From idea to action. Artistic practices of resistance against forgetting.
From idea to action. Artistic practices of resistance against forgetting.
A review of Bogotá's urban transformation through ephemeral interventions of political art in urban spaces, 2000–2015
The main objective is to fight against the inexorable forgetting that characterizes our society, and to see through the eyes of artists how their artistic practices are aimed at social action as the city undergoes a morphological restructuring of its architecture and social distribution. Consequently, with continuous growth — both physical and in population — it becomes necessary to control the improvised, self-built forms of housing and their illegal occupation of the city's outlying areas. What at first sought control of public office became, with the electoral victory, a war against the unions that revived the armed conflict over land, extending to the city a form of homemade social justice carried out by bandits with no ideology whatsoever. The conviction that only military force could restore order led, on June 13, 1953, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to stage a coup against the government of President Laureano Gómez, under the banner of a ceasefire and a path toward democracy. Ideologically close to Gaitán, Rojas Pinilla believed that a new social order was needed, with rights and interests that recognized the majority. The civic-military action of mutual support between the people and the army made the general the new popular leader.
The national development project proposed by Rojas Pinilla, led by the presidency's Economic Secretariat, extended to the agricultural, livestock, mining, and industrial sectors the exclusivity that, until then, coffee had held as an economic source. Bogotá annexed six surrounding municipalities, projecting to the outskirts important facilities such as El Dorado Airport, the National Administrative Center (CAN), and the Avenida de Las Américas, which, among others, drove growth and development toward the north and west of the city.
In the cultural sphere, this government promoted the arrival of television in the country. His popularity made him Gaitán's apparent successor, which is why liberal and conservative leaders withdrew their support. Through the Binomio Pueblo-Fuerzas Armadas party, Rojas Pinilla attempted to remain in power, with an immediate response of a three-day national strike by bankers, business owners, traditional political parties, merchants, and church leaders, which ended the regime on May 10, 1957. Provisional power was held by the Military Junta until June 20, 1957, when the period known as the Frente Nacional (National Front) began, with the Sitges pact signed by Laureano Gómez, Alberto Lleras Camargo, Darío Echandía, Eduardo Santos, Alfonso López Pumarejo, Mariano Ospina Pérez, and Roberto Urdaneta. This agreement proposed ending disputes between parties through sixteen years of alternating power between them. At the end of World War II, as the challenge of stabilizing the country's economy and politics was being settled, Latin America, along with Asia and Africa, came to be called the Third World. At that point the United States increased its economic influence in developing countries, such as ours, to prevent the spread of communism, which threatened its dominance given the proximity of Cuba. Under the administration of J.F. Kennedy, the program known as the Alliance for Progress set out a ten-year plan to improve the country's economic and social conditions so that it could become part of the developed world. The scant investment in rural areas under that project and by the National Government forced many peasants to turn to growing coca and poppy, joining the ranks of a guerrilla group or arming themselves to defend their crops, as the only option for economic survival.
The limited room for any political ideology outside the liberal or conservative parties after the Sitges Pact increased social segregation in the cities. Nevertheless, the lack of a project that would plan the city as an inclusive place, given its complex and diverse character, raised the threshold of violence and social discrimination, which, combined with the armed conflict and problems of common crime, turned this lawless land (TAUSSIN) into the most violent country in the world. (AYRES)
Liliana Gonzalez
Curator