"Cartographies of Escape," Luis Carlos Tovar

From October 21, 2016 to January 8, 2017, the IILA-Photography Award will be present at the 15th Photography–International Festival of Rome at the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Rome (MACRO with the exhibition titled "Cartographies of Escape" by Colombian artist Luis Carlos Tovar, winner of the 2015 IILA-Photography Award. "Cartographies of Escape" is the result of work created last year by Tovar during his stay in Rome. In this proposal, he approaches the city of Rome like a roaming ethnographer. For almost an entire month, and alongside a group of refugees and social workers, he developed a photographic project in the Baobab welcoming center for refugees at Vía Cupa, in the eastern part of the Italian capital, a place entirely managed by volunteers from Italian civil society—who sprang into action to assist refugees in the beginning of the exodus in the summer of 2015—that was closed down last December. During this stage of the project, Tovar was assisted by students from RUFA–Rome University of Fine Arts. Appealing to collective and individual memory, as well as to his ability as mediator, Luis Carlos Tovar and the guests at Baobab evoked traveling, journeys, dispossession, peripeteias, affections and other milestone events that gradually outlined an ephemeral and emotional picture that serves both as therapeutic catharsis for the participants of the project and as what the artist calls "Naive Etnography." Through this excercise, Tovar acted as visitor and explorer as he entered a closed city to show, without prejudices, one of the most complex dramas of our time: the migratory crisis and the institutional and cultural inability to face it, not only in Rome but also in the rest of Europe. "Cartographies of Escape" emerges from this context of rejection through photographs, portraits, narratives, accounts, and sounds that thoroughly and poetically attest to a parallel city; a Rome that is complex but also solitary, an invisible periphery that is profoundly human. Photography–International Festival of Rome is promoted by Roma Capitale, Assessorato alla Crescita culturale - Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, and organized by Zètema Progetto Cultura under the artistic directorship of Marco Delogu. The IILA-Photography Award is organized in collaboration with the Embassies of IILA's member countries: Argentina, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.