Un Souvenir patriótico

Interview by Elkin Rubiano to Leonel Castañeda. Bogotá, February 1, 2018

Elkin Rubiano: Let’s talk about the intervention Leonel Castañeda will make in Caja Negra for Espacio el Dorado. This is not the first time that Leonel intervenes, well Caja Negra has been intervened twice. Leonel, why does your interest persist in intervening that container? Why are you interested in intervening a black box, which is like the opposite of a white one?

Leonel Castañeda: As a beginning, Caja Negra as a memory device gave the possibility to generate an intimate space, and was the starting point of the development of the projects Caja Negra Armero and Caja Negra Un aspecto de la violencia. Within my process, it is important to be able to think and manage space, as well as create atmospheres. In this way, the cube is a space that turns infinite due to that intimacy generated from the gloom and illumination, because the device Caja negra doesn’t refer to colour, but to that situation of intimacy that presents an articulation between the container and what it contains.

ER: What does the spectator encounters when they enter the box?

LC: When the spectator enters, they face the content. This space works as a theater of cruelness and also as a memory device contained in the images. It is theatrical, scenographical. The intervention was never intended to be redundant, but Caja Negra (black box) is Caja Negra (black box) because the principle of this device allows different readings to be made. At the same time, the definition of Caja Negra as a navigation device that treasures information corresponding to events that precede the catastrophe, interests me. The third intervention is in the Cubo negro (black cube) Un souvenir patriótico (A patriotic souvenir), relates to past projects in the extent that the device allows to show the process around seeing the lead flag as a patriotic symbol.

ER: Let’s talk about the flag and the title of this intervention, Un souvenir patriótico.

LC: In the context of the referendum for the Peace agreement in Colombia, 2016 the lead flag was exhibited in Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación (Center of memory, peace and reconciliation), under the project RE: Bandera, de la Fundación MÁS ARTE MÁS ACCIÓN for the commemoration of the 500 year anniversary of Thomas Moor’s Utopía in which he proposed the interpretation of the flag as a national symbol.

During this process I collected a series of documents in which I understood that what I was interested in, was not in intervening a piece of cloth but rather in finding a way to resignify a symbol, and a lead plate was the appropriate material to do so, that although it wasn’t cloth, it gave me the possibility of generating the folds and at the same time allude to what lead refers to in the context of war such as its weight and the density of the material. This series of documents relate to each other conceptually and formally with the flag. Within them there is an illustration of a XIX french newspaper, in which a woman gives the tricolor flag to the president, that carries the title of “Un Souvenir patriótico”. I was interested in the idea of the flag as a souvenir, as a president, as a symbol. This flag hoisted at half mast is Un Souvenir patriótico.

 ER: So we have this flag that is some sort of anti-monument. By the way, in Espacio El Dorado there is a posthumous artwork of Bernardo Salcedo in which the Colombian shield is disappearing from some statements that negate, point by point, the patriotic symbol: there are no condors, no abundance, no liberty, no canal, no shield, there is no country. In one hand, one has the emptiness the image arrives to, and on the other, with the lead flag, we have the contrary: In place of emptiness, heavyness. And both emptiness as heavyness indicate a non-place or something uncertain, right? It’s interesting that the same place will exhibit both that impossibility of the shield, and the lead flag, that is a kind of anti-monument.

LC: As fullness and emptiness, as well.

 ER: As fullness and emptiness. That is interesting.

LC: And weight and lightness.

ER: Exactly. In a sense, and following the patriotic symbols, the national anthem can be heard slowed down. So much that it generates a sensation of foreigness respecting that anthem, which sound mixes with some images of violence. So we have the flag, we have the national anthem, and we have editions of the book La violencia en Colombia (Violence in Colombia). Such way that what is placed there is like putting in first place the patriotic symbols that make part of the imaginary of the nation, but then turn them into something strange. To turn them into something strange means to suspend the imaginary of the nation, or to read the imaginary of the nation in terms of death exclusively.

LC: I believe, Elkin, that that is my proposal. To reinterpret a symbol from the materialization of a lead flag and the connotations that this object has. It is real. And to that emptiness you refer to when talking about Salcedo’s shield, which makes it convincing. Like the weight of the flag. It is a reflexion and reinterpretation of the national context in terms of vulnerability.

ER: About the title, Un souvenir patriótico, normally the souvenir is a small object. But this flag is heavy and big. Haven’t you thought about making small flags as a type of remembrance?

LC: I’d like something else, the souvenir is sarcasm… What they can take is not a replica of the flag, but a reinterpretation of the national symbol.

ER: Besides the flag and the national anthem, there is a section of publications about the topic of violence in Colombia. Something that interests Leonel is the massacred body, the recurrences of that massacred body. But something that also interests him is the meaning that builds around these images and how from one edition to another the photo caption points out different questions.

LC: The idea is to show in this project the documentation compiled during the process: books about violence in Colombia, the image of Bolivar’s death war flag, a fragment of the book La bandera de la muerte (The flag of Death) by Victor Balaguer, about the history of the Colombian flag, another one about Bolivar’s autopsy, which references the process of his sickness before his death, as well as photographs that illustrate these texts and images in art history and of manuals about anatomy intervened with collage, studies and sketches previous to the elaboration of the lead flag, these documents conform a series of findings and relationships that interests me to articulate. Some of these texts belong to José Darío Gutiérrez, who has gathered documentation around the subject under the premise “Editar es un acto político” (editing is a political act). Some images of these books have no caption, or the information included is conditioned by the political wing in power, which means, that while in a text a citation affirms that the source of all evil is communism, in others it states the social injustice or it shows the name of so-called murderers. The discourses are conditioned.

ER: This dare of yours, regarding this archive, is how to exhibit these images, how to assemble them. Because maybe the artist or investigator have something in mind, but maybe sometimes it fails in presentation. What have you thought regarding this and how do you confront this challenge of the montage? About the montage of the images, which is a very benjaminian regard. The idea is that the two images that apparently have nothing in common, when they come together, they construct an unexpected meaning. So, is that what you are looking for?

LC: Yes, apparently these documents that don’t have a direct connection, articulate themselves and construct new readings, that are not lineal nor chronological, but that evidence a dystopia. With the montage, the flag that’s raised outside the container generates a reading. But that reading comes from all the images that are inside the container, from the container of interventions that I made with the archive.