Ciudad Negra
2024-25, waste, recycled objects, wood, metal, clay, plaster, plastic, cardboard, wire, masking tape, industrial anti-corrosive matte black paint, metal structure, T14 LED tubes, cables, MDF platforms. Performative photo series, 6 prints of 250 gr on Hahnemuhle matte paper, black and white, framed, 700 x 140 x 120 cm.
“And thus in a whirlwind that seems endless, each new story confronts us with the intolerable evidence that the decomposition of cities advances in a race that drags everything in its path, like a landslide of mud and detritus. The sinister, that almost always imperceptible transformation of the familiar and the known into something threatening, malignant, terrible, was unsettling the national landscape. We were filled with symbols and metaphors, with hints and signs, a new utopia beginning to dissolve into a Black City.”
The Oblivion We Will Be
Héctor Abad Faciolince
The whitening of cities, of places, of people is accompanied by a recovery of brutality, understanding this as a primordial state adhered to natural stimulus.
The essence of the brutal implies violence, the use of force and power, a lack of knowledge, a lack of culture, and the loss of rational legacies.
A state of malice establishes that rupture to the rational state, to the reflective space, unleashing a field of impurity where the episode of war materializes in all areas, from the simplest social configurations to the State.
The construction of an armamentary baggage is the accumulation of whitened desires, of sanitized images throughout historical processes, the containment of such brutality, of such original effervescence in the creation of an object that destroys, that deteriorates flesh, things, ideas, forms. The subterranean layer of harmony, dialogue, thought. But thought also takes from that materiality and twists the gaze to hint at the ambiguity of the human being.
Ciudad Negra is a research project that began in 2016, during the Art-Laboratories residencies in Medellín, Colombia. Its second staging took place in 2017 at the Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende (MSSA). The third stage will be held at the XVII Biennial of Cuenca, Ecuador, in 2025.
