[THE LA LOMA TESTIMONY]
• PERFORMANCE / INSTALLATION• MEDELLÍN, COLOMBIA • 2016 •
David Ramírez [CO] & Troels Primdahl [DK]
& Friends from La Loma, San Cristobal
Opening Night 17th November 2016
Paul Bardwell Contemporary
Colombo Americano Medellín
TO TRANSGRESS AN INVISIBLE BORDER
[The La Loma Testimony]
David Ramírez [CO] & Troels Primdahl [DK]
in collaboration with friends from La Loma, San Cristóbal
It is already happening: a revolt against the urban violence taking place in an outskirt village northeast of Medellín. Through artistic practices a group of inhabitants are redefining themselves as a new family of La Loma. A family who dissents from belonging to one of the combos and hence from joining the battle for control of the criminal underworld. And with this initiative they are risking everything.
Like an elephant in the room an awkwardly over-dimensioned white ACNUR car made of wood and pvc seems to address an obvious problem. Occupying the gallery space with a contraintuitive impression of immobility the automobile starts unfolding a multitude of unanswered questions. As an object supposed to move, the car seems to be stuck in a violent history which has been going on for too long and which still leads to an everyday life of forced recruitment, intra-urban displacements, extortion and sexual abuse.
The installation of a black tunnel creates a labyrinth pathway into a deeper psychological contemplation on the current situation in La Loma. From an explorative mesh of compositional and choreographic elements a performance cycle is slowly emerging in the dark. Eleven performers are devoting their voices and their bodies to become one instrument while they seek to bear witness about the complex emotions that reigns behind the ongoing fight for transgression and emancipation. After a while it becomes clear how darkness and light, noise and silence, stillness and movement give birth to each others destruction somehow.
This is not an exhibition. The works presented here should rather be perceived as a testimony; a proof. Due to La Loma’s strategic location, ideal for para-military drugsmugling organisations, the place has become a Gordian knot. Though, just as Gordian knots can only be solved by making a cut, this is exactly what the new family of La Loma is already doing - by transgressing the invisible borders with a yearning for love and friendship.
»Perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, and yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity; the flash loses itself in this space it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent now that it has given name to obscurity.«
Michel Foucault: A Preface to Transgression
