions on their own, as they were used to follow the orders of their superiors. When they go back to their cities nobody respect them because they are not wearing their uniform and they are not carrying their weapon around. The only thing they know is how to shoot and it is difficult for them to get a job in a society that does not accept them.” In this long and strenuous rehabilitation process, music can play a crucial role. Many fighters know how to play popular music, and some of them had built recording studios even in the middle of the forest.
Once they leave the guerrilla behind, music can then become an opportunity to express their feelings, reflect on their past and speak about their present problems.“Using art as a tool for social transformation and to prevent violence is a hypothesis yet to be verified” says López. “We don’t know yet how to measure the results, which strategy is the most effective and whether it works better in one country rather than in another. But I strongly believe in the power of art, and for this reason I have launched a new and bigger project: 24/0.” For 24 hours we want people to take care of their own life and to respect the life of others. “Our goal is to make people. It is just matter of respecting the true value of human life.”
18 CÉSAR LÓPEZ “The word indifference has different meanings,” explains López. “There is the indifference of those who are scared and they protect themselves looking away and turning off the television, and there is the indifference of those who are not sensitive enough to care about the pain of another human being. Here in Colombia we have especially the first type of indifference.bv For this reason we need to educate people and engage them, pushing them to become active participants in the social change process we strongly need in this country.”As recognition for his efforts to bring peace in Colombia and for his inspiring work, in 2006 López was appointed UN Messenger of Peace. As part of this mission, López organised the
“Transformation Tour”, a series of meetings and concerts in the US and in Europe. During the tour López and other musicians hold non-violence workshops with underprivileged youth and former combatants. The concerts were also an opportunity to raise funds on behalf of local NGOs supporting programs that teach music to at-risk youth. “These awards tend to be really abstract,” comments López. “But when I received this title I imagined myself as a messenger boy, travelling on a motorbike with a helmet and a yellow vest. This is what I do: I carry parcels containing stories and ideas, I travel with them, I share them, I collect new stories along my way and I bring them somewhere else. This is how I fulfil my role of messen-
ger of peace.” In the blog where López presents his album Toda Bala es Perdida (All bullets are lost), the artist writes that it is important to speak out not only against the “visible” violence, but also against the “invisible one”, such as marginalization, inequality, and discrimination based on religion, gender, sexual orientation, age or social class.“The message of this album is that any bullet that is shot is a wasted one. A bullet symbolises every type of violence. It can be an aggression, an assault, a punch, anything that could hurt someone. A bullet can also be a scream, a word, or even the same indifference,” says López. Two minutes of commemorative silence or an intimidating display of military power do not stop any of these bullets.
19 CÉSAR LÓPEZ César came up with the idea of converting a weapon into a guitar after witnessing the aftermath of a bloody terrorist attack in February 2003. He and his friends reacted to the violence in the only way they knew: by playing music, to show their support for the victims and call for an end to the bloodshed. While performing near the site, López noticed that a soldier held his rifle in the same way he held his guitar. An idea was born and the first escopetarra was produced a few months later. The rifles to create escopetarras are provided by the Colombian authorities. Once the firing components are removed, the weapon becomes incapable of firing anymore. Each escopetarra is donated to an international artist, an institution or an individual working for peace - to help them bring attention to the cause of ending violence and curbing the spread of small arms and light weapons. Colombian superstar Juanes was the first musician to receive the instrument. Through the Office, César has received the funds and 17 assault rifles to produce escopetarras. As part of the campaign, López and other musicians have travelled to communities afflicted by violence to collect testimonials on video that are now shown at interactive concerts. The campaigners have also played in prisons, schools and universities. UNODC supports their work with young people, particularly with those linked to conflict and gangs. This year, UNODC in association with the Embassy of Colombia in India, invites César to India, where he will be presenting the escopetarra to the ‘Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Smriti’ in New Delhi on 31st October 2011. He will also be performing at a ‘Music for Peace’ concert on 1st November 2011 at the Stein Auditorium, New Delhi as part of the Delhi International Arts Festival (DIAF) 2011. In addition, UNODC in collaboration with the Embassy of Colombia and the UN Information Centre (UNIC), will be hosting interactions with educational institutions and NGOs working on drugs and violence issues.
