Martín Carreño MFA

"The armed conflict in Colombia, protracted and ruthless, has transcended generations, crossing its inhabitants’ bodies and memories. Violence has become so ordinary that it merges with oblivion. The purpose of this research is to dismember endemic violence to find its effect on its subjected people and discover the transformations that the body experiences as a survival response. To begin with, a retrospective analysis of the conflict in the timeframe between 1950 and 2015 exposes the anatomy of living violence. Referring to its movement as a continuum, in which each act of aggression derives from the circumstances that make it possible and simultaneously transfigure human structures. Through a biographical approach and the critic of public opinion and local art, a catalyzation of cultural elements into signs takes place.

Consequently, through hermeneutical and aesthetic expression research methods, the determined signs are examined to find their potential as identity builders. To approximate to violence depiction signs is to meet violence itself. Analyzing the artworks of Doris Salcedo, Beatriz Gonzalez, among others, the deconstruction of the body occurs. The body is the fundamental object, thoroughly diminished, but even when it doesn’t exist, its essence remains, and it can be measured and experienced.

This research concludes with a series of jewellery pieces which attempts an act of human objectification, allowing body parts, or at least in this case, the reminiscence of them, to tell the story of a specific kind of violence that is transgressing human limits. The great advantage of embodying human memories is the transparency or rawness that is inherent in their symbols. Repeatedly breaking, abrading, and reconstructing enduring stone. Like this, the passage of time is recorded. The fragility of metal is put to the maximum test, vulnerabilities that, all together, sustain with ample strength. This research is a claim for recognition. Reflecting on the portrait of war that political art offers, which can reveal the mirror of memory to discover a national identity."

https://martincarreno.com