“Caliban”, an anagram of the word cannibal, is an exhibition that reflects on and questions the identity of Antioquia. It is by the Medellín-based artist from Cartagena Roberto Ochoa and is on display at the Medellín Museum of Modern Art until April 9.
The artists Danny Castaño, Mariana Gil Ríos and Wallace Vieira Masuko were invited to this exhibition. “Caliban” is intended as a “playground”. It is a playful installation that mixes sculptural furniture and videos created from the recombination of symbols of modern Antioquia. Roberto Ochoa points out that he takes as his starting point two references in which visuality has been produced based on the imaginaries about Antioqueñidad: the sculptural work of Fernando Botero and the film “Bajo el cielo antioqueño” (1925).
The term was coined in 1971 when the Cuban intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar wrote his famous essay “Caliban” for the magazine “Casa de las Américas” and introduced the figure of the “savage” into the debate on identity in Latin America and the Caribbean to questioning the historical formation of the region.The anthropophagic use of the term by Retamar, more distant from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” or Montaigne’s essayism (where it had its origins), and closer to the emancipatory ideas of Antillean thinkers Aimé Césaire or George Lamming, proposed inverting the image of Latin America that had been forged since the colonial process.”Caliban” was for the Cuban essayist a possibility of emancipation from the hegemonic centers of power.
This exhibition takes the power of this image, in which the cannibal rebels to question history and identity, with the intention of proposing a reading that allows one to question the imaginaries inherited in Antioquia after the process that, mainly between the 19th and 19th centuries, XX, was known as “colonization of Antioquia” and that contributed, among other things, to the displacement and elimination of indigenous communities that had a close relationship with the Caribbean.
tensions and contradictions
It is not a secret that identity in Antioquia has been a sort of pantheon in discord, loaded with tensions and contradictions. For example, while the expansion took place towards the lands of southern Antioquia, Quindío, the north of Valle del Cauca and Tolima, there was also access for peasant families, which led to economic development opening new paths, with planting crops and mining extraction. This panorama allowed the regional elites to establish large estates in which asymmetrical relations of class, race and gender were reproduced. While the first situation may have contributed to a type of agrarian reform or popular modernity, the second highlighted the marginal and oppressive conditions of indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant communities under clearly patriarchal forces. It was in this scenario that the myths of progress and development fixed the imaginaries about the Antioquian identity.
The change in the economic model at the beginning of the 20th century, which went from a fundamentally agricultural and mining economy to an industrial economy, required, according to Pedro Adrián Zuluaga, ambitious social engineering by the elites of Medellín. The invention of the myth of Antioqueñidad was carried out by white men, mainly from the upper class, which relegated women, Afro-descendants and indigenous people to a marginal, discriminatory and submissive plane. That the dominant groups have exercised a discursive control over this imaginary, under the signs of progress, strength and development, is part of a sophisticated process of forging the Antioquian temperament.
In this sense, “Caliban” is an invitation to decolonize the paisa ethos, a show that encourages us to think, unlearn, transform and recompose the patriarchal, disciplined and industrialized imaginary while rescuing another Antioqueñidad that has been marginalized. How to decolonize a settler? This question refers to a condition of possibility and reminds us that the figure of the settler in Antioquia is not pure, but diverse.
For its part, in “Bajo el cielo antioqueño” the upper class is portrayed as a Creole aristocracy (what José Martí called “European America”), an eraser or a copy of the bourgeois culture of Europe: enlightened, refined, loving of progress, catholic and altruistic.
Guest artists
The project proposes a collaborative reissue of the film by different artists who, with fragments and new montages, weave together alternative narratives. Thus, Danny Castaño, from a popular language traversed by humor and irony, proposes a narrative adaptation of some fragments of the film, demystifying the regional high bourgeoisie of the original images; Mariana Gil Ríos presents an interactive intervention in which the public can superimpose their face on fragments previously edited by her, which, moreover, are recomposed throughout the exhibition, weaving different readings that escape the linearity of the initial story, revealing forms of being and appearing that make new narratives possible; and, finally, Wallace Vieira Masuko superimposes two images: that of a camera located on the terrace of the Museum, which points towards the horizon and shows a portion of what happens under the Antioquian sky, proposing a relationship between sign and landscape, between limitation of the horizon and the sensation of confinement by geography, while the intertitles of the film appear in a sequence that coincides with its reading aloud.
Additionally, a series of performative readings will be carried out during the time of the sample. In them, a mule costume, the animal par excellence that allowed the Antioquian colonization, will be used to stage the underground stories of these Calibanesque figures in Antioquia.
Finally, it should be said that this exhibition is raised in terms of a pedagogical curatorship. For this reason, throughout the exhibition different actions will be carried out that seek to activate the dialogue on conjunctural points of the Antioquian temperament. Thinking about the possibilities of cannibalizing this ethos through the body, food, geography or the image itself, gives rise to a public program that tries to extend the contents of the show beyond the limits within which the artistic field usually operates. .