NULL

In the center of the Colombian capital, a building that previously symbolized progress and prosperity is now abandoned. It was built to host the offices of the state telecommunications company, TELECOM, and its modern infrastructure was once admired as a promise of a brighter future for the country. Now, the building is empty; its facilities are a shameful monument to the mismanagement of our nation’s money. The company went bankrupt in 2003 due to government corruption. The TELECOM building symbolizes Bogota’s downtown economic difficulties, which are often masked by gentrification projects.

Our project summoned twelve artists to take over three floors of the abandoned building. Each artist artistically interpreted an intervention in the space. The collective is unified by their approach to the same subject: modern human interconnectivity, not only as city inhabitants but also as artists and workers.

Being an artist in a developing country means facing unique challenges, especially when seeking spaces to work and exhibit collectively. The shortage of accessible and suitable places to create and display our work is an everyday reality. However, when we find a space to share our creative processes, a collaborative dialogue emerges that inspires and strengthens our growth by building community.

The challenge ahead is to transform this collective experience into a replicable model, which allows us to systematize and deepen collaborative and sustainable work practices. The aim is to create a model that not only meets the needs of artists but also generates feedback on creation and participation. In this way, the artistic and cultural ecosystem can be strengthened, and the viability and impact of self-managed independent spaces as engines of innovation and social change is ensured.

The title of the exhibition, “NULL”, comes from a term used in telecommunications, meaning “a misspoint, a false data input, or a programming mistake.” This project reevaluates “system errors” as starting points for brand-new ideas and possibilities for the future. We believe in people’s connection as the key to overcoming unpredictable situations, so for this project, we considered where these “null gaps” on communication systems might be.

Working in an office building, it seemed logical to examine work itself as a means of communication. The most basic human interactions , after family relationships, are always related to the economy. Matilde Guerrero uses performance to create experiences that question our relationship with daily labor. For example, she created a prayer novena for the soul of Leo Kopp, founder of the Bavaria brewery and the La Perseverancia neighborhood. Kopp’s effigy is visited today by hundreds of Bogota residents, who ask him for economic stability, work, and good luck in business; as if he were a saint of capitalism. Guerrero has also categorized an aromatic landscape of the Colombian office, an enumeration of smells like coffee, wet carpet, photocopier ink, and many other fragrant traces that we associate with office employment, and that speak of everyday life, work and that invisible spectrum that populates our most common environments and interactions.

In a project like Null, focused on mutual support, William Contreras Alfonso questions the role of the artist and the help he can provide to his community. His works on fabric contain instructions to reuse the fiber on which they are drawn and to build shelter and rescue mechanisms in case an eventuality or catastrophe occurs in the building. Tents, hang gliders to escape through a window, and stretchers to transport injured people if an artistic piece falls on a spectator. All these mental projections, rather than predicting disaster, aim to satisfy the hope that artists have that their art is useful, appreciated, and valuable.

Art can help society, and seemingly simple ideas we tend to ignore might represent big profit. To catch these opportunities , you must be very alert. That is why in Chocó, there is the expression “Veanvé,” which means “Look again! Be careful!”. It is also the name of the rehabilitation project of the old TELECOM headquarters in Nuquí. This APLO architecture workshop project, with Pedro Aparicio and Mano Cambiada, seeks to rehabilitate the building as a cultural environmental center aimed at young people. Communicating the two TELECOM headquarters, the sign displayed in Bogotá will travel to the Pacific after the exhibition and will remain there to be seen again, strengthening young people’s knowledge of their economic and social environment.

Becoming aware of the environmental situation is urgent, but it is a complex issue: Does technology mean exploitation and doom, or could it bring salvation if used wisely? In Linda Pongutá’s installation, materials such as charcoal, waste cable, iron, and ceramic combine strangely, similar to a fungal formation or an insect infestation. Industrial garbage, with its tangled debris and formless non-reusable polymers, resembles Manigua and its dangerous chaos, in which the nature of things advances and brings together the density from the unpredictable. The supposed garbage is reconfigured and forms a bustling colony, disrupting the austere architecture of the building.

