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Juan Manuel Echavarria turned to the viseul arts just under ten years ago. He makes virtuoso use of photography ans video in pursuing his declared aim of adressing the urgent social and political problems of his native Colombia.
Bocas de Ceniza (Mouth of Ashes) is the name of the place where the Rio Magdalena, one of Colombia’s largest rivers, flows into the Caribbean. The conquistadors discovered it on Ash Wednesday and named it accordingly. The Rio Magdalena was the starting point for their conquest ans exploitation of the country. To this day, the river is a symbol of violence and death, sice thousands of corpses from the drog war in Colombia have been ”disposed of” here. The devastation wreaked by this civil war, ultimately caused and prolonged by US drug policy, is reflected in Echavarria’s video Bocas de ceniza, which demonstrates quite simply that the power of art is much greater when conveying the consequences of vilence than when depitching acts of violence themselves. |
