From February 5 to 11, 2026, members of the C-MAP Africa group from The Museum of Modern Art traveled to Morocco on a research trip that included several cities: Marrakech, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, and Tétouan. Over the course of the visit, the group met with artists, curators, scholars, and cultural practitioners and toured studios, archives, museums, and independent initiatives. Upon their return, the travelers were invited to reflect on a single moment that shaped their experience and prompted them to reconsider their work at MoMA. Because these responses are intentionally brief, they do not fully capture the breadth of encounters that shaped the experience. 

The group extends its heartfelt thanks to Chahrazad Zahi, whose knowledge and good spirit were integral to the trip. The group also remains deeply grateful to the many artists, scholars, collectors, and cultural workers across Morocco who so generously shared their time, knowledge, and spaces with us, and whose hospitality and openness made the journey possible including but not limited to the following: Oumayma Abouzid, Amina Agueznay, Mustapha Akrim, Yto Barrada, Elisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal, Amina Belghiti, Amina Benbouchta, Hicham Benohoud, Meriem Berrada, Khalil Binebine, Mahi Binebine, M’barek Bouhchichi, Hicham Bouzid, Nadia Chabâa, Larbi Cherkaoui, Kamal Daghmoumi, Florence Renault Darsi, Hassan Darsi, Touria El Glaoui, Safaa Erruas, Oumaima Haitof, Hassan Hajjaj, Laila Hida, Amine Houari, Abdellah Karroum, Imane Lahrich, Othman Lazraq, Mohamed Mourabiti, Amina Mourid, Mounia Yasmine O’Neal and the team at The Mothership Tangier: Khawla, Chef Mohamed, BaMjido, Othmane, Saïd, and Si Mohammed; Juan Asis Palao Gómez, Mehdi Qotbi, Karim Rafi, Younes Rahmoun, Sara Rerhrhaye, Nadia Sabri, Abderrahim Yamou, and Fatiha Zemmouri.

The 2026 C-MAP Africa trip was organized and researched by Beya Othmani, the C-MAP Africa fellow (2024–26).

Smooth Nzewi, The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, C-MAP Africa Group Leader

On Mohamed Chabâa 

The stewardship of an artist’s legacy is something I find deeply compelling, especially when it is taken on by family members. Nadia Chabâa, an art historian who has dedicated herself to her father’s legacy, stands out as a particularly inspiring example. Before our visit to her home, my knowledge of Mohamed Chabâa (1935–2013) was spotty and largely limited to his role in the triumvirate that founded the Casablanca Art School. But his contributions ran much deeper. He combined artistic practice, theory, and pedagogy, and architecture was at the heart of it all.

In 1966, Chabâa joined the Casablanca Art School as a teacher, leading workshops in decoration and graphic arts and establishing an Arabic calligraphy workshop as a core part of the curriculum. Alongside Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020) and Farid Belkahia (1934–2014), he co-organized Présence Plastique, a manifesto-exhibition held in Jemaa el-Fna Square in Marrakech in 1969, deliberately bringing art into public space.

In 1982, he joined the faculty of the National School of Architecture in Rabat, Morocco’s first architecture school, and in 1994, he returned to his alma mater, the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tétouan, as its director, overhauling both its Italian classical curriculum, which had been place since Chabâa was a student there in the 1950s, and its pedagogy. There, he shaped a generation of Moroccan artists now active on the international scene, including Younes Rahmoun and Safaa Erruas, both of whom we visited during our trip.

I was also quite impressed with how Chabâa’s own artistic practice evolved over the years, from hard-edge abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s to looser abstraction in the 1980s to more gestural lines from the late 1990s onward.

Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director, International Program

C-MAP research trips typically culminate over a year’s worth of distance learning. They are an on-the-ground continuation of the dialogic, group-based learning practiced by C-MAP members at MoMA in their monthly meetings with artists, curators, and scholars, which are organized by the C-MAP fellow and the C-MAP group leader. Thus, our short but precious visit to Morocco was but one piece of a larger and longer-term project with deep roots in our institution’s mission to connect people to and through art.

This metaphor of piecing or putting together lends itself to the many ways of making we experienced in our multicity venture via plane, train, and automobile. I was particularly struck by the power of pattern, which emerged as a salient trope for artists with whom we met or whose works we saw on view at various venues. Whether it is the repetition of an iconic image in the works of Safaa Erruas or Hassan Hajjaj or the repetition of a shape or color in urban and religious architecture alike, such as at the Madrasa Ben Youssef, pattern permeated our visual field. Meeting with Amina Agueznay brought pattern into the conversation a different way, specifically through the traditional weaving patterns incorporated in her work Curriculum Vitae from 2020–21, which comprises dozens of blocks made by weavers from different communities across Morocco. Each block represents that weaver’s “language,” which is passed down from generation to generation and is either well known or endangered. Agueznay also showed us Burials, a work from 2024 that also meditates on waving as a language, creating parallels between words and stitches. 

Leonardo Bravo, Director of Public Engagement, Department of Learning and Engagement

The opportunity to travel to Morocco with the C-MAP Africa group felt like stepping into a long-held dream. Since my youth, Morocco has occupied a vivid place in my imagination—shaped by the mystique of North Africa, the wandering spirit of the Beats, and the hypnotic sounds of the master musicians of Jajouka.

To finally move through the country itself—along the vibrant streets of Marrakech, amid the coastal rhythms of Casablanca and the layered histories of Tétouan and Rabat, and across the luminous threshold of Tangier—was to encounter a reality even more compelling than the one I had imagined.

Across these cities, Morocco revealed itself as a landscape shaped over millennia, where culture and history unfold in layered and interconnected ways. It is a place continually formed and re-formed through the shifting currents of empire, colonization, and self-determination.

Particularly moving was the exhibition on Berber and Amazigh culture across the Maghreb at the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts, which offered a powerful testament to the grace, dignity, and resilience of these communities. The presentation underscored how Amazigh cultural traditions continue to resonate across generations and geographies.

Among the many memorable encounters during the trip, our visit to Think Tanger stood out. The work of Hicham Bouzid, Amina Mourid, and their collective—creating a platform for collaborative learning, research, and public inquiry—deeply resonated with my own interests. Their experimental, research-driven approach to collective knowledge-making at the intersection of arts, culture, and civic life closely aligns with my institutional work.

I left the visit inspired and hopeful about developing stronger connections that might lead to future collaboration with MoMA.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography

Our time in Morocco was sprawling in its scope, intensive in its sensibility. From Marrakech to Casablanca, then Rabat to Tétouan, our final day in Tangier remains crisp in my mind’s eye.

The night prior, we had visited Yto Barrada’s inimitable Cinémathèque Tangier—followed by a convivial dinner over which we discussed Morocco’s expanded presence at the forthcoming Venice Biennale (Barrada representing France; Amina Agueznay representing Morocco).

On a dewy, fragile morning, the group arrived at The Mothership, where we encountered the expanded fields of Barrada’s artistic and social practice. In ethos, The Mothership is a site for artistic retreat, experimental research, and interdisciplinary exploration inspired by natural dyes and Indigenous traditions. Physically, it consists of a series of studios and dwelling spaces occupied by visiting residents, collaborators, and Barrada’s family. These are threaded together and surrounded by a variety of flowering and subsistence gardens.

Situated on a dramatic set of cliffs that overlook the Strait of Gibraltar and face Spain, the view from the rear balcony of The Mothership is anchored by a massive tree. Here, Barrada has constructed a sturdy platform that one can access through netted passageways entangled among branches. She calls this her raft.

In considering this view, I was catapulted back to the first time I leafed through her photobook A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (2005)—a project that shaped my understanding of the stakes of contemporary photography in Morocco and which anchors MoMA’s photographic holdings of Barrada’s work.

Looking skyward at her raft, I was plunged back into the world of French social work pioneer and writer Fernand Deligny that Barrada had shaped at MoMA through Artist’s Choice: Yto Barrada—A Raft (2021–22), which was organized thoughtfully in collaboration with my colleague Lucy Gallun.

