From the North end of Bolívar Plaza, through crowded rows of Colombian soldiers, I see a 5-foot tall photograph of a woman's face. Her eyes are pensive, transfixed in defeat, and her wrinkles quote a consternation that has enduringly carved her expression. A few days later, having lunch in a cafeteria called Jugueteria-toy store-I find out that her name is Ana de Dios, and her brother has been killed, an additional one victim of La Violencia.
Erika Diettes is the Colombian artist behind de Dios' photograph, which is one of three pieces in the artist's most recent work, A Punta de Sangre (By the force of the bloodshed). Contemporarily, La Violencia refers to the uncut brutality of civil friction in Colombia, which originates from an era of political unrest and bloodshed during the late 1940s. Such a broad, overused expression absolutely obscures the pain the term encompasses. "Sometimes citizen get kidnapped because of money. Sometimes it's because of power. And sometimes it's just politics," Diettes says as she sits down and pulls out a thick black journal filled with photos, notes, quotations, and memories.
Macbook 13
In de Dios' case, no one knows why her brother went missing or why he was killed, and that's true with the majority of these occurrences in Colombia. While most of the Colombian friction is generalized as paramilitary vs. Guerilla warfare, most of the time, the violence has nothing to do with whether a person is affiliated with whether group. Diettes explains that usually, no one knows why their house members are kidnapped. "They could be recruited, it could be vengeance, it could be anything" Diettes says. De Dios' found out about her brother's murder from a seek during a town meeting. "He couldn't remember if [they] had chopped up the body or burned it, but he knew he was killed," Diettes explains in a succinct but polite tone. The reality is disturbing, but it's a reality de Dios has to acknowledge.
Typically, the bodies of the victims are disregarded in the rivers of Colombia, the turbulent waters sweeping them away. "Ana said every time she saw a river, she would search for his body," Diettes tells me, explaining that because there is relatively no hope for seeing the victims alive, their families only seek to give them a allowable burial. Rivers approximately come to be cemeteries for the victims, which is why Diettes uses water as a symbol throughout her work. In the second piece of A Punta de Sangre, a panel of translucent water is used, adding a calming sense of reassurance to the exhibit as a whole. "I use the water as a metaphor of memory," she says. "Life is water. Life flows on. It is cleansing, purifying." The photograph is reminiscent of Río Abajo, or Drifting Away, Diettes' primary exhibit, in which she borrowed articles of clothing belonging to the victims, and photographed the shirts, shoes, and troops uniforms in water, preserving their memories and addressing the human aspect of an issue that has come to be so politicized. Warfare in the middle of the paramilitary and the guerilla is so vague and seemingly pointless that the friction is comparable to inner city gang warfare. The fighting continues not because of political differences, but out of revenge for the consequences of war. Diettes explains that one house had a son in the paramilitary and an additional one son in the guerilla. "It is easy to be the victim, and it is easy to come to be the one who inflicts the pain," Diettes says. "I'm not curious in the politics. I'm curious in Ana's pain."
From her quaint studio in Bogotá, I watch a video interpretation of Río Abajo, filmed in the rural areas of Colombia where much of this violence takes place. Even from her 15" inch Macbook, the photographs are haunting.
The video captures one of her most leading feats. In order to allow the victims' families some sort of memorial, Diettes went to East Antioquia, a State known for being one of the most hazardous in Colombia, and displayed all of the pieces that were part of Río Abajo. Normally, these pieces are printed on 5-foot tall glass, like the three in Bolívar Plaza, and positioned so that the viewer must walk nearby every one of the glass panels. Designed to look as if tombstones, the exhibit is intended to give the viewer the sense of walking through a cemetery. But in East Antioquia, Diettes wanted to furnish the families a memorial, not an exhibit. So she was intent on along with each photo she had taken, making sure everybody had the chance to remember the person they lost. One hundred and fifty photographs, lit faintly by candlelight, were suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned community hall.
