Colombian artist shapes the pain of migration in America

Bogotá (AFP) – A pregnant woman, another lifeless woman lying in the mud, walkers whose faces reflect pain and battered flags of several countries are carefully molded by Édgar Álvarez. The Colombian artist reflects with plasticine the suffering of migration in America.

One of his small works recreates a typical scene in the so-called "Loma de las Banderas", the point that marks the beginning of the most challenging stretch for those who go from Colombia to Panama through the dangerous Darién jungle.

Inspired by photographs that he himself took and by his feelings after visiting that migratory corridor, Álvarez gave shape to the mountain and the migrants who try to conquer it.

A smiling man takes another photograph at the top, next to her a woman with a belly about to burst reveals her anguish with her face. A girl hugs a teddy bear while she cries and around her other applicants to reach the United States rest loaded with suitcases.

In the background are the national colors of Venezuela, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, China and other Asian and Latin American countries whose citizens are fleeing due to economic shortages or armed conflicts.

"That (the 'loma') was like a cemetery of shoes. Pure mud and shoes and shoes and shoes... Nailed in the mud, boots, flip-flops," Álvarez remembers about his visit to that place in September 2022 .
"It's exactly the first place where people say: 'Here I realize what the hell I've gotten myself into,'" he tells AFP.

With long hair, a beard and multicolored bracelets, the 49-year-old artist assures that his creations appeal to social sensitivity and the defense of the human rights of the thousands of migrants who cross the Darién, a record of 409,000 between January and September of this year. year, according to official Panamanian figures.

- Indifference -

Álvarez baptized his project "I explain it to you with plasticine", a popular Colombian and at the same time ironic expression, as a criticism of indifference.

Shelves with drawers full of figures made with plasticine adorn his workshop in Bogotá. There are also small-scale cardboard replicas of the migration paths on the continent.

There are several routes through Central America and the border between Mexico and the United States, the last step for migrants before fulfilling the so-called American dream, but also very often the point where their dreams end. In September 2023, some 200,000 migrants were captured by the US border patrol, a historic record.

There are also the representations that made him famous about the history of the armed conflict in Colombia, a country submerged by more than half a century of war between guerrillas, drug traffickers, paramilitaries and state agents.

They are displaced farmers and relatives of the more than 100,000 disappeared during the conflagration, which has left more than nine million victims.

"The level of displacement in Colombia, then, is very high, but when you live in big cities you never realize that type of things," says Álvarez, who has more than a million followers on his social networks.

"Childish"
A recent exhibition in Bogotá, called "Refugees and Migrants in America," compiles his work over time portraying experiences in various migratory corridors in Latin America, although his art was not always well received.

"I had a lot of trouble when I studied fine arts with my teachers," he says. "Why don't you dedicate yourself to something less childish?" they told him.

Foolishly, he continued to shape and became a reference on social networks to explain complex topics in a didactic way.

"What the material does is bring people closer to many topics that they generally would not approach in such a simple way," he says, referring to violence or xenophobia.