Still reeling from the loss of Jay Levenson—who has made, and continues to make, so much possible within and beyond MoMA—I was reminded of what it means to sustain an insistent generosity of spirit and a rigorous fidelity to life in all of its forms.

Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator, Department of Media and Performance

Mother, Ship

Yto Barrada has been building rafts with others for over twenty years. Consider the tree house she made in 2005 in the garden of her Tangier home, which later that year she photographed and called Raft in Strangler Figtree. Or her 2021 tabletop sculpture—Tamo’s Raft (Le radeau de Tamo)—included in her Artist’s Choice exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.

Yto’s rafts are rarely flat, much like the buoyant structures made of fastened materials used by migrants as makeshift boats. You don’t need me to recall images of Mediterranean migrants here for you to call to mind the morphological echoes between Yto’s assemblages and the vessels captured in photographs endlessly circulated via news and social media.

Those shapes are echoed in the meandering wires that wind atop Tamo’s ship and hover in the diagonal lines of ladders extending below the tree house and web of branches linking the two-hundred-year-old strangler fig tree to her house.

In this trail of associations, ghosted but not forgotten, a network of rafts seems to breed more floating platforms. There is a technical word for this type of vehicle: a mothership, designed to carry, lead, or serve other vehicles as they travel through water, air, and space.

Yto’s rafts tend to float in groups. To call them “Yto’s” rafts is itself a usable fiction. They are perhaps better described as our rafts; Yto keeps them company.

Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections

Specificity, universality, transmission of ideas, connection, circulation, and yes, beauty.

Younes Rahmoun’s presentation at the Tétouan School of Fine Arts helped me reflect on the experiences, new ideas, and hope that were centered during this most enlightening trip to several cities in Morocco.

Formed and informed by his family tradition, and deeply rooted to his locality, Younes discussed his background and practice. I enjoyed learning about his Ghorfa (room) series in particular. With his mother’s support, he inhabited a small space under the stairs in the family home, which became his studio—a space for work and meditation. He translated that architectural space into a series of drawings, objects, and installations in various media.

Some installations appeared in gallery contexts, while others were situated in the landscape—but always with the artist’s intended desire for the viewers to concentrate on their “here and now.” His presentation also spurred me to contemplate the path to my current role, from my first art history courses at Smith College, where Younes had a residency and solo exhibition in 2024 that included his most recent Ghorfa, which he installed in the woods a few miles outside of campus.

The show was curated by Emma Chubb, who joined our meeting in Tétouan, and together we all toured the School of Fine Arts library and discussed the critical importance of collecting, preserving, and making accessible research materials, particularly of artists, populations, and regions that may be underrepresented in research institutions.

I am grateful to all the inspiring people we met throughout the trip, and I felt honored to think together with such wonderful MoMA colleagues, including our dear Jay Levenson, who helped open horizons for so many with his humor and humility.

Kate Lewis, The Agnes Gund Chief Conservator

I am very grateful to all the collectors, collectives, curators, publishers, researchers, and, of course, artists (including their families and colleagues) across Morocco who so generously welcomed us into their homes, studios, spaces, museums, galleries, and cinemas over the course of the 2026 C-MAP Africa research trip.

At MoMA, artists and makers are integral to the stewardship of the collections. A clear thread that emerged during this journey was how the process of making—of choosing materials and techniques, of collaborating with others—is deeply influenced by histories, religion, language, politics, and communities.

In the beautiful city of Tétouan, we were fortunate to visit Safaa Erruas in her downtown apartment studio. She shared with us her “ideas and materials from my internal kitchen” and talked about an artwork Les Drapeaux (2011–12).

This piece consists of the flags of the 22 Arab League member states reimagined as white pearls embroidered on sheets of 600 gsm cotton paper, reflecting on the Arab Spring.

Embroidery is a local tradition, passed down from mother to daughter, and the Tétouan practice is known for its stylized flowers and geometric shapes on unbleached canvas. It was interesting to hear how she worked with local embroiderers to create this painstaking work.

The multilayered significance of this approach and method reminded me that beyond materials and process, people are at the center of art and also, by extension, museum collections.

Jay Levenson embodied this ethos: Meet artists in their communities, where they are.

In memory of Jay Levenson (1948–2026), Director of MoMA’s International Program

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This text is available in Spanish which you can access here.

Thomas J. Lax: My dear, let’s start from our beginning. We met in Havana, where you live and work, about a year and a half ago. I was visiting on a MoMA research trip, led by my colleague, Inés Katzenstein. We visited the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), which was formed after the Cuban Revolution and has five different building complexes, one for each discipline. Its campus was once a golf course for the country’s elite. This is the school you attended in the 2000s. Can you talk about what that experience was like as someone working in performance and video and invested in black aesthetic practice?

Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo: Yes, for me, the education system in Cuba had a great effect on my work. At the beginning, I was studying in San Alejandro, where we had a more technical approach. We would start in the first year having general training in all the media—drawing, sculpture, painting. In the second year you would pick one. I started in painting. I had three teachers who were very important for me—painter Inés Dario, who was also my mentor of my graduation diploma, together with painter Rocío García and Florencia Peñate, a professor of art history. I was focused on addressing violence against women in Cuba, which is a problem nationally as well as in my family. One day, Ines was looking at some of my paintings and drawings, and she said, “Do you think this is enough for you, for what you are trying to express?”

I started going to the Institute of Legal Medicine, researching the cases there and making photos of many of the victims who had died because of violence against women and making photos of my body, using my body as a way of denouncing these cases. I was working with photography on my own and with the encouragement of my teachers, but we didn’t have a formal photography class.

After that, I went to the ISA, the university art institute. There, I was in dialogue with students in music, theater, dance, cinema, because it’s one big university with different faculties. I could make an open call for other students to participate and collaborate. Plus everybody is together in the dormitories so when there was a party, I would see friends, filmmakers, dancers, musicians.

I was continuing working in photography, and at a certain point, consciously or not, I started performing in my photos. I was doing a lot of work based on imitation, recreating traffic accidents for example, which I organized with permission from the ministry of transportation. I also had the help of my sister, who is an actress and would help me do makeup or take the photos.

TJL: Was there an opportunity either when you began at San Alejandro or when you got to the institute for an engagement with feminist thought or black theory, two parts of your work that are important?

SPDM: Officially there is not a class for feminism or black feminism or black studies in Cuba. So I think I just got there on my own, through the different situations I was confronting in my daily life. The closest we had was Arte Africano, African Art in the third or fourth year. It was a class about traditional African art, nothing contemporary, going to lectures or the museum and looking at objects like masks or a few paintings. You looked and the teachers lectured. These were the colors. This was the size. This was the wood. But you didn’t get inside the work to talk about its function or feeling in how the class was structured. It was very, how can I say—

TJL: Formal?

SPDM: Yeah, formal. You didn’t really get it from behind, you know. I realize now that it was like studying Renaissance art or any other history as just a form, but not really asking what is making this form, what is behind it. In addition to this, it was mainly research on your own or exchanging information with other students. Some of the most important things when you are studying is meeting the people of your generation. I would say my consciousness about practices of feminist thought and theory came from talking with other students. Oh, you know this book? You get a better sense of what you are doing, and then you realize what you are doing is connected to others.

TJL: I can relate to that. I want to first fast forward and then we can go back. I’d like to talk about the exhibition of your work in 2015 that the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes organized, Un chino llega a Matanzas, or A Chinese Arrives in Matanzas. Because in that project, there seems to be two components of what you’re describing right now. On the one hand there is research in the archive, a scholarly approach to making work, and on the other hand, something more personal, an investigation of yourself as embedded in the experience of others. Can you talk more about this project and how it came about?