Reviewing the advertising archive of the former TELECOM, Pongutá found a construction record of a Manguaré drum from the amazonian jungle, made from a hollowed- out trunk that can be heard twenty kilometers away. In his films, Alejandro Salcedo condenses the jungle drift in search of the drum, not out of archaeological concern but as an excuse to generate a conversation with the locals about the relativity of distances: An ideological, geographical, and linguistic gap makes understanding difficult and stands in the way of hybridization between cultures, but is also an inspiration to seek, through art, a shorter path between the Amazon lands and the rest of the world.

Wildlife is thought to only exist outside of built-up land. However, ecosystems of birds and small mammals populate our roofs, patios, trees, and basements. Luisa Roa watches them from the TELECOM windows in the shade of the sabanero rubber tree that is at the entrance. Birds such as the Tropical Kingbird, Rufous-Collared Sparrow, Brown-Bellied Swallow, pigeon, and black vulture interact with stray cats and dogs in the area, and the artist has meticulously and scientifically documented their network of songs. The sound installation to which they are consigned shows the vast world we miss daily, a complex world that passes over our heads. Roa’s work demonstrates that the basis for efficient communication is always attentive listening.

Allowing a moment of sound and visual contemplation, Néstor Gutiérrez with musician Vladimir Giraldo commandeered offices with wooden divisions and opaque glass. They installed speakers, paintings, objects, sounds, and colors, generating an intoxicating and evocative atmosphere. The curuba-colored paint of the offices served as a reference for the artists’ intervention, blurry by the passage of time and an agonizing remnant of an out-of-fashion decorative taste. The curuba is a climbing plant native to the Andean mountain range and very present in the Cundiboyacense highlands. As it grows, it usually parasitizes other plants, architecture, or whatever is around it among its tangled forms. Its fruits, like other passion flowers, have a sedative effect.

Maria Clara Figueroa expands the language of painting and works with transformed architectural materials as traces of actions in space. Her observation of place consists of the repetition of a gesture: removing old paint with hot caramel, or collecting abandoned objects and preserving their silhouette as if it were a photogram. In her work the skin of the wall is undressed, and through the transparency of the veil, the view of the city joins what had been forgotten on the ground. Maria Clara titled this piece Phantasma, perhaps because of the translucent nature of its structure or maybe because it is inevitable to think of ghosts in an abandoned building full of empty rooms and lurid noises.

There is still no conclusive scientific evidence of the existence of spirits. However, the ghostly spectrum is believed to be related to specific electromagnetic frequencies. The belief is so widespread that one can buy ghost meters online and, if desired, hack it as Wilmer Rodríguez did so that the EMF energy fluctuations transform into synthesizer sound. As a counterpart, Sebastián Mira’s flags of wood, glass, and concrete stand on the foundation of what is definitively verifiable: the tactile nature of objects and the relationships between construction materials as components of the building that houses us. A flag is a symbol of territory, a geographical and political demarcation. It is unclear what territory these flags represent or if their territory is the flag itself, crafted with the raw material that molds cities.

When we arrived for work a few months ago, concrete, glass, and wood were in messy piles on the floor. The abandonment reorganizes the materials, making the appearance of mountains, blocks, and paths. The intention of Ana Montenegro and María Leguízamo was to intensify the characteristics of the place through water vapor and light. “Smoke and mirrors” is a common metaphor for deception, an act of sleight of hand: The reflection is seen as a copy that supplants the original and the mist as a curtain obscuring the obvious. However, it could also be the opposite: the image bouncing is evidence of a translucent surface or the fog as a screen exalting light events, beams of brightness, and shadow. Ana and María’s installations demand a second look at undervalued, overlooked elements.

William Contreras Alfonso & Linda Pongutá
Open Call Exhibition
© apexart 2024