Susana Vargas
Walking in Bogotá and Montréal: Adopting New Lens of Interpretation
My walking started when I did my first step on the weapon-melted floor in Bogotá.
Montréal and Bogotá have the great potential to be cities with entry points between them. Although they are located in different contexts, geographies and cultures, by exploring them through walking, I have come with multiple reflections about pedagogy, walking, art and research. This, in fact, came to my mind by questioning how does walking through those cities reveals its community? What kind of stories am I able to tell by walking? Does our background play a main role in this?
By engaging walking as a method of inquiry, I realized two walks, one in my hometown, Bogotá and the other one in Montréal. The walking in Bogotá was centered in the history of violence of Colombia. That is the reason why I decided to begin with "Fragments", a new art space whose floor consists of the melted remains of 37 tons of decommissioned weapons of the former guerrilla group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
This made me question about other Colombian artist whose work focus on the armed conflict and walking. I analyzed then the artwork “Cardinal signs” by Libia Posada. It consists in a collective exercise of description, representation and understanding of forced displacement. It recreates a series of maps of the routes described by a group of people, mostly women. From the oral reconstruction, the maps of the traced path of each person was drawn up on their own legs. Afterwards, a photograph was taken. The artwork addresses the story of people who have been forcedly displaced because of the armed conflict in Colombia. It exemplifies how through art one can get to deal with sensitive topics at the social level, while appreciating a technique and its aesthetic value. This set of photographs reveal one social issue very remarkable in Colombian history, and it is through the act of walking.
With an internal displacement of approximately 7 million citizens (Josi, 2017), Colombia’s indigenous and rural populations have been affected by the conflict. The artwork of Posada focuses on that, pointing out the routes the peasants had to live to escape the armed conflict. Walking in this case served as a key component to the creation of her artwork. The artist, by using maps as a vehicle to demonstrate a specific journey, gives the spectator an idea of how we can address a problematic, it is a way to speak in visual language.
Through recognizing different elements such as architecture, art, museums in downtown Montreal and Bogotá in multiple walks, I created a visual journal that documents the places, objects and details which in turn, revels the process while doing these walking routes. In this visual journal I also explored new lens of interpretation and I addressed various types of walking, mostly memory and historic walks.
To see the full visual journal please visit: https://susanavargasm.wixsite.com/walkingartography
References
Josi, C. (2017). Accountability in the Colombian Peace Agreement: Are the proposed sanctions country to Colombia’s international obligations?. Retrieved from https://www.swlaw.edu/sites/default/files/2017-08/401%20Accountability%20in%20the%20Colombian%20Peace%20Agreement%20-%20%20Josi.pdfSouthwestern Law Review, 46, 402-421.
LeBlanc, N., Davidson S. F., Ryu, J. and Irwin R. L. (2015), ‘Becoming through a/r/tography, autobiography and stories in motion’, International Journal of Education through Art, 11: 3, pp. 355–374, doi: 10.1386/eta.11.3.355_1
Navarro, L. & Nario, J. (2010). Peace Education: A Pathway to a Culture of Peace. Quezon City: Center for Peace Education Miriam College.
Truman, S. E. & Springgay, S. (2016). Propositions for walking research. In Powell, K., Bernard, P. & L. Mackinley (Eds). International handbook for intercultural arts (pp. 259-267). New York, NY: Routledge.
