artnexus #64

Jaime Ávila (Saboyá, Colombia, 1966) has worked with urban spaces since the early 1990s. Large cities are the visible stage for our most frequent conflicts, and Bogotá is a suitable site for reflection. Starting with his series of snow-capped mountains, through his project The Radioactive Ones (1997,) all the way to Life is a Catwalk (2002- 05,) Ávila explored the world of drugs, the life of youths in socially complex areas, showing the decay of addicts and marginals presented “on a catwalk,” deploying his critical irony against fashion magazines in their attempt to set the pace of the times. The rawness of these images, recorded in photographs, foregrounded the weight of a constant enemy in Latin American cities: extreme poverty.

Ávila uses the resource of photography as a document, a taxonomy that allows him to classify, fix, and order types, thus joining a strong trend in contemporary Colombian art as a way of accounting for everyday reality.

In 2006, Ávila launched his Bombs project. For this proposal, he appropriated some bank archives, where hundreds of papers were kept in orderly boxes; in this hermetically sealed, inaccessible place, illuminated only by artificial light, his intervention resembled an underground city, where confrontations arose setting capitalistic and socialist systems against each other.

This issue’s cover registers one of these works. At one end of the digital photograph is the US Capitol building, crowned by a tiny George Washington figure; at the other end is the Havana Capitol;

between them, the body of a bomb. This alludes to the political situation, to the cultural tensions it generates, and to the feeling of being astride a ticking bomb, not knowing whether it will explode, or when.

 

IVONNE PINI