As the video reeled on, I couldn't help but notice a shot of vultures drawing circles in the sky above a seemingly calm river. "After traveling a year and a half," Diettes told me, "I found one thing coarse to all was that the families would follow the vultures." She explains that instead of a harbinger of death, the vulture becomes a symbol of hope to many of these families. Upon spotting one in the sky, they will run to see if the bird has found the body of person they know. So for the third piece of A Punta de Sangre, Diettes had a vulture captured, brought to her studio, and photographed. In the photograph, she has somehow managed to capture a look of sorrow and shame in the bird, who she named Lucho. She explains the intrigue in interpreting this animal, typically related with the negative side of death, as something more positive, allowing the vulture to come to be an approximately angelic symbol to "show citizen the way." Diettes points out how, in her photograph of Lucho, his beak is pointed downward, resembling a prayer position. "In the photograph, it is like he's saying, this is my job. I have to do this," Diettes says. "He is like the executioner request the victims for forgiveness."
An Anthropology graduate with a Bfa in Communications, Diettes studied at Universidad de Los Andes, a prestigious college in Bogotá. "I always wondered, how do citizen survive violence? How do you live with it? That's what made me want to study anthropology." She continues, explaining that the violence citizen suffer eventually transforms them. "You can see it in their eyes," she says, pointing out a young man's face in her overflowing journal. The primary inspiration for her work was a newspaper article, chronicling the struggle of one victim's family. "I had taken photographs of clothing before, but for fun. Then I read this report and put it together." So she decided to have lunch with a friend who knew some of the victims' families personally. She proposed her project-that she would like to take articles of victims' clothing and photograph them in water. He asked Erika how serious she was, and then the two went to his office where Diettes met one of the victim's mothers. "I told her [about] my plans. She was skeptical and said, 'you better come next Saturday'. So I did." Soon enough, many families started sending Diettes boxes of clothing, which she would at once return after photographing, letting the citizen know she was serious. "Every puny thing," Diettes asserts, "I gave back."
Many times, however, these families are forced out of their homes and naturally have nothing left, like the woman Diettes met who had nothing left from her son but a tree he planted. "She brought me two puny branches wrapped in a napkin." Because the woman realized Erika typically used clothing in her work, she asked, "does that mean my son is not worth anything to you?" Diettes, of course, photographed the branches. absolutely the memorial held in East Antioquia proved that Diettes' exertion is not about what Río Abajo is worth to her, but to the families. Erika's work provides a collective purpose that functions beyond addressing a topic of unrest in contemporary Colombian society; it provides a representation of the citizen that have collectively come to be known as Los Desaparecidos-the missing. The photographs give their loved ones fulfillment in knowing that person was curious in validating their son, daughter, brother, or sister, and this fulfillment maybe makes it easier to continue the mourning process in a natural way.
Ana's face, in the middle of bustling Bolívar Plaza and next to the deep, concerted eyes of a vulture, beg the viewer's gaze-including my own-as an ice cream vendor tells me he's been displaced by La Violencia. There's no way of telling whether he's sincere or just using the emergency to evoke my condolement and spare change. At any rate, I give him both, knowing that many impoverished Colombians register themselves with the government as displaced because doing so makes them more noteworthy for funding. Like the report next to A Punta de Sangre reads, the stories behind La Violencia are lost as "a short note before entertainment gossips section." But the stories are also lost in politics, as the issue becomes a means for citizen to receive quicker government funding. And they're also lost in phrases. Phrases like, Los Desaparecidos,which amass everyone's disappeared relative or friend in one uncomplicated and concise expression. Even using the word stories diminishes the very essence of its function in the situation. It's a word that is absolutely lacking. It lacks the exaggeration of a modest pink dress, the epaulets on a soldier's uniform, and the school crest ironed on a red sweater of person that died too young. Maybe the shortcoming of words is what partially inspired Diettes to use photographs to communicate. "The pain cannot be expressed through words," she says. "Words limit some things."
Defining Blood - A Spectator's Interpretation of Erika Diettes' A Punta De SangreRelated : เสื้อผ้า มือ สอง ราคา Patong Hotel Phuket 13.3 inch