SPDM: Un chino llega a Matanzas was in an exhibition at Galleria Continua in Havana, and then in a group exhibition at Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana this year. It started from a curiosity when I was younger and my grandmother would tell me that her grandfather was a Chinese immigrant. She would show me photos of my great grandmother who she resembled. I realized I wanted to do something with that because it not only related to the history of my family but also to Cuba’s racial mixture, a result of slavery and colonization. During this period, Chinese migrants were forced to work in inhumane conditions. They got a small payment, which was almost nothing. They worked and lived with people of African descent because they were in the same social class. And so they mixed culturally and also socially, which means that today you have a lot of families in Cuba who, like me, are black and Chinese.

During this period, those in power used techniques to erase your past, to erase your history so that you had nothing that you could hold onto, so you were more vulnerable. I went to the state archive in the city of Matanzas, hoping to find information about my great-great-grandfather who was Chinese. I realized that black people and Chinese people in the archive were only numbers. This amount of Chinese people entered the port. That amount of black people docked. And if you would see a name, it was only related to something negative, if somebody was a criminal, for example, or if some person committed suicide. There were a lot of suicides. Only then did I find a name. When I saw this situation, I thought okay, there is nothing I can find here. There is no trace, no track. And the same with my African ancestors: there was nothing.

So instead, I went back to the oldest member of my family. My grandmother’s cousin is 98 and his memory is amazing. He told me we had ancestors in Congo, others in Sierra Leone. He told me about the specific goods sold by people on the Chinese side of our family. Through that oral history and family memory, I got something of our history. But in the actual archive, the colonizers took everything from us.

So what I decided to do was write a poem, an ongoing poem for my great-great-grandfather. I used silk fabric, meters of silk, on which I wrote the poem. I used silk because silk was part of the exploitation of Chinese people in Cuba. It was inspired by what I could get from my family and from the archive where I couldn’t get much. The rest I pulled from my imagination. If the only story to tell was the story that the Africans were brought to Cuba as slaves and then we had to follow this and that rule, and we suffered and so on. I know there is a story of suffering and sadness and darkness, but I’m sure there are also some other things, some beautiful things. So, I was thinking, if the only story we got left is this, me as an artist, I have the license to create, base it on a little bit of the research, and create some stories for my great-great-grandfather. So in the poem, I was just writing everything I thought that could be… I was just filling it with my imagination. It’s an ongoing work. Whenever I research or find something new, I continue writing the poem. 

TJL: Beautiful. Thank you for filling in the space between different forms of knowing that exist outside of official history and are transmitted from one generation to another. Maybe we can now go back a little bit to this moment right after you finished school to the work El escándalo de lo real, or The Scandal of the Real, which you made between 2006 and 2007. It’s a work for which you used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to become pregnant using sperm you sourced from a deceased person. I think there are some continuities between that work and your later work. Both share, on the one hand, a search for science and truth and, on the other hand, a belief in what you cannot see, how to use knowledge and also destroy knowledge by believing in what can’t be seen. Can you talk about this incredible work?

SPDM: To start with, this work involved a personal decision that I made as a woman: that I have the right to procreate in a non-traditional way. People were saying, This is not art. You’re not respecting the Catholic religion or that people should date before they should decide to have children. I had a lot of conflicts with my friends, with my family about this work. I almost got kicked out of school. There was even a meeting of professors to put me out of the university. In the end, they let me stay in school, but I couldn’t get back to work for a year after. Also some scientists coming from a medical point of view had ethical issues with this work. I was doing research in the Institute of Legal Medicine, and found out that spermatozoa can stay alive for 72 hours. But some questioned whether it was right to take sperm from a person who could no longer consent to becoming a donor. But for me it’s not any different from art, religion, or even nature. The limit between life and death is malleable. When life starts and ends has different interpretations. It’s a process. And there are things that we are able to do between the two states.

I ended up miscarrying after a month. I think it was the stress, the pressure of the whole thing. I was holding onto my own thoughts that I have the right to use my body to procreate in a way that I would decide. Other people decide to have a baby in different ways; my decision was to have it this way. I was not saying through this action — I call it an action, more than a performance — that the baby was going to be an artwork. It was only a result of an artwork. The work was my attempt to say that life is not separate from death. 

TJL: Can you talk a little bit more, Susana, about the way in which the work lived as an artwork, which is an extension of this idea? On the one hand, you’re making a real claim about the blurriness between life and death, which is a position that emerges from many belief practices including those common in the black Americas and also of Chinese folks in diaspora. And on the other hand, you have this clarity around what the work is and what the work is not. This tension seems to be expressed not only in time, but also in terms of material and medium. How did you consider all of this in terms of how the event would be represented?

SPDM: Well, both the donor and I had a lot of tests, and before he passed away, he said he wanted to be considered an anonymous donor. I started in August, September, and we managed to do the fertilization in January. So it was a couple of months of going to the doctor, going to consultations of all kinds, so when the person passed away, I had been seeing a gynecologist for months. I was in a paradoxical situation with documentation: I had a lot, but many of the doctors didn’t want their names involved in the action, which I understand. But at the same time, I was facing a lot of pressure from the art world asking, Where is the documentation? I even remember a conference I went to where they were talking about documentation and then they were putting El escándalo de lo real as an example of the documentation they needed for proof. I was thinking then, the art world is always looking for an object, always claiming something physical. Why can’t art be something that is there but that you can’t touch or see? I was thinking, the action is something microscopic that happened inside my uterus. There is no documentation of this, even a photo or a scan is a kind of abstraction. After months of me insisting and checking, working with the doctor, I managed to get my medical files and then I had to black out the names, sadly. Then I was showing this as the documentation and people were like, Okay, fine. But I still think this is actually not the action. This is just an object to make the art world a little bit satisfied or happy. But for me, it’s problematic. Why are people asking to show this when it’s something that you cannot see?

TJL: And it seems that your approach and belief system, your refusal to prove something according to a flawed definition of what is real and your faith in the reception of a work as it exists through oral dissemination or through self knowledge, as opposed to official forms of documentation, is something that recurs in other projects of yours. I’m thinking of Anexión oculta, or Hidden Annexation which is also related to these questions. Can you just talk about how this has kind of continued in other projects?

SPDM: For Anexión oculta, I put myself inside a table in my house. It’s a table you can open. I would go inside and my legs would hang out and then my mom would sit on the other side of the table. From these actions, I would create photographs. People would ask me, Oh, this is Photoshop, how do you go through there, do you really get inside the table? Even when you are there with a camera, performing for the camera, people question the result. 

I had a similar experience in a recent video I was making this year at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago. The video is called Resistencia or Resistance, and to make it, I attempted to stand still as this stream of high-pressure air tried to knock me down. In this case, I wanted to prove that I was there resisting something invisible. You don’t see the air, but you see the body is resisting something. How can you prove that you were really doing this performance and you were not pretending? I could also simulate it and the results would be the same. But for me, I like to do the process because I enjoy it. It gives me a lot of feelings, it puts me in a state. It would be boring just to pretend to do something and then show the results.

TJL: But there is a way that this emphasis that you place on process also establishes another kind of relationship between yourself and your audience, and the trust and antagonism that is created there. Your work, Immaterial Domme or Immaterial Dominatrix from 2012/2013, is another moment where I sense this relationship between the performer and the audience, albeit here mediated through an avatar. But what happens in that process is the playing out of a contingent, entangled relationship.

SPDM: Dominadora Inmaterial features an avatar in the website Second Life named Flor Elena who is a financial dominatrix for slaves who pay to serve her. Flor Elena doesn’t really need them or anything from them because she actually doesn’t need the money, but she deserves the money as compensation for her work. When I was building Flor Elena, I realized that the clients would feel more and would be more willing to serve Flor Elena if she had a website that catalogued all the things that she was doing to her other servants through videos, photos, transactions of what she was buying with the money, etc. I put everything on her website, and then clients wanted more, and more people came. In this way, documentation was really important for… I wouldn’t call them an audience, but active participants. Documentation was really important for the interaction with the submissives because it was the proof. And also for the art world, too.

