Juan Manuel Echavarría, La bandeja de Bolívar
of liberty through the violent metamorphosis of a piece of crockery, a replica of the one received by the liberator at the foundation of the Republic, a white and fine debris that manifests the destiny of a country where the devastating boomerang of drug-trafficking blossomed.
Echevarría’ s subject is war, the violent disappearance of bodies. He finds the symbolic relationships formulated by his work through the representation of bordering circumstances, the same border that separates a country from its normality and recovers a glimpse of the abyss
for the spectator, embellished, complex, and hard to define. This way he evidences the amazing transformation processes of people who live through violent processes, occasional testimonies for future life, as a result of traumatic fixes that mark them, just like murder: the drama implied by leaving the world by a foreign hand.
Probably one of his more moving pieces, the Bocas de Ceniza( 2003-2004) video – which really is a photographic portrait with movement – depicts singing as a resistance act, an aesthetical act that appears where everything crumbles,
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