Oscar Murillo
22 OSCAR MURILLO Murillo was born, and spent the first ten years of his life, in La Paila, a small town in the Cauca Valley of Colombia, where sugarcane has been harvested since it was brought by the Spanish in the 16th century. Enslaved Africans were imported to work the plantations, and to this day their descendants, now a mix of hues, still live there, many employed in the confectionery industry. For almost a century, the local company Colombina has been owned by the Caicedo family, sugar barons whose complexion trends lighter than those of their workers and who control everything from the farms to the sprawling candy factory to the local fútbol leagues. Murillo’s show at Zwirner, “A Mercantile Novel,” opened April 24 and came down in mid-June, eight weeks that enclosed a neat allegory about the art world’s limited patience for the undeferential. “Here’s a gallery which is, according to experts or whatever, one of the most successful in the world,” says Murillo, and it let him do something few others would have: not show any paintings. Instead, he was going to setup a satellite single-machine Colombina chocolate factory. It involved the re-creation of a factory production line, making confectionary to give away to visitors. Chocolate-covered marshmallows will be produced on site by Colombina. Murillo has close connections with this company, based in his hometown of La Paila, which has employed four generations of his family, including his parents. Tens of thousands of the chocolate treats will be produced and handed out to visitors throughout the course of the exhibition, enacting a form of good will that Murillo wishes to encourage through his work and to highlight the global nature of manufacturing. Moreover, recipients are asked to share the journey of their gifts on social media sites, inspiring interaction amongst strangers in a big city. Murillo also designed the packaging of the goods, featuring a smiley face often seen on New York carrier bags, and the slogan ‘Have a nice day!’ to reinforce this friendliness. The factory conceit is not new in art; neither is even the idea of making chocolates in galleries (both Dieter Roth and Paul McCarthy had done so, and the art world ate it up.) But Murillo’s version was more evasive and personal, almost to the point of not being discernible. He had the workers video-record their time here, as if to say they were the ones watching New York, not the other way around.
23 OSCAR MURILLO “Y es que en su piel sigue marcada la nostalgia por Colombia. No teníamos posibilidades de volver y estuvimos cinco años sin movernos. En mitad de aquello, creció una especie de
romanticismo por lo que dejamos atrás. Idealicé el Cauca, mi niñez, mis amigos, el trópico, la libertad.”
24 OSCAR MURILLO
25 OSCAR MURILLO A few of the chocolatiers while they hand-sealed custom-designed foil bags full of Chocmelos. None had ever been to the U.S. before; most had never left Colombia. They had first heard that Murillo had made it big as an artist when a Colombian newspaper reported Leonardo DiCaprio had bought one of his paintings. They were surprised that New Yorkers ate so much salad, and all planned to come back. When his family moved to London, settling in the East End, he spoke no English and described the adjustment an “astonishing cultural displacement.” Perhaps because of a child-
hood spent assimilating into a foreign culture, Mr. Murillo is keenly interested in arts education. He is collaborating with schools around the world in a project that involves covering student’s desks with canvases and asking children to draw on them, their creations eventually becoming part of a larger work. “The children have the freedom to do what they want,” he said. “My aim is to create a cross-cutlrual dialogue.” “Life was very lonely,” he recalled. Murillo is perhaps best known for his rough-textured, patchwork paintings, upon which he allows dirt to accumulate in his East London
studio. An unfinished, experimental quality is part of the appeal of these works, combined with the lack of pristine care normally associated with valuable art works. Yet Murillo is not simply a painter, he is also an event co-ordinator, bringing together different cultures for participatory celebrations and performance-based installations. He commands these exciting projects with appropriate energy for someone born in 1986, whilst simultaneously injecting references to his Colombian roots.
Beatriz Gonzรกlez
28 BEATRIZ GONZÁLEZ
29 BEATRIZ GONZÁLEZ “Sometimes I see myself like a transgressor that didn’t fit in her time.” A pioneer of pop, González is considered one of the seminal artists of Colombia’s now substantial art scene. Growing up in Bucaramanga during the 1940s and ’50s, a politically volatile era known as La Violencia (The Violence), she eschewed her academic training in painting, turning instead to mass media for inspiration. González became an acute chronicler of Colombia’s recent history, using newspapers, magazines and photographs to create colorful and critical works that coyly underscored the corruption of her home country. At the Bogotá’s Central Cemetery, specifically in the buildings known as columbaria, Beatriz González has covered the spaces once occupied by gravesites with images that refer to the people charged with picking up the corpses of the war dead in various Colombian municipalities. The artist had already explored these images, which have circulated in the mass media, in a previous series of paintings and drawings. There she analyzed the features that could make them visual icons of Colombia’s historical present.
“Aura is the trace of person’s presence, which remains in a place for as long as someone remembers them”
30 BEATRIZ GONZÁLEZ Beatriz González is a Colombian painter, associated with the Pop Art movement. She grew up in Colombia in the 40s and 50s, during an era of political unrest known as La Violencia (The Violence). Initially González was a traditional painter, inspired by Vermeer and also Velazquez, but later began to refer to the mass media as a source of inspiration instead. She used bold colours and the flat figures to represent images taken from magazines and newspapers as a means of documenting the political and social climate of her homeland. With characteristic tongue-incheek humour, González calls these her ”underdeveloped painting[s] for underdeveloped countries.” Did your work engage with current events in the 1960s and early 1970s? The idea of taking images from everyday reality runs through my whole career.
