January 2009, Gloria Arboleda

Gloria worked with satellite photographs from Colombia’s geography and while travelling by plane over the Guaviare River she was inspired to do this work. She turned the outlines she could see in the photographs into the roads followed by the guerrilla in the centre of the deep Colombian forest. Pieces like I’m not like you, Swimming Prostitutes, Main Concern or Bureaucracy, perfectly represent those remote regions of the country, invaded by violence and no law whatsoever. One piece in particular, Tell me the truth, relates her concern about information and communication, something that is supposed to bring people together but which gets more complicated as we speak. This could easily be exemplified by her own words “…The loss of ego comes along with the disdain for language, from and to the speaker. This happens with victims of a kidnap that have no chance to establish linguistic relationships with the kidnappers because the main goal the aggressor wants to achieve is to make the victim lose every sense of confidence in his/her ideas”. She also criticises people’s lack of action, and physical response to violence. Pure Tropic 7, based on Peace after the storm (1896), by the German artist Ferdinand Schauss, represents a man’s body abandoned on a beach after a storm. She relates fruit and animals with human behaviours, using oranges instead of people and a hen to represent their passivity while facing facts. Acrylic works perfectly as a fragile soul which breaks like glass, once again analogically, before the overwhelming facts.