Etcétera: Covering with mirrors Francisco de Orellana, the supposed discoverer of the Amazon, Bogotá, Colombia

Description

For years, Colombian artist Iván Argote has been staging interventions on public monuments. These three images trace some of this work and showcase two different approaches to confronting figures in colonial history. In both of the Turistas pieces, the artist covers colonial figures with ponchos—a garment that is associated with Indigenous peoples and peasant farmers in Colombia and other parts of South America. These photographs recontextualize the figures as foreigners and question their public celebration. In Etcétera, Argote covered a statue of Francisco de Orellana in a park in Bogotá. Orellana is a well-known Spanish conquistador and self-proclaimed discoverer of the Amazon rainforest. The illusion brought on by the mirrors temporarily erases this conquistador from view, and instead reflects the natural environment in the park. It brings attention back to the land, and the land dispossession and environmental degradation caused by colonization.  

Iván Argote is a Colombian artist and film director based in Paris. Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, he questions our relation with others, with power structures and belief systems. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect and humour through which he generate critical approaches to dominant historical narratives. In his interventions on monuments, large-scale ephemeral and permanent public artworks, Iván Argote proposes new symbolic and political uses of public space.