More than current events I was interested in what Félix Fénéon termed faits-divers. Starting with The Suicides of the Sisga and then with the furniture pieces, I appropriated press images. These included: gossip columns, accounts of trips by royalty and advertisements that I found in local newspapers (I still do it). I was particularly interested in the relationship between text and image (the captions) and minor printing defects. As well as images extracted from the press, I also worked on icons from the time, ranging from Simón Bolívar and Queen Isabella of Spain, to the Pope and pocket depictions of saints. Above all I was focusing on a provincial everyday reality, universal symbols that underwent a process of transformation through their re-localisation in the Third World. For instance an odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres could illustrate
a book dealing with exotic sexual practices. I encountered these images in bookshops in the city centre [Bogotá], discoloured or badly printed and above all decontextualised. At times, without actively searching, I came across images of this sort on common objects, for example, packages that my sister sent me from London, on chocolate wrappings etc. These to a certain extent also belonged to the everyday realm I had an interest in.current events in the 1960s and early 1970s? The idea of taking images from everyday reality runs through my whole career. More than current events I was interested in what Félix Fénéon termed faits-divers. Starting with The Suicides of the Sisga and then with the furniture pieces, I appropriated press images. These included: gossip columns, accounts of trips by royalty and advertisements that I found in local newspapers (I still do it).
“I’m surprised by myself, for having taken such a valiant position in this moment. Yes, sometimes I see myself like a transgressor that didn’t fit in her time.”
31 BEATRIZ GONZÁLEZ
34 JUAN MANUEL ECHAVARRÍA “Since I was born, Colombia never had a year of peace,” says the 68-year-old artist and photographer, who has lived through most of his country’s recent history of violence, starting with a decade-long bloodletting that started in 1948 and known simply as La Violencia, which pitted landowners against peasants and fuelled the rebel armed struggle. In Colombia, fighting has been going on for so long, few remember why it began. After decades of an internecine war and blood feuds between leftwing guerrillas, rightwing paramilitary groups and drug gangs, Juan Manuel Echavarría wants to block the country’s amnesia. After studying humanities in the US and art history in Italy and Greece, his artistic awakening came in 1995 when artist friends handed Echavarría a single-lens reflex camera loaded with a black-and-white roll of film. He has documented Colombia’s internal conflicts — and to international acclaim. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Musée du quai Branly in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá. “I’ve started digging into Colombia’s violence through images, building metaphors from the tragedies,” he says, likening his camera to the “reflection of Perseus’s shield” — which the mythical Greek hero used to protect himself from the Gorgon-monster Medusa, whose gaze could turn onlookers to stone. Armed with his camera, Echavarría spent much of the past two decades travelling through war-torn parts of the country “getting into the bowels of the conflict to understand it”. Among his first body of works, Flower Vase Cuts uses human bones to portray the evidence of war mutilations as botanic arrangements. “His work shows how the aesthetic can help us to understand the historical roots of Colombia’s violence.
35 JUAN MANUEL ECHAVARRÍA He drives the spectator to ask questions and make connections. One of his most recent projects, Silences (2012-2013), is a series of photographs taken in abandoned and crumbling schoolhouses in Montes de María, a mountainous rural area whose inhabitants were forcibly displaced by paramilitaries in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The protagonists are the blackboards they left behind. “They are a metaphor and witness to the war,” he says. In one photograph, a touching phrase can be spotted fading from the wall: “How beautiful is to be alive”. In another subtle but shocking image, Requiem NN, Echavarría recorded over seven years the story of several “chosen” tombs of Montes de María victims, whose bodies were carried downstream by the Magdalena River to the town of Puerto Berrío. He recorded events, first through more than 400 photographs then in an hour-long film. The bodies were fished out of the river by locals, and each grave was
marked with the abbreviation NN for “no name”. The graves were tended by locals, who became their caretakers in exchange for favours.
Peace negotiations between the government and Farc rebels are polarising Colombian public opinion, despite bringing a deal closer.
The lost souls, who have been stripped of their lives and identities, are prayed for, adopted — even named. “It is an act of resistance,” says Echavarría. “These people are not turning their backs on the dead the river brought them. They are giving them a presence, a sort of second life. Most of all, they are giving them dignity in a place that is full of dead and disappeared, victims of guerrillas, paramilitaries and state forces.”
The photographer and videographer’s works are important: in this war, the poor are the losers, and without blame or pity Echavarría’s work brings perpetrators and victims to the same level. Painting by a former Colombian guerilla soldier, from Juan Manuel Echavarría’s project to be exhibted at the Musee d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux in December.
36 JUAN MANUEL ECHAVARRÍA The images — almost always against the backdrop of Colombia’s lush green countryside — are striking, not because of its content, but because the chainsaws used to dismember victims; the massacres, shoot-outs, kidnappings, air raids, pools of blood and bodies dumped into the river, are painted with childish naivety. A naive painting by Jhon depicting his uncle in his plantation of coca — cocaine’s raw material, is a case in point. In the painting, rebel assassins tie his uncle to a tree trunk for a fortnight, where he is embraced by his teenage daughter, before accusing him of being an informer and killing him. “They painted like children because they never had the opportunity to hold a pencil for too long. From a very young age they were forced to hold a gun instead,” says Echavarría. “It is a very innocent language to describe the horror, which in turn makes it a brutal encounter between art and reality.” That encounter may be on its way to find a place in Colombia’s history, but probably not until a peace deal is signed, he says: “It will take time for these paintings to be valued. When peace finally comes, they will be looked upon with more interest and less prejudice. For now, we are still at war and everything is very raw.”
37 JUAN MANUEL ECHAVARRÍA “These people are not turning their backs on the dead the river brought them. They are giving them a presence, a sort of second life.”