« Resilience » Installation. Old books about the colonization of America, golden thread, needles, earth and mud, wood, light, sound. Dimensions: 900X600X300 cm. 2019.
According to Karl Marx, people make their history from the inheritance their ancestors left. Inheritance which they carry like a nightmare. In 1492 Latin America was colonized. During that colonization, the native American people and the enslaved Africans lived a violent castration of their identity. They learned that their language, their religion, and their culture were wrong, while they had to learn a new one: that of civilized men. From that moment the native American people and enslaved Africans learned that they were inferior and that feeling of inferiority has been inherited from generation to generation. In the installation «Résilience» the artist Camila Rodríguez Triana creates a healing ritual for that inheritance, in which she tries to recover that lost ancestral wisdom, that for her lives in every Latin American man or woman in an unconscious way. First, she intervenes several pages of books on the colonization of America written from the point of view of the colonists. She paints them with earth and mud and then embroiders the names of her ancestors with gold threads. These names are decomposing in their phonemes to go from a human language to a language of divine symbols. Likewise, with the musician Holman Álvarez, she composes a song for each name. Sixteen songs in total. Every time a song is played, one of the embroidered names radiates light. In the middle of the installation hangs a Tunjo, a woven figure that the artist made as an offering to the Gods to ask for this healing.

Resiliencia / Résilience (Visual Arts).

« Improvisation # 1 » Performance or Video. Thread, spool of thread, piano, chair, history book. 23'32 ”mins. 4K. Color. Stereo Sound. ProRes. Dialogues in Spanish. Subtitles in English or French. 2021.
Holman Álvarez, Camila Rodríguez Triana and Adrien Chauvin Picard meet to reflect through music, words and the body on history and the way in which the history version learned at the school affects identity. While Chauvin Picard reads random words from a history book, Álvarez and Rodríguez Triana react to those words from the sound and the body. At the same time, the actions performed by Rodríguez Triana and the sounds produced by Álvarez guide the selection of the words read by Chauvin Picard. An improvisation where the attention to the other becomes essential to generate a game of reactions. This union between what each one proposes and how it affects the other is accentuated by the thread that unites them and that borders the space where they are.

Improvisación # 1 (Visual Arts)

« In Ashes II » Video. 8 mins. 4K. Color. Stereo. ProRes. No dialogue. 2019.
«At this moment, without a doubt, the people prefer the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to reality, the appearance to being … For them, the only sacred thing is the illusion (the image), while the profane is the truth. Furthermore, the sacred grows in your eyes as the truth decreases and the illusion increases”*. The video «En Cenizas II» asks us about our social body, about how today social controls have conquered our bodies and have imposed allowed forms, uniform appearances, signs of status, culture, aesthetics, leading us to create an image of ourselves, according to what is socially demanded, but at the risk of denying our reality, our essence.

En Cenizas II / En Cendres II (Visual Arts)

« Exercises for Memory, displacement » Installation. Series of three albums. Album, objects, photographs, thread, earth. Each album is displayed on a table made by the artist from pieces of old tables. Dimensions: 260X660X200 cm. 2020.

In this project, the artist works with three families who experienced the displacement of their territory due to the violence generated by the war in Colombia among paramilitaries, guerrillas, and military forces. Families from the departments of Cundinamarca, Cauca, and Valle del Cauca. With each family, the artist reconstructs the memory of their time in that territory and of the process of their displacement.

From these memories, the artist builds three albums, each album inspired by the history of a family.  Rodríguez Triana builds a map of those memories with objects, images, and threads. Each album is exposed on an old table that has been rebuilt by the artist and that is hung on the wall. A table that allows us to feel the reconstruction of themselves that these families have made in the cities they arrived and the lack of territory and uprooting they face.

Ejercicios de memoria, Desplazamiento (Visual Arts)

« Knowledge » Installation. Book: paper, golden thread. Video. 5'08 "min. Color. Stereo. No dialogue. Variable dimensions. 2020.
In this work, the artist contrasts the image of a man who destroys a book and a book embroidered with gold thread by hand. Opposites that make us think of destruction, but also of delicacy and care. The central question that Rodríguez Triana proposes to us is about the way in which we use knowledge.

Conocimiento (Visual Arts)

« Exercises for Memory, murdered leaders » Installation. Wood, old clothes, black thread, nails, lace, sound. Dimensions: 250X250X330 cm. 2021.
In the work «Memory for exercises, murdered leaders», Rodríguez Triana works around the assassinations of social leaders in Colombia following the signing of the peace agreement between the Juan Manuel Santos’ government and the FARC guerrillas. Around 350 social leaders have been assassinated in Colombia between 2016 and 2020. A number that continues to increase day by day, while the government of the current president Iván Duque keeps silent.

Rodríguez Triana builds the Colombian map using old clothes which she has collected from people who were born and live in Colombia. Clothes that the artist has smeared with mud. On this map, the artist marks with nails the places where social leaders have been assassinated. Later, Rodríguez Triana weaves with black thread the route of these murders chronologically: from the first occurrence in 2016 to the last one registered in January 2021. The black thread is held at its corners by pieces of lead, the material from which bullets are made.

While the public looks at this piece that lies on the ground, the voice of the artist is heard reading the list of the names of the social leaders murdered in her country. Assassinations that are sustained over the silence of the other inhabitants of Colombia.

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Camila Rodríguez Triana