Colombian Caribbean art shines in Spain

A look at the Colombian region, at the Gabriel García Márquez Cultural Center in Madrid.

The exhibition brings together the flavor, traditions, landscape and tragedies of this Colombian region, at the Gabriel García Márquez Cultural Center in Madrid.
The Colombian Caribbean travels to Madrid. It does so with the exhibition 'Constellations and tropical insurrections', which is presented until June 7 at the Gabriel García Márquez Cultural Center of the Colombian Embassy in Spain, within the framework of Arco, one of the most important art fairs in the Hispanic world.

“It is an excellent opportunity for Colombia to show its cultural and artistic wealth at the Arco Madrid Fair, especially by highlighting artists from the Colombian Caribbean,” said María de los Ángeles Holguín, director of the Association of Friends of the National Museum of Colombia. “This not only promotes the cultural diversity of the country, but also offers a platform for our artists from this area of the country to gain international visibility, thereby strengthening the Colombian identity in the global arena.”
The exhibition is the result of joint work between the Colombian Embassy in Spain and the National Museum of Colombia.
“This is an exhibition project that weaves together works by artists from different generations starting in the 1970s,” explains Elías Doria, the curator. “Most of them are artists who are characterized by having a radical or disruptive attitude, who also help to extend a map on the Colombian Caribbean in relation to the Greater Caribbean and with transatlantic travel and other territories that could fall within the category of the Expanded Caribbean,” he adds. And he explains that for this reason the exhibition understands the Caribbean more than as a geographical space but as a conceptual space, “a place that cannot be summarized from a physical, political or historical geography, but from encounters, trips, routes, drifts, perhaps even common utopian projects between various territories of the Greater Caribbean.”

With that idea in mind, the exhibition not only includes artists from the Colombian Caribbean, but also from other regions of the country who at some point have worked on related themes. There are even works that allude to territories such as Puerto Rico, Suriname, Brazil and Guinea Bissau.
“The exhibition presents a story about the visual arts located in the Colombian Caribbean as an expanded region, which manages to promote the uniqueness of the historical, geographical and poetic particularities of that constellation network that is our Caribbean,” says William Alfonso López, director of the National Museum. “There appear a plethora of artists organized around four major axes, in an exhibition that, although not large in scope, is very well crafted, delicate, and at the same time complex.”
The axes it refers to are the following: structural racism, transatlantic travel, coloniality and the Caribbean as a microhistory of the universe, in which the artists Jessica Mitrani, La Vulcanizadora, Liliana Angulo, Carlos Motta, Calderón & Piñeros participate. , and Delcy Morelos. Informal work, historical memory, social classes and extractive economies, with works by Alexandra Gelis, Dayro Carrasquilla, Kevin Mancera and Gonzalo Fuenmayor.
Also the claim for the Caribbean landscape, the representation of the territory and the dislocation of exotic views, in which Julián Chams, Hernando 'Momo' del Villar, Carson Hudgson, José Olano, Teresa Sánchez, Ramiro Gómez and PaEntro Espacio stand out; and the identities, imaginaries, worldviews and performativities of popular culture from and about the Caribbean, with productions by Álvaro Barrios, Alfonso Suárez, María Isabel Rueda, Eusebio Siosi and Andrés Matías Pinilla.
This year, Arco Madrid, which ended yesterday, focused precisely on the art of the territories connected to the Caribbean Sea.
In this sense, the exhibition allows the importance of this region to be shown internationally. "It is clear that the country at some point went from being a nation internationally linked to the Caribbean to being a fundamentally Andean nation, and they allow us to raise important questions both in the international field and in the national field and, above all, integrate the field Colombian artist to international debates about the Greater Caribbean,” explains López. “I don't want to say that there are no voices in Colombia that are on that stage, but we must recognize that these are voices that do not resonate powerfully, but rather are marginal in general terms.”

Precisely to echo them, an important part of the exhibition is made up of conversations and virtual transmissions with the artists through the accounts of the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Knowledge and the National Museum. “The idea is to promote discussions around what is understood as the Caribbean, transatlantic travel, the structural racism that operates in many of the imaginaries around the regions linked to the Caribbean,” explains Doria. Also around what is the history of art of the Colombian Caribbean and those relationships between the history of art of the Caribbean with the rest of the basin, of the Greater Caribbean.” Experts in Caribbean art processes and the artists themselves participate in the conversations.
There is no better setting to highlight this cultural identity of the Caribbean than Arco, one of the main art platforms, which completed its 43rd edition. The program around the Caribbean Sea is commissioned by Carla Acevedo-Yates and Sara Hermann Morera, under the name of 'The shore, the tide, the current: an oceanic Caribbean'. Galleries from the General Program and the 'Opening' section were also presented, where a selection of young galleries stand out. And the section 'It's never the same. Latin American Art', curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy and Manuela Moscoso, gives relevance to the link with Latin America. A bond that crosses borders and becomes strong thanks to the power of art.