Irrupciones, compresiones, contravenciones

Former visual arts director in Colombia's Ministry of Culture (1997-2001), and after more than 10 years in the United States, author Miguel Rojas-Sotelo explains how the new Colombian Constitution (1991) shaped cultural policies and the production and professionalization of visual art, literature, and mass media. The book "examines the insistence of Colombian middle class intellectuals to reexamine the founding events of the nation, including the scientific, geographical and ethnographic Expeditions of the mid-19th century. This tendency responds to a nostalgic desire to claim an uncompleted process to construct modernity. It is an example of societal schizophrenia but at the same time of social sensitivity that seeks to understand the nationœs present by uncovering the retro. A comparative examination of the work of the artists María Elvira Escallón (b. 1954) and Libia Posada (b. 1961) is used to illustrate aspects of public life and its interactions with the domestic sphere in Colombia. Subsequently, the text focuses on the cultural violence that has marginalized, exoticized and racialized certain population groups that are constitutive of the nation. This section presents the case of Abel Rodríguez (b.1941), a Nonuya indigenous man who has over the past decade, like a modern day successor to the Expedition naturalists, dedicated himself to illustrating thousands of botanical and animal species. Rodríguez is an example of a process of adaptation and capture that has rejected the denial of non-Eurocentric viewpoints that marked the logic of the Expeditions and of Western scientific thinking. Such responses are now embedded in the processes of cultural construction inaugurated by the 1991 Constitution and the emergence of new cultural markets in the country. Finally, the work of Juan Obando (b. 1980) illustrates an interstitial space that gives rise to a critical/anarchic possibility. The book discusses the way in which an image has been constructed of a docile nation based on a popular culture that has been domesticated by the forces of the global market (associated in this case with narcoculture). The international brandingʺ of the country and its bizarre domestic mirror are present in Obandoœs work, apparent in its bi-directional movement: at the same time central to, and on the margins of, national debate: operating, like many contemporary creators in the country, along a geological fault line." (HKB Translation)--Verso Cover.