Abstract
In September 2019, I visited the Serranía La Lindosa in Guaviare, Colombia, with a team of researchers from the National University in Bogotá. The trip was led by Prof. Rosario Lopez from the Fine Arts Faculty and included a visit to the extraordinary rock painting site at Cerro Azul. Abstract and figurative red pictographs densely cover the rock faces of this hill that suddenly rears up from the plains surrounding the Guaviare river, their meaning mostly mysterious, obscured by the temporal and cultural chasms that separate us. But these astounding images nevertheless have plenty to say, once we get past their scientific analysis, which remains trapped inside its own terms and interests, and their incarceration in the museum as melancholic memories of something they never were. Beyond these limits we discover northwestern Amazonian cosmologies organized around alterity, where multiple others (including me) constitute a virtual outside actualized in and by the pictographs. By doing so these images offer analogies that travel between worlds, and so help maintain the balance and reciprocity of the infinite perspectives constituting life. While these two ideas of virtual affinity and inter-world analogy do not explain these pictographs, they do reveal how they might explain us. After unfolding these aspects of the pictographs a little, I will consider the exhibition Trazas, oficios y territorios curated by Prof. Lopez at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá (21 April–8 August 2021). This exhibition confronts the pictographs with various examples of Latin American abstraction drawn from the museum’s collection (amongst other things), and in doing so demonstrates how the virtual affinity and inter-world analogy of the pictographs might form the basis of a contemporary cannibal aesthetics).
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Notes
- 1.
A beautiful video presenting Professor López’s project is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPWXH_HYOLo
- 2.
For a good overview of the research on Cerro Azul to date see Muñoz Castiblanco (2019).
- 3.
Something suggested to me by Barbara Santos, a Colombian artist who works closely with indigenous groups in the Vaupés region of the Colombian Amazon.
- 4.
Urbina and Peña (2016, 14) give the more recent date of 7250 BP for the pictographs.
- 5.
Personal correspondence, 11.04.2020. For more on the Carijona people, see Schindler, 1977.
- 6.
The nearby Guaviare and Guayabero rivers were used by a succession of Spanish expeditions between 1535–1572 (Urbina & Peña, 2016, 18). Michael Taussig quotes indigenous descriptions of these dogs from the sixteenth century: ‘The color of their eyes is a burning yellow; their eyes flash fire and shoot off sparks. They are tireless and very powerful.’ (2004, 131) He also discusses the ongoing resonances of these images (2004, 130–32).
- 7.
The recent exhibition El jaguar y la Mariposa. Chiribiquete Patrimonio Natural y Cultural de la Humanidad (National Museum, Bogotá, Colombia, 17 July–30 August 2020) seemed to willfully ignore this, offering video documentation of two pictograph sites that simply identified what each pictogram ‘represented’. The video can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W06xeA4nboE&feature=emb_logo. See Castaño-Uribe (2008) for another view of the pictograms at Chiribiquete.
- 8.
As Århem explains, living beings are either ‘eaters’ or ‘food’, and so from any given perspective a being is either predator or prey (1996, 188–189).
- 9.
As Århem writes about the Makuna: ‘Every material form and practical activity has its counterpart in the he-world. Indeed, material forms and physical operations in the visible world instruct human beings about the hidden reality of the spirit-world, and thus of the deeper significance of existence’ (1996, 188).
- 10.
This passage first appears in Morais’ catalog essay for Geometria Sensíval, but he often re-used it, including in his essay ‘Utopia and Form in Ramirez Villamizar’, the catalog to the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá (Morais, 30). The cover of this catalog shows Ramírez Villamizar’s 16 Towers, and the maquette for this work is included in Trazas, oficios y territorios.
- 11.
As Camila Maroja points out, Frederico Morais initiated this ‘fundamental shift in the canon of Latin American Art’ replacing the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo with the Brazilian Neoconcretos Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica as its central figures (Maroja, 225).
- 12.
Fontana was very close to the Madí group, Ramírez Villamizar and Sanin are important Colombian abstract artists, Gego was a significant kinetic artist in Venezuela, Henri Laurens had been commissioned to paint murals as part of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas project, Hans Arp was an important European influence on geometric abstraction, and Bridget Riley was a leading proponent of Op art, which was very influential (especially through the presence of Viktor Vaserely) in Venezuela.
- 13.
On the importance of this exhibition see, Maroja and Winograd (2014).
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Zepke, S. (2023). Inverted Worlds: The Cannibal Aesthetics of the Pictographs at Cerro Azul. In: Zepke, S., Alvarado Castillo, N. (eds) Violence and Resistance, Art and Politics in Colombia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10326-1_6
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