GOLD AND SKULLS

Drawings and installation views.
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As a child, my appreciation of pre-Colombian Indigenous cultures came from looking at art exhibited in archeological exhibitions like those on display at the Gold Museum in Bogota. Together with ceramics, food and gourds, gold ornaments were buried beside people to assist them in their passage to the next life, Gold and mummies always went together, and in this sense, funerary art was the pride of our museums. No wonder it had such an influence on my art.

I made an artwork mimicking the gold helmets exhibited at the Gold Museum, using gold leaf on Totumas (a hollow wooden vessel made from the gourd of the calabash tree). I placed them on metal toads typical of a pre-Colombian game called “El Juego del Sapo/The Game of the Toad”, where players compete to toss metal rings or brass coins inside the mouth of the three metal toads. I love the fact that the game continues to be popular, our Indigenous roots still alive.

In my installations “The Toad Game” and “Golden Helmets” (both from 1993), I combined the metal toads, totumas and 24 karat gold leaf to reflect on Indigenous representations and their validity today. I recognized in them the value of our ancestors and the ongoing impact the natural and cultural environment of the Americas has on us all.

SOCCER BALL
Human craniums, plastic tubing, glue.

My father used to tell me that the Conservatives were bad people. I would ask him, "why?" He would then tell me that during the period of" la violencia" , they used to play soccer with the Liberals ' heads. Stories like this one are part of the Colombian collective memory.

I glued together two human craniums in order to create a rolling ball. One recognizes them as craniums only on noting the fissures in them. This piece combines the entertainment (and competitive) elements of sports, with death and violence. Such odd mixture is as relevant today as in my father story.

In the context of the intense patriotism and disappointment that the Colombian team had at home during the Soccer World Cup 1994, death threats received by Colombian soccer players and coach, and the murder of one of them, make this macabre reference once again relevant in Colombian history.

English