UNWEAVING COUNTRY
Unweaving country is a process of intervention of the Colombian flag that invites people to disseminate the concept of national identity through social gatherings, conversations, and different poetic and material translations.
These gatherings invites Colombian migrants living in Spain to unravel the Colombian flag while talking about territorial experiences and ways of inhabiting Colombian political contexts. I'm accumulating the frayed threads, audio recordings of conversations and documents related to flag history to generate an archive of this decomposed symbol. For the Public Domain solo exhibition (Diaspora cultural space, Bogotá 2024), I edited and printed the sound waves of one of the conversations and copied them with the frayed threads to generate a graphic composition between both materials. The threads are not embroidered or woven; they are only arranged on methacrylate plates, allowing a superposition with the printed texture. In addition to this, I created a list of approximately two hundred verses, using words from the conversations and from the archives collected, to form a polysemy of meanings for the word country: Banana skin country, Volatile impression country, Unfinished treaty country, Witches letters country, among others. This poetic list was written on the wall with carbon paper, transferring the printed verses.
The project propose textural forms of language that question the idea of a homogeneous and sovereign territory (implicit in the concept of country).
Year: since 2019.
Description: project in process.
> Public domain solo exhibition , Diáspora cultural house in Bogotá (2024).
Throughout the process, I have been experimenting with different graphics, impressions and interventions of the flag that I consider equally important. One of those explorations was a book that I made printing some of these graphics on two discolored Colombian flags, folding them as a fanzine. For the exhibition "Temptations, contingent exhibition" in Complutense University of Madrid (2023), I displayed the book on a table with some frayed threads from the unweaving encounters. Attendees could see, touch and rearrange the material as they wanted.