At a certain point, I couldn’t understand why people were as committed as they were. I was thinking, why do people want to do this? Why do they want to serve me when they don’t know who’s behind this avatar. They don’t know who I am. I could be five different people, or a corporation even. I was asking myself, what makes you follow no matter who is behind the computer? What is it about this symbol of power that they’re trying to relate to?

I remember I had one submissive who didn’t want to tell me what he did for a living. But I knew he had an important position, and that the salary of many people depended on him. He had so much pressure to be on top or to be the boss that he would then need to rely or submit his power to somebody and Flor Elena was that person. For him, it didn’t really matter who was behind the avatar; giving over to the symbol of power was enough. I found other submissives. I would log in, then all of a sudden there would be 20000 Linden dollars, which are used to buy and sell goods and services online, in my account. When I looked, I saw an avatar I didn’t know who was sending money and a note saying, I saw your website and I think you deserve this, plus I need a release. I wasn’t even having a dialogue with this avatar. People need this symbol of power to worship, and money is a way to do it through a simulation of real life. For people who have this fetish of financial domination, money is a way to show the exchange of power. So it’s no longer about money, it’s more about how I can show you that I am giving you my power in this mediated form because there is no physical contact.

Being in the digitalized world that we are living in today, there is also a lot of alienation. A lot of people also feel that they can express themselves more through social media than in real life. Having three or four avatars in Second Life, you have a chance to create or reinvent yourself all the time. Flor Elena was a way to research that aspect of the digital world through this performance or action when I was doing my postgraduate studies in New Media between 2011 and 2013 in Germany.

TJL: What’s important to me about casting these relations in this other realm is that it shows how many forms of labor are still part of the afterlife of slavery’s economy, but don’t get named as such, be it sexual labor, reproduction, or caregiving. These forms of work that are imagined to be immaterial are in fact totally embodied and form the fundament of what we understand to be all kinds of material labor.

SPDM: One more thing. When I created Flor Elena, I made her a black woman and made her a little thick. I was trying to respond to myself. All the submissives, all of the slaves, were white. I never got approached by any black avatars even though I saw a lot of black avatars, men, women and gender non-confirming people in Second Life. They mostly had white submissives and not the other way around. This is an experience for which I don’t have the explanation. Is this their way of trying to reinvent history through Second Life, in other words, reverse the history of slavery through Second Life? Is this a means for people who are trying to use Second Life to release those things? I don’t have the answers yet.

TJL: Thank you so much Susana for this beautiful conversation, for your openness, and for your generosity.

SPDM: Thank you. Really happy to be here with you.

To learn more about Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo’s work, please visit her website at susanapilardelahantematienzo.blogspot.com

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These numbers were way too high, and we had such little time. Yet the trip offered a glimpse of a robust artistic history and a vibrant contemporary art scene in the cities of Colombia. It was also the beginning, our first steps toward planting a seed of curiosity at MoMA and building what we hope will be the long-lasting relationships. Since our return, that seed has not stopped growing.

Listed below are blog entries by the chosen members of the group, reflecting on their experiences.

In the following months, post will publish short interviews conducted with the scholars, artists, and curators who visited MoMA in 2016 to help us with our research. You can access them here.

Blog posts from the travelers

Lugar a Dudas

By Marta Dansie

Lugar a Dudas, which translates as “room for doubts,” is an artist-founded, artist-run, nonprofit, alternative art space in Cali, Colombia. It’s a gallery, which includes a street-facing public-art exhibition space; an artist residency program; and a cinema club that screens films almost daily to help promote many independent films made in Cali. It hosts talks and workshops as well as programs for school groups, produces publications, and publishes prints. In short, the organization runs an impressive range of programs to engage audiences locally and internationally.

Photographer Oscar Muñoz, whose work is in MoMA’s collection, founded Lugar a Dudas in 2005 and continues to direct it. He was also a founder, in the 1970s, of Colombia’s first independent art space, Ciudad Solar, which eventually disbanded as Cali was engulfed in violence in the 1980s. He explained that he started Lugar a Dudas to address an imbalance in Cali’s art network, which, he reports, currently has six art schools but only a few art galleries and therefore extremely limited opportunities for artists to work and exhibit. At the same time addressing a national imbalance, Muñoz was eager to help decentralize the Colombian art world, since most art institutions and organizations exist in Bogotá.

Everyone working at Lugar a Dudas is an artist. Muñoz’s partner, Sally Mizrachi, is a designer and coordinates the center’s programs. Víctor Albarracín is an art critic and founder of his own art collective, located in Bogotá, who has been in residence at Lugar a Dudas for almost a year. Iván Tovar, who is in charge of residency programs, works as a curator and artist (we saw Antiespacio, one of his hutlike sculptures made of rejected bricks from a local factory, at the 44th Salón Nacional de Artistas in Pereira). Breyner Huertas, the center’s website designer and communications manager, publishes miniature artist books under the pseudonym Hermes Acosta and received an honorable mention at the 2016 ArtBo fair for his photography.

The documentation center is at the heart of the organization and its largest gathering space. Juan Guillermo Tamayo, who is in charge of the center, hosts students and researchers in a library that is open-shelf and open to the public. He runs the genius Fotocopioteca, where essays from art theory, recommended by artists and others, are translated into Spanish, often for the first time, and made available as hard copies, downloads from a drive in the wall, and also on the organization’s website. I fell in love with the documentation center’s current exhibition of typeset posters (in the style of the much-lamented Carteles Horche), which use rebus-style clues to guide you to text contained in publications on the documentation center shelves, a colorful addition by Martin La Roche, a Chilean artist based in the Netherlands.

Residencies in a large house around the corner from the main space cost approximately 2,500,000 Colombian pesos or 850 US dollars for two months and offer artists and/or curators a private room with a work table as well as access to the common roof garden and even a small swimming pool.

A Multilayered and Rare Opportunity

By Yasmil Raymond

This report will never be complete nor does it pretend to be entirely accurate. But whatever is captured in the next sentences was written to give words to a multilayered and rare opportunity to visit Colombia during an exceptional historical moment of a potentially feasible peace agreement. There is no manual that tells curators the appropriate method of engagement on a research trip to a country that has recently experienced a civil war. It has been estimated that in Colombia, in the past fifty years, more than two hundred thousand people have died and five million people have been displaced from their homes. (It is hard to imagine what it must be like to visit artists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, or Syria but we can try.) In Colombia, the evidence of the past decades of warfare and devastation is not physically evident in its cities, but the overall silence and the empty sidewalks and squares are indicative of a trauma that is not easily “solved” with signatures. At the center of the normality we experienced during our visit was the stunning realization that artists are not speaking openly about the current political situation, or addressing the social indignation that has altered their culture. Once you realize what this omission might mean, you understand that the process of peace and reconciliation in Colombia has yet to begin.

The road from the airport to Medellín is a telling metaphor for the strong will of the city. The mountainous terrain is demanding and requires maneuvering, but eventually through patience and determination, we made our way along narrow and curvy roads into the valley. There is a palpable ambition in Medellín that is manifest in the recent urban renewal: the development of an efficient cable-car network and pristine subway systems. Our tour of Medellín was led by two visionary architects: Ricardo Vásquez and Emerson Marín. Among the many highlights was our visit to one of the UVA (Unidades de Vida Articulada) projects, a citywide endeavor that, in the spirit of Brazil’s phenomenal SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio) projects, takes water towers and turns them into community centers. The focus of this mission is socio-educational and recreational, and people seem to value it. We experienced another example of Medellín’s imaginative edge at Casa Tres Patios, a nonprofit organization where artists partner with educators to invent creative new methods for teaching children and young adults. Its founder is the American artist Tony Evanko. There is a heart beating in this space, a sense of urgency that was visible in the faces of the couple dozen of people we saw there rehearsing their lesson plans and teaching techniques. We also had the opportunity to meet the team at MAMM (Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín), and to hear firsthand about the radical work of painter Débora Arango, which had been curated by Emiliano Valdés.

