Espacio rehabilitado y geografía mutante en Ríos y silencios

Abstract

In 2017, artist Juan Manuel Echavarría presented Ríos y silencios, an exhibition that featured some of his work from the last two decades. Among the pieces there is a series of photographs in which Echavarría captures the main walls, or at least what remains of them, of destroyed schools in the Montes de María, Chocó and Caquetá. These rural areas have suffered the violence of guerrillas and paramilitary groups, as well as from a lack of government support. According to the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, MAMBO, that hosted the exhibition, the photographs portrait the education as a victim and they are an aesthetic critique to the representations of violence in Colombia. Beyond such interpretation, this paper problematizes photography as a medium to “reframing” colonial perceptions of landscape and understands the nature depicted in the photos as an actant that re-signifies the ruins of the schools. Fur-thermore, this paper argues that silence is important to understand how the absence of students and teachers cohabits with the vital presence of nature in the photos. This cohabitation destabilizes the status of the ruins—thereby showing—the potential of change and regeneration of non-human subjects. In dia-logue with Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, W.J.T Mitchell, Jane Bennett, and Ana María Ochoa, this pa-per questions anthropocentric ideas of landscape and focuses on two aspects traditionally seen as dis-tant to the study of photography: the movement of the image (that the river announces), and its aural dimension (that the silence enunciates).