“Macondo is not a place but a state of mind that allows one to see what one wants to see and how one wants to see it.”
–Gabriel García Márquez.
Featured Artists
Hermes Berrio
Nicolas Bonilla Maldonado
Maria Cano (Salvaje)
Carlos Castro Arias
Andrea Dominguez
Rafael Dussan
Gonzalo Fuenmayor
Vanessa Gomez
Ana Maria Jimenez (Taller Sin Borde)
Laura Jimenez Galvis
Camilo Rodriguez Marquez (Carm Works)
Stefania Tejada
Marco Tulio
Verdi
Gabriel Zea
Exhibition Highlights
Exhibition Info
Casa AmaCord is pleased to present MACONDO: Colombian Imaginaries, its inaugural London exhibition, featuring a selection of works by 15 contemporary Colombian artistic practices which are challenging the relationship between art and the socio-political context.
In Macondo, the fictional town where One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place, extraordinary or magical events are taken as mundane, while the habitual is considered extraordinary. In this way, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez explored how the retelling of stories can mythologize or distort our perception of History.
Similarly, the artists in this exhibition engage with the malleability of collective narratives through the conscientious questioning of today’s cultural setting. Featuring paintings, photography, sculpture, mixed media works, design and ceramics, the exhibition identifies and invites the audience to reflect upon five key concepts that capture essential themes related to Macondo’s ethos: landscape, life, memory, society and the imaginary.
Highlighting the uniqueness of each artist, AmaCord brings them together within this borderless land of Macondo, where the dialogue between the intimate and the universal creates new imaginaries. In AmaCord’s Macondo, each cultural narrative collides in one shared space where there is an element of unity, constitutive of a myriad of themes and motifs that echo contemporary identity.
Like García Márquez's Macondo, this exhibition is a protest against forgetting. Just as memory may save the fictional town from repeating its history, so do these artists appeal to memory to reclaim value for their origins: the Mestizo, the Black, the Indigenous, the European. Each artistic input can be read within this integrated framework that unveils the artwork as a response to the context in which it originated: Colombia.