Not to be forgotten amid all the experiences in Medellín was Erika Diettes’s exhibition at the Museo de Antioquia, a solemn investigation into the trauma of the war. Her impeccable installation is unsettling and visceral, but equally courageous and necessary for those who have seen death and destruction. The rich history of the Museo of Antioquia precedes the tenure of its chief curator Nydia Gutiérrez. Opened in 1881, the museum is the second oldest in Colombia, and it houses an important collection of modern art as well as wonderful murals by Pedro Nel Gómez, who was inspired by the Mexican muralists. Gutiérrez was a gracious and generous host and guided us through the exhibitions. In one of the galleries, we came across an extraordinary series of watercolors by a self-taught artist by the name of Abel Rodriguez, a member of the Nonuya people, from the Caqueta River region. The selection was from his series Chagra, and it depicts both luscious rain forests and areas devastated by deforestation. The tour of the museum ended with an interesting display of some of the works included in the 1968, 1970, and 1972 Coltejer Art Biennials. It was gratifying to come across an exceptional painting by the Argentine artist Sarah Grilo (MoMA recently acquired a Grilo canvas from 1965) and a mesmerizing metal sculpture by Édgar Negret, in his signature red paint. We got to see more terrific examples of Negret’s floor works in Cali and Bogotá. MoMA owns an early sculpture from 1954 titled Sign for an Aquarium (Model) but nothing from the pinnacle of his career.

For decades, my imaginary of Colombia has been shaped by the lucid narratives penned by Gabriel García Márquez and Héctor Abad Faciolince, and this trip didn’t diminish the veracity of their accounts. As always, works of art have that unsettling ability to tip emotive charge into extreme discomfort. We began our stay in Cali with a visit to the studio and home of Rosemberg Sandoval. Sandoval is an internationally acclaimed performance artist and his work is included in MoMA’s collection. I can imagine that experiencing his actions would be infinitely more powerful than seeing black-and-white documentation of them—or related props and artifacts. However, the pictures of his 1985 action on the statue of Simón Bolívar across from the Palace of Justice (on the eve of the rebels’ attack) were charged with defiance and desperation. The hour-long visit to Sandoval’s home reeled with dignity, vigilance, and a peculiar inventiveness. His work is unapologetic, visceral, and consciously “badly” made, qualities that I admire and a position that seems to be undervalued by the younger generation of artists we encountered throughout our trip, who are so eagerly concerned with quality and craftsmanship. Later, in Bogotá, we saw some of Sandoval’s objects made from scraps of glass, and even his tabletop pieces, intended for domestic settings, have an edge and a certain monstrosity that rubs against notions of taste and civility.

In contrast to Medellín’s determination, Cali is a combination of warmth, sensibility, and modesty. The city might lack infrastructure, but it seems to enjoy a fearless sense of lucidity as the institutions and studios we visited reflect a particular self-awareness and extraordinary command of the basic conditions necessary to display art and generate forceful aesthetics. We learned about the hugely impressive synthesis of theory and practice happening at the artist-run space Lugar a Dudas (founded by the artist Oscar Muñoz and graphic designer Sally Mizrachi) and shared a relaxing lunch alongside the team of artists and writers running its ambitious residency, library, lecture, and film programs. Another interesting phenomenon seems to be germinating at the Museo la Tertulia under the leadership of its chief curator Alejandro Martín Maldonado. It was at this museum that we had the chance to see two exceptional exhibitions, one on the work of Beatriz González, and another on the year 1971, when Cali hosted the Pan American Games. All the works on view were from their collection, among them Antonio Caro’s important installation Aquí no cabe el arte (Art does not fit here) from 1972. (Later, in Bogotá, we had the opportunity to briefly meet Antonio Caro. His early work is difficult to find, but he is an artist that we should consider for MoMA’s collection.) The team at Museo la Tertulia allowed us to use their facilities to meet with the daughters of photographer Fernell Franco, and to organize a viewing of groups of works only available for museum collections. Seeing Fernell’s photographs was among the highlights of the trip for several of us. Fernell’s work recently entered the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Tate, but it is still not represented in MoMA’s collection. Although Fernell was a self-taught artist, he is considered one of the leading figures in photography in Colombia; having had an extensive career as a photojournalist, he exhibited his large-scale series throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

From Cali, we headed to Pereira to see the 44th edition of the Salón Nacional de Artistas. The exhibition was not short on ambition or diversity. Though there are too many examples to mention here, artworks by Barış Doğrusöz (printmaking), Rabih Mroué (video), Ming Wong (video), Wilson Díaz (painting), Ethel Gilmour (sculpture), and Tatyana Zambrano y Roberto Ochoa (sculpture) were among the most memorable. It was unclear if the exhibition was well received by the artistic communities in the neighboring cities of Cali and Medellín, but we sure felt its effort to approach a wide range of forms and aesthetics without being pretentious. The director Rosa Ángel and guest curators staged an impressive synthesis of practices and nationalities. This exhibition was the only instance we experienced in which artworks by national and international artists had been brought together.

Bogotá was our last stop. The revival of the artistic scene there seems to be driven by the opening of a number of commercial galleries and the establishment of the art fair ARTBO in 2004, a program sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Bogotá. We were lucky enough to learn about a range of alternative spaces run by artists and architects throughout the city, and we listened to individual presentations by a handful of artists whom professor Lucas Ospina graciously gathered together for us at the Universidad de los Andes. It is indisputable that the work that José Roca and his team are doing at FLORA ars+natura has been pivotal to this rebirth, and we were fortunate to meet several of the artists participating in their residency program (and to experience the delicious food prepared by one of his daughters). However, the unforgettable moments still took place in the privacy of individual studios. A charming Nicolás Paris allowed us into his home-studio and shared insights into his investigations of geometry, nature, and pedagogy. His ongoing project centers on an emancipatory pedagogy that encourages students to self-initiate the “lessons” through games and other techniques that stimulate exploration. It was particularly interesting to see how Paris has integrated his studio practice into his life, expanding the team to include other artists and architects, teachers, and researchers; together, they seem to be reinventing the nature of collaboration and authorship.

Similarly, another inspiring conversation took place during our visit to the home-studio of architect Simón Hosie Samper. He spoke to us about his multidisciplinary practice and his experience building La casa del Pueblo (community library) in Guanacas Cauca. Samper’s research and collaboration with the indigenous people of Cauca brought a totally new dimension to social architecture. His project seems to have generated a critical discourse not only in the field of architecture but also among artists through his interrogation of the place of native cultures within Colombian society. And last but not least was the visit to the home-studio shared by Gabriel Sierra and Delcy Morelos. It took twelve years for Sierra and Morelos to build this sanctuary for their work and life, and it is definitely worth it. Due to the unexpectedness of our visit, the artists were not fully prepared but managed to show us fragments of their most recent projects. In February, Sierra will be mounting a solo exhibition at the Secession in Vienna, on the back of his acclaimed project at Kunsthaus Zürich and The Renaissance Society in Chicago.

Sierra’s work can come across as somber with a no-fuss formalism that seems to spring from a political exigency that favors the mundane over legibility. On Friday, our last day in the city, we did a rushed walk-through of the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, which included a thrilling display of their Neo-Concrete collection with exceptional works by Ary Brizzi (Argentine, born 1930), Rogelio Polesello (Argentine, 1939–2014), Yutaka Toyota (Japanese, born 1931), Julio Le Parc (Argentine, born 1928), Carlos Cruz Diez (Venezuelan, born 1923), and an unforgettable juxtaposition of an Édgar Negret sculpture from 1967 titled Edificio (Building) and Louise Nevelson’s Rain Garden Zag II from 1977.

Ten days in Colombia, 29 studio visits, eight museums, nine galleries, ten independent spaces, six private collections, and two delayed flights, left us physically unable to carry on but also offered plenty to ponder. In retrospect, the overall impression of this first visit can be summarized by one of Nicolás Paris’s proposals for art: “A classroom for error: the incorrect, options how to fail, possible ways to make mistakes.”

