Visual noise/visual memory:
recent videos from Colombia
curated by Michèle Faguet

Just as the media fragments that make their way to the outside fail to represent the structures of power responsible for the increasingly obscure political and social narratives that define everyday life in Colombia, this particular selection of videos does not seek to describe anything like new tendencies in art-making practices from there. And yet the media reference is apt to describe the inadequacy of representation that always implies a potentially hegemonic function. On the work of José Alejandro Restrepo Paulo Herkenhoff has written, "There are steps that must be taken to make visible what was consigned to the shadows or to obscurity. Perhaps his most striking temporal modality is to impede the filing away of the present itself."

Whether it be through the recuperation of audiovisual memory—the collective, urban trauma of Burbano and Bravo or the intimate, familiar accounts of Hernández and Vargas mediated by the passing of time and the filters of memory—or the recontextualization of images that are appropriated from other sources or uses (Arenas, Díaz, Restrepo), these works desire to glean more subtle, intricate narratives from the visual noise that surrounds us.

PROGRAM:

Agonía by Rolando Vargas
2000-2001, 3 min. 16 sec.
Agonía is an animated fiction in which various characters take part in a fictitious mosaic of individual, tragic histories.

TazaDecafé by Rolando Vargas
1997, 3 min. 59 sec.
TazaDeCafé is a videografia of a family. An anthology of a personal history, it is a video that while non-narrative, opens up the possibilities of constructing narratives in the interstices of its varied layers. Rolando Vargas is a Bogotá based video artist who has just completed Exiliados en Exilio, a documentary video on German/Japanese concentration camps in Colombia during World War II.

Medios I (nace y muere Bogotá) by Andrés Burbano
2002, 1 min. 3 sec.
Medios II (el asalto a Bogota) by Andrés Burbano
2002, 1 min. 15 sec.
View the video
Medios III (melancolía en Bogotá) by Andrés Burbano
2002, 2 min. 30 sec.
View the video
Medios I,II,and III are part of a video clip series that researchs the audiovisual memory in Bogotá.
Medios I, Bogotá is born and dies:
April 9 1948: the presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan is assassinated, the city is in chaos and is burned: el bogotazo.
Medios II, the assault on Bogotá:
November 6 1985: the guerrilla group M-19 invades the supreme court; the armed forces refuse to negotiate leading to a confrontation right in front of the presidential palace.
Medios III, melancholy in Bogotá:
August 19 1989: the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan is assassinated by narcotics traffickers, it is one of the saddest moments in the city’s history.

Da te la vuelta by Adriana Arenas
2002, 2 min.
Although filled with iconographic sources that refer back to what Euridice Arratia has argued as "cultural identity…based solely on geographical specificity," her work disrupts the sort of facile narratives that might lend themselves to a set of tired clichés about nostalgia and memory. Da te la vuelta shows the image of a Spanish bullfighter parading about the ring sporting a Mexican sombrero in one hand and two ears in the other.
View the video

Iconomía (excerpts) by José Alejandro Restrepo
2000
José Alejandro Restrepo is Bogotá based artist who recently participated in the Tempo, the inaugural exhibition of MOMA queens. Iconomía is the product of an obsessive investigation of the media inflicted visual codes active in ideological constructs that inform ideas about faith and social cohesion in contemporary Colombia.
View the video

Coqueta (pilot version) by Simon Hernández
2001, 8.20 minutes
In his video work, Hernández draws upon the formal language of B movies, mid-day dramatic television programs and crime series to create portraits of the urban landscape and the individual’s place in it. In Coqueta the artist has appropriated a forgotten film reel documenting the wedding of his parents. The poor quality of the projected image emphasizes a sense of loss, of something that occurred but which nobody remembers. To make public this documentation is to incorporate this image into our collective memory—producing a kind of mediated memoir that no longer has any personal relevance. Simon Hernández is an artist based in Bogotá and member of the collective El Vicio.
View the video

Baño en el cañito by Wilson Díaz
2000, 3 min. 39 sec.
Wilson Díaz is a Cali based artist who work ranges from painting to video to installation. This video voyeauristically captures a group of young members of the guerilla group FARC bathing in a stream—an image that is charged both with homoerotic desire and a sense of intimacy and empathy far removed from the media imagery which typically depicts such individuals in violent, alienating terms.
View the video

Anarquía en la estrada by Margarita Jimeno
1999, 4 min.
Excerpt from LA MUSICA DE LAS MALAS AMISTADES (Humberto Junca)
In June 1994 five or six friends gathered around a tape recorder with the intention of making pop music. As no one knew how to play anything, instruments were divided up. We liked the result, so we continued to get together every month or so to play music, or sometimes just to cook or watch movies. In late 1999 we produced a CD of 27 songs that functioned as a sort of photographic album of our gatherings. After receiving negative reception in the press and in a public performance in Cali, the only thing missing was a compilation of videos. So in an exhibition in the Galería Santa Fé, Planetario, Bogotá, we presented 16 videos made by friends (and members) of the group who liked our songs and shared with us a low-budget, domestic, do it yourself kind of attitude.
View the video

Soy rebelde by Elkin Calderón
2000, 3 min, 6 sec.
Elkin Calderón is a member of the artist collective El Vicio, which since 1999 has produced many video works including Posesión Extraterrestre, a mock thriller made in collaboration with movie director Jairo Pinilla. Soy rebelde is the product of an investigation that links two themes: the desire to be a star and the necessity of learning to sing in English. Produced in karaoke style the video functions as a sort of how to lesson for its viewers.
View the video

Liquify by Monika Bravo
2002 8 min. 7 sec.
Monika Bravo is a Colombian artist based in New York. Utilizing natural imagery of abstract colorful fields of snow and raindrops, this video transforms the moving image into a visual replica of a canvas. Each of these images are sectioned off and pass horizontally through the piece, creating an animated homage to painting. Sound: raydial.

@ MOCA at California Plaza
Nov. 10, 11am -5pm,