Expurgo (edificio Mónaco), 2022
Video-installation with 3 channels
«The future is an indifferent void that nobody is interested in, while the past is full of life and its face excites us, irritates us, offends us and that is why we want to destroy it or retouch it. Men want to own the future just so they can change the past. They fight to enter the laboratory where photographs are retouched and biographies and history are rewritten».
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The implosion of the Mónaco building, owned by the late Medellin cartel boss Pablo Escobar, was a decision that sparked a debate around historical memory in the country, in relation to the denial of the conflict and the establishment of an official narrative. Disappearing or destroying evidence has always been a strategy that is convenient for certain sectors of the country's ruling class that have been interested in erasing the links with organized crime which, in many cases, still persist.
The project was conceived as an audiovisual and editorial archeology based on an urban interference that consisted of inscribing the word EXPURGO on a large scale on the terrace of the building. A tautological gesture about the ins and outs, of a memory that is pierced in what was once a symbol of ostentation and power, and that stood like a ruin in the heart of southern Medellín. A last writing condemned to disappear, to be devoured by the noise of the implosion.
Archive work becomes the substrate through which the dispute over historical memory that crosses Colombian society is evidenced, where counter-narratives become the basis for continuing a debate, a mechanism that allows the discussion to continue, open and plural.
, Colombia