Discovering Feliza

By Starr Figura

In Colombia, probably the biggest revelation (among many) for me was the work of Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982). Our group had the opportunity to visit her home and estate in Bogotá. The property includes a modest front garden and the tiny apartment that was her first home and studio, as well as three adjacent buildings purchased by her second husband, Pablo Leyva: a small house, another building where her library and archives are currently stored, and a much larger, garage-like studio. Leyva’s son, the artist Camilo Leyva, now uses that large space for his own work, and he also manages Bursztyn’s estate. Examples of Camilo Leyva’s sculptures mingled comfortably with those of Bursztyn, whose art has always been a touchstone for his own. Bursztyn’s sculptures were resting unceremoniously here and there, the large ones occupying sections of the floor and the smaller ones placed on makeshift surfaces and tables, or inside crates or cardboard boxes.

What impressed me about Bursztyn’s work is its combination of visceral toughness, poetic sensitivity, and sly, irreverent humor. In 1961 she began using scrap metal, twisting, crushing, and welding it to create sculptures large and small. In 1967–68 she made her first kinetic artworks, a series of steel constructions that she called Las histéricas (The hysterics), by welding long, thin ribbons of metal into circular, springlike configurations; attached to motors, they vibrate noisily, even aggressively. There is a suggestion of playfulness in them, but also of confrontation, disruption, and violence.

In Colombia, Bursztyn is revered as a key artist of the postwar period, a pioneer whose sculpture broke new ground in the 1960s and helped pave the way for avant-garde practices in more recent decades. Her work is highlighted in the collections of museums such as the Museo Nacional de Colombia and the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, and can be found in galleries such as Alonso Garcés, all of which we had the good fortune to visit during our trip (although, regrettably, her major works were temporarily not on view at the museums). Despite this renown in her own country, Bursztyn is all but unknown in the United States. Hopefully this will change, not only because her work represents a high point in the history of Colombian art, but also because it can be seen as part of an artistic current that crested internationally in the 1960s. Bursztyn’s work is often compared to that of César (with whom she studied in Paris) and Jean Tinguely, but it may resonate even more potently with the work of a number of women artists—Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alina Szapocznikow—who also found their own strong and slightly eccentric voices by creating disturbingly subversive and unorthodox sculptures during that same heady, transformative decade.

The Art of the Book

By Milan Hughston

Our group’s visits to museums and artists’ studios confirmed how important artist’s books are to Colombia’s flourishing art-publishing history, both modern and contemporary. The rich tradition of drawing and the profusion of beautifully rendered sketchbooks quite naturally find their way into the production of artist’s books and editions.

Our C-MAP group was fortunate to be able to see work by three Colombian artists participating in the forthcoming project being published by MoMA’s Library Council. The Library Council is a group whose annual membership supports activities of the Library and Museum Archives. A special benefit is the semiannual publication of a limited-edition artist’s book that often brings together the work of an artist and a writer.

In early 2017, the Library Council will publish The Valise, which includes work by seven Latin American artists inspired by the text of Argentinian writer César Aira. Aira’s text follows the dramatic journey of a nineteenth-century German artist through the mountains and pampas of Chile and Argentina. Three of the artists included in this collective project are from Colombia; and we made studio visits to two of them, Johanna Calle and Nicolás Paris, as well as saw an exhibition by Mateo López at Casas Riegner gallery.

We were lucky to be accompanied on these visits by the editor of the Library Council publications, May Castleberry, who was in Bogotá working with the artists on final details for the publication. Our studio visits with Calle and Paris allowed us to enter their worlds in an intimate and personal way, to closely observe their past work, and to see how their more recent work for The Valise has taken them on new journeys—in terms of traditional production and also new media and formats, all contained inside a Duchamp-inspired “valise” that reflects the themes of journey and travel.

Both Calle and Paris are known for their meticulous and detailed work, particularly in drawing, and each of them is well documented and represented in MoMA’s collection.

Calle’s contributions include a series called Morphine Landscapes, which incorporate intricately typed letters that frame the images, functioning as a kind of typed poem imagining the drug-addled German artist on his journey. Her second piece uses a series of anonymous photographs taken by a photographer in the 1940s that depict the Colombian Andes, again echoing the themes of travel and adventure.

Paris’s work incorporates architecture, objects (including a glass bulb with a local seed floating within it), and drawings. The body of work as a whole reflects the themes of travel, exploration, time, and teaching, all of which find their ways into most aspects of Paris’s art practice.

At Casas Riegner gallery in Bogotá, the group visited Mateo López’s latest solo exhibition, Ciudad Fantasma (Ghost City). This exhibition included examples of the intricate folded and printed pieces that López has created for his participation in The Valise. These comprise twenty-four letter press and woodcut prints that reflect the “geometry of the object” and interpret the artist’s recent trip through the Darién Gap, a wild area straddling the borders of Panama and Colombia that remains one of the least-traveled areas in the Western Hemisphere. In conclusion, it’s very appropriate that our CMAP “journey” through Colombia mirrored the focus of the forthcoming Library Council publication, incorporating discovery, collecting, and learning. All of these traditions are timeless.

Colombia Coca-Cola

By Sarah Meister

Early in the evening of our last night in Colombia we had the opportunity to meet with Antonio Caro, who for more than four decades has been a key protagonist in Colombian art circles. We met at La Oficina del Doctor, an intimate book-space nestled within Caro’s gallery, Casas Riegner, in Bogotá. This struck me as fitting, given that one of Caro’s most iconic works Colombia, painted in Coca-Cola’s distinct looping script, had become a leitmotif during our travels throughout Colombia. We first encountered a version in Medellín at the Museo de Antioquia (executed in 2007; Caro’s first version is dated 1977) and saw several others in public and private collections. My favorite was an embroidered apron hanging in Nicolás Paris’s studio—not only because we all so enjoyed that studio visit!

This work succinctly points to the complex network of relations between Caro’s native country and my own through this symbol of American capitalist enterprise, produced in a variety of formats and editions that irreverently mimic a marketing strategy. But no matter the scale or material, Caro imbues each version with subtle imperfections (a missing dot over the i or irregularity in the lettering), nodding to broader political and human conditions, perhaps, but certainly to the hand of an artist whom Luis Camnitzer has described admiringly as a “visual guerilla.”

As a photography curator, I can’t resist mentioning a select few of the most meaningful photographic encounters, wishing I had the time to write about each and every one of them. There were several artists working with photography whom we knew we wanted to see the minute our C-MAP group decided we would be visiting Colombia. We had acquired a few works from Miguel Ángel Rojas’s series Faenza in 2015 (see the acquisitions here), but it was a rare treat to be welcomed by the artist at his home in Bogotá and to have a leisurely opportunity to trace the broader trajectory of his career through the work installed there.

Fernell Franco (1942–2006) was another artist whose work we have been following actively for years, and we enjoyed an afternoon in Cali with his two daughters, who have thoughtfully tended to his legacy.

Perhaps slightly less well-known, but equally significant is Jorge Ortiz, who had a few works included in Pablo Gómez Uribe’s unassumingly revolutionary exhibition This House Isn’t Worth Anything: What Is Really Worthless Is the Lot at Galería de La Oficina in Medellín. We were fortunate, on our last day, to have been in Bogotá for the opening of “Bernal, Ortiz y Cano: un cuerpo para el arte” at the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño (thanks to Alexa Halaby for the tip, and for so much else). This was a great opportunity to develop a sense of Ortiz’s broader career, with work dating from 1978 to 2016 whose material presence is remarkably difficult to capture through reproduction.

Back in Medellín, also at La Oficina, we had a chance to speak with Jesús Abad Colorado about his work, also lesser known outside of Colombia, which compellingly presents activism and art in equal measure.

Though I can’t pick favorites, it is always a thrill to learn about work that one simply wouldn’t encounter in midtown Manhattan. The first of these discoveries was tucked into a small gallery at the Museo de Antioquia (not far from Caro’s Colombia): an impressive panorama by Jorge Obando (1894–1982) of thousands of people gathered for the inauguration of the Atanasio Girardot stadium in Medellín (1953).

