The meeting between two cities as diverse and complex as Bogotá and Cologne is an important opportunity for artistic experience to help shed light on their points of convergence and divergence.
The meeting between two cities as diverse and complex as Bogotá and Cologne is an important opportunity for artistic experience to help shed light on their points of convergence and divergence.
Two Colombian artists had the experience of living in and sensing the city of Cologne for two months, and from that experience, expressing in images what impacted them most. In turn, two German artists and a Colombian artist residing in Cologne visited Bogotá to generate a similar experience, now on exhibit at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá.
This process, in which cartographies, sounds, images, and lived experiences all converge, is in itself an entire laboratory for experimentation – not in a pragmatic sense, but through a thoroughly praxiological approach, that is, one in which observation, appropriation, and the visual resolution of a problem converge.
It is true that each individual's own experiences generate divergences; we could say this is the most positive part, since these divergences help to shape a much broader, more complete map of the place and the surroundings in which the artist lives and develops their work.
The works presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá within the Zone of Convergence are precisely the diverse appropriations of sound, space, and image that these three artists have built from different perspectives on the city, its inhabitants, its values, and its experiences, both urban and rural.
If only there were many more zones of divergence and convergence, so that many cities, many regions of the country, could sit down calmly and look each other directly in the eye within spaces of convergence and divergence, without fear of being excluded, subjected to violence, or marginalised for their ideas, visions, and perceptions of reality, of fantasy, of imagination, of dreams.
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá likewise presents itself as a zone of convergence, while also making room for divergent perceptions; a space for learning and for generating knowledge.
The exhibition opens on November 20 at 6 pm and will be open to the public until January 23, 2016.
Gustavo A. Ortiz
MAC Director