Reimagining the Colombian Pacific

The exhibition Manglaria: raíces y sujeciones wishes to open a dialogue between 25 artists, including a collective, in order to explore the links with the sacred and the ritual, the archive, memory, identity, and the Afro, indigenous and mixed race representations in Colombia. Proposals from photography, video installation, sculpture to figurative art, sound and performance meet each other and question stereotypes, gaps and contradictions at the base of the narratives of a racist country.

The show is the fruit of Litoralidades, a research-creation group led by Colombian artists Fabio Melecio Palacios and Henry Salazar, who were in charge of the curatorship, the selection of works and the museology of the exhibition, which takes place in an unconventional space, the Obeso Mejía House, that belongs to the Museo La Tertulia in Cali. In this space, the visitor can dialogue with the past of the house: the works can be seen in the kitchen, bathroom, rooms and gardens. This is how we enter into a disturbing and necessary conversation that, from the perspective of visual arts, questions the ways of enunciating the territory of the Pacific coast.

The title of the exhibition, Manglaria, refers to a symbolic space typical of the geography of the Colombian Pacific, in which a plurality of artistic aspects and paths meet in order to talk about the present, the past and the future of the complex creative universe of the region and its relationship with politics and society.

Manglaria: raíces y sujeciones: August 15th – September 13th, 2019, at Casa Obeso Mejía, Avenida 4 Oeste No. 4-59, Cali, Colombia. Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. at 7 p.m., Sunday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Photos and text by Ana Luisa González.