And on our final day, at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá, we came across the work of Luis B. Ramos (1899–1955), whose series El hombre y la tierra from the 1930s was represented with an assortment of modestly scaled vintage prints.

These were contemporaneous with many of the oil paintings hanging in the same gallery and spoke to a distinctly local, quotidian experience. It’s no surprise that the least familiar achievements are those that flourish outside the international art scene, but it does underscore the importance of traveling to see beyond established narratives.

A Thought About La Tertulia

By Thomas J. Lax

Located on the Cali River, directly in front of what feels like the city’s center of skateboarding and cruising culture, Museo La Tertulia presented a set of thoughtful and original exhibitions organized by their relatively new chief curator Alejandro Martín. Cali/71 looked introspectively—but refreshingly without navel-gazing—at the city’s critical history of activism, cultural and otherwise, that not only led to the formation of its important art collectives, but also to massive changes at the museum itself. The combination of agitprop and formal approaches to political engagement by a range of artists including Barbara Jones, Luis Caballero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and many others, seen on the heels of the stunning upset in the United States of the Democratic Party candidate by a fascist, white supremacist, was a stunning reminder of the potential of art and culture to interfere with the work of hegemonic consolidation.

Singing for the Absent

By Luis Pérez-Oramas

The very first scene of the video Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia, by the art collective La Decanatura, depicts a mother cow slowly, even lovingly, stroking with her tongue a newborn calf, presumably her own. The landscape is pastoral and magnificent in its Arcadian calm, but for two uncanny architectural presences: two monumental satellite towers dating from the 1970s.

The place is known as the Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia (Satellite Space Center of Colombia) and, like many similar sites throughout Latin America, it was opened in the 1970s, specifically on March 25, 1970.

The video, introduced by two black-and-white photographs of the towers, was authored by a collective of young Colombian artists, La Decanatura (Elkin Calderón and Diego Piñeros), and presented among many works in the National Salon of Artists in Pereira.

I still have this video in mind. It is one of the strongest, most moving art pieces I have seen in recent months. It obliquely touches upon some of the issues that I have been personally interested in, both as a curator and as a poet. The experience of seeing it actually drew me to the writing of some verses, maybe a poem, as well as to the memory of some old, haunting readings, and to general thinking about the purpose (or purposelessness) of an initiative such as a trip by MoMA curators to Colombia within the frame of our Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives initiative, C-MAP.

Were we bound there with the expectation of discovering some (hidden) masterpieces? Do we really care about the history of a country such as Colombia—or for that matter about any other (relatively small) country in the Americas, or in the world? What is our position, as employees of a dominant, mainstream art institution, vis-à-vis the struggles and celebrations of national communities that are not planned to be part of the fairy tales embodied by our geniuses and artistic heroes? Could an institution such as MoMA be generous? Could an American, or for that matter international, curator working in the very axis of art power produce a critical perspective outside of a logic of power-will? What is a powerless art? A powerless Modernity: does it exist?

After the cow has caressed her newborn calf with her tongue, the video proceeds to show the rainy surrounding landscape of the very old Leal y Noble Villa de Santiago de Chocontá, in Cundinamarca.

Suddenly, sparingly, a group of children, all bearing musical instruments and wearing white costumes, which we presume were the uniforms of the technicians who worked at the Satellite Space Center, come out from those monster towers into the open field. They start playing a moving song, a lullaby. They caringly play that music while it slowly rains. In another shot, they play inside the abandoned towers, uncannily, against the silence of a failed Modernity.

They may be playing their music in search of a voice that they have lost, or the voice that they are losing as they become adults, and they look for the place of infancy, where they come from, that place that we all have abandoned: that site of absence projected into the future, uncertainly.

The Satellite Space Center is no longer useful, no longer “modern.” Beside its ruins of modernity, the landscape continues, beyond itself, following the same secular, ever-evolving pace of cows, trees, tempests, veals, harvests, lightning storms. A verse by Alberto Caeiro, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, reads, “Os pastores de Virgílio, coitados, são Virgilío, / E a Natureza é bela e antiga (Virgil’s shepherds, poor guys, are Virgil, / And Nature is beautiful and ancient).”

The Banda Sinfónica Infantil de Chocontá (Children’s Symphonic Band of Chocotá) ends its lullaby outside the satellite towers as the rain recedes. Each child turns away, one at a time, and goes inside. The day is ending. From above, from a hill maybe, we see the landscape of Chocontá entering the darkness of the night, gray mirrors of water slipping toward the horizon.

Few days, too many places: Medellín, Cali, Pereira, Armenia, Bogotá. A country emerging from a century of wars, from innumerable lost. A community rethinking itself, projecting for the first time, as a possible achievement, a future of peace. Artists getting together, making art there, where it was not possible to make art before. Is there a more exciting encounter? Do we need to expect there, as good old colons, the illusory greatness of art, the fiction of genius, the phantom of masterworks to feed our insatiable, Saturnine capitalization of the modern . . . instead of—Agamben’s dixit—just the upcoming, ordinary community?

I will keep with myself, for years, this brief encounter with La Decanatura’s view of Chocontá, the lullaby addressed to the absent, the dove’s coo intended for those who have not yet come as a testimony of something that, for the most, I think contemporary art has unfortunately lost.

We have lost an ambition. An ambition that consists of addressing those who are no longer with us, or those who have not yet (be)come. This deep ambition of temporal projection, of resilience against the precariousness of the present time; this will against the preterition of the absent; this illusion of making connection with that which we were, or with those who were, or with that which is the place from whence we come, and never were, was the driving ambition of art, at least since its intellectual regime was theoretically established in the Western world. It has been one of the most recurring figures of transcendence, that human impulse. That is what seems to have been lost in a world of art that only satisfies itself with the present; that aims only to be contemporary; that surges in cowardly silence against all forms of anachronism; that satisfies itself with a contempt of politics consisting in neutralizing it in its very mediocre scenes of representation; that feeds itself with its own commercial fetishizing, with its own, imperturbable economy. That conforms itself with its own present being, as if the darkness of the present or the uncertainty of the future were nonexistent; that satiates itself with its own fashions, happy to not be anything more than what it is, as all fashions, ceaseless, expiring from the anodyne exhaustion of its consumers. It is against that world that the kids of Chocontá are singing.

Listen to Colombia

By Giampaolo Bianconi

One of the most striking threads through our recent visit to Colombia was that of sound and its deployment as a tool to produce and question both standards of scientific investigation and understandings of nature and culture. Institutions of varying scales across Colombia are united by the strength of their spaces dedicated to sound art created toward these ends—works that ultimately reflect one of the strongest themes in contemporary Colombian art: an all-encompassing focus on territory as an umbrella under which both art and politics are articulated.

In Medellín, the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art (MAMM) contains a gallery called Lab 3, a space designed to showcase sound installations. On view during our visit was a biologically driven piece by Leslie García and Paloma López, titled Micro-ritmos. Powered by soil samples collected from different parts of the city, Micro-ritmos transforms organic bacteria into a constantly shifting light and soundscape. García and López are Mexican artists who have worked extensively in alternative spaces, radio, and experimental sound rooted in organic systems. Throughout our time in Colombia, we came to realize that the pattern of working with organic material is part of a broader focus on the issue of territory in Colombian art and politics. As a watchword, territory encompasses concerns with landscape, real estate, extraction of natural resources, organic animal and plant material, and more.

At the National Salon in Pereira, one of the standouts was Carlos Bonil’s Fonoarqueologia y otras conexiones con el Amazonas (2016). In this sound work comprised of a listening station on blonde wood, visitors were invited to hear sounds like those derived from field recordings of the Amazon. These “recordings” were, however, in fact reproductions, produced in a studio using special instruments and techniques. By implicating the construction of human-made sound with the scientific endeavor of field recording, Bonil allows his listeners to question the supposed distinction between nature’s purity and industry’s artificiality. This theme was repeated at FLORA ars+natura, a space in Bogotá dedicated to exhibiting nature-related artworks and cultivating artists demonstrating a keen awareness of nature. Alberto Baraya and Sylvia Jaimes’s worked with an archive of birdsongs from Cornell University, collaborating with a team of singers and musicians to re-create these natural sounds from scratch for a piece entitled Gallada Lab (2015–16). Gallada Lab was presented in a dedicated sound gallery at FLORA, a room used throughout the year to host a rotating series of sound installations.

While artists use sound to question the authenticity of nature itself, other institutions in Colombia use immersive sound toward more didactic ends. At the Museo del Oro, a dramatic sliding door lead to a gallery that houses glass walls behind which illuminated golden relics were presented. Sound recordings of rituals that once incorporated these artifacts were presented with musical punctuations of light that animate the objects. At the National University of Colombia, an exhibition tracing the history and contemporary manifestations of shamanistic rituals in indigenous communities in Colombia featured a completely dark space in which a sound bath of recordings of ceremonies played on a loop. In both exhibition venues, theatrical presentations of recorded sound were being used to convey experiences of anthropological knowledge.

In each of these institutional and extra-institutional contexts, sound is presented as an aesthetic experience contiguous with other mediums. From my perspective as part of MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance Art, this was an inspiring constellation of spaces fostering sonic experiments with thoughtful depth.

3 days in Bogotá

By May Castleberry

For the last two years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with three artists from Bogotá—Mateo López, Johanna Calle, and Nicolás Paris—on a collective project called The Valise.¹ Joining the C-MAP group in Bogotá for three days in November certainly expanded my outlook on Colombian art. I was particularly interested to see works that helped me understand the context for the Colombian contributions to The Valise—works that reflect an affinity for travel, history, and bookmaking, and that draw upon Latin America’s rich tradition of graphic design, typography, and illustration.

When I first visited Bogotá in 2014, I went to the Luis Ángel Arango Library with López and Paris. While there, we looked at nineteenth-century atlases, entomological drawings, and expeditionary volumes, and it was clear that some of these objects, which López and Paris have been looking at for years, influenced their works for The Valise. In any case, all three artists appreciated the suggestion that their contributions might evoke earlier journeys or explorations of South America.

The C-MAP trip introduced me to some of the institutions and collections of older works that have inspired the Colombian artists participating in The Valise, as well as to some of their contemporaries, colleagues as well as rivals, who also employ graphic techniques, albeit in different ways. For example, after hearing of my project, the kind curator of art at the Museo Nacional de Colombia showed me a gallery filled with heroic paintings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquest. Then he took me to an adjacent gallery and showed me a satirical reproduction, by José Alejandro Restrepo, of a nineteenth-century print of a supposedly paradisiacal tropical scene. This work, an interesting contrast to that of Calle, Paris, and López, sends up the colonial idea of the “picturesque.” The next day, I saw some of Restrepo’s incisive videos at Espacio El Dorado; despite the shift in medium, these pieces still incorporate text and photographic illustration in a layered way, recalling the artist’s harshly powerful work as a printmaker.

I saw echoes of the artwork we’ve commissioned in multiple places. Knowing of López’s love of the informational poster, I was struck by a large, early twentieth-century color chart in Beatriz Gonzáles’s studio—one of the only pieces of décor/art/information hanging there (other than her own work). I saw collaged, collapsed, altered, and/or blurred typography, and texts as images in almost every collection we visited. This only added to my impression that Calle, a master of such mediums, is a singular innovator rooted in a long Latin American lineage. In fact, typography appeared where I least expected it! At the studio of Miguel Ángel Rojas, we saw miniaturized photographs of illicit acts, bunched together to form letters and words. Conversely, Doris Salcedo, an artist clearly on the “maximalist” end of the typographic imagination, showed us her studio filled with dozens of massive concrete plinths, cut with water-filled alphabetical letters that form the names of would-be immigrants to Europe who had drowned in the Mediterranean en route.

More practically, I saw López’s gallery, Casas Riegner, and they proposed that we might show our project in La Oficina del Doctor at the time of the Bogotá Book Fair. I’ve begun to think about libraries in which we might place The Valise, or to whom we might give the extra, offset-printed pamphlets we’ve made in conjunction with it. For example, we will have 150 extra copies of a small pamphlet, designed and created by Nicolás Paris (and including a poem of his authorship), about Colombian leaves that have been marked by leaf-mining insects—perhaps of interest for the Flora library?

A Big, Healthy Nose

By Jerónimo Duarte Riascos

Perception, when it becomes habitual, also becomes automatic. Take, for instance, your nose: you know it is there and yet you don’t really see it anymore. Unless, of course, you change your habitual perspective: close one of your eyes and your nose (or at least part of it) “appears.”

Russian formalism, notably Viktor Shklovsky, proposed that this process of fighting the habitual, of seeing anew, is called defamiliarization—and he identified it as one of art’s core effects. But art is not by any means the sole defamiliarizer. So, I think, are time and space, something that became apparent to me during (and after) our recent C-MAP trip to Colombia.

C-MAP Latin America’s recent focus on Colombian modern and contemporary artistic practices—which included around twenty study sessions on the country’s art, history, and culture and was the reason for MoMA’s recent trip to Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and Pereira—was, for me, a defamiliarizing moment. In a way, I saw my nose again and realized how much it had grown.

Born and raised there, I moved to the United States (space) a good number of years ago (time). I return to Colombia a lot, usually in a rush, always trying to do and see too many things in too short a time. In November 2016 I went back, again in a rush. But this time I was joined by a group of colleagues, most of whom were traveling to Colombia for the first time and whose objective was, after having spent more than a year researching its art, history, architecture, key figures, and particularities, to gain a better understanding of the artistic scene of the country.

We experienced a very intense ten days, complying with the stereotypical Protestant ethic: early mornings, late nights, and few (too few!) breaks in between. We visited artists, museums, independent spaces, galleries, collectors, schools, exhibitions, universities. I felt like a proud local, though a defamiliarized one, showing them things that were also new to me. Because despite the cliché, things are changing in Colombia—quite radically. Not only politically, of course, with the much-discussed and recently signed peace treaty with FARC, but also behaviorally.

There is optimism and brains and creativity. And a very encouraging desire to work together. This was clear to me throughout the whole time in Colombia and during most of our visits. But I want to underscore two events, in particular: a brunch with representatives from some of the most interesting and exciting independent spaces in Bogotá, and a class (of sorts) that we took at Universidad de los Andes.

Brunch was held at Espacio Odeón, where we met not only with Odeón’s team but also with teams from La Agencia, C a m p o, and Miami. The spaces these groups are creating are, it seems to me, the basis for a community of experimentation and thus the impetus for a self-critical and fertile scene. I felt a bit jealous seeing this scene from afar—I know that some of my colleagues, who have no particular connection to Colombia, felt the same way, and so I think it is safe to conclude that it was not (only) a case of homesickness. Odeón, La Agencia, C a m p o, Miami, and the more than sixty flourishing independent spaces existing in Bogotá alone, invite you to belong and that is perhaps one of the reasons why they have successfully lured new publics into their spaces, projects, and experiments.

After brunch we left for class. The whole MoMA group sat quietly and in orderly fashion to hear a group of artists, who had graduated from Universidad de los Andes or were otherwise affiliated it in some way, discuss a diversity of paths enabled by artistic education. The group was so diverse and the conversation was so engaging that we ended up staying for a couple hours more than initially anticipated. You know it’s a good class when students refuse to leave and instead linger in the classroom trying to get a bit more of what has been given.

After class, as we continued on with our full schedule, my feeling of defamiliarization intensified with every new conversation. My conclusion: a pleasure, and an unparalleled opportunity to (re)discover my big, healthy, full-grown nose.

Photos from the trip

Medellín (Nov 10-12)

Cali (Nov 13)

Pereira (Nov 14)

Bogotá (Nov 15-18)

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