Medellín’s Modern Art Museum (MAMM)

As usual, I wandered around the Museum of Modern Art and found the museum a bit underwhelming. Most of Medellin’s art scene seem to be centered around the local community’s street art and artist. However, what I did find extremely fascinating was a modern exhibit that centered around Pablo Escobar. In general, I found it extremely fascinating how Pablo Escobar – an extremely polarized figure – was able in his life and now his death – influence a city so pervasively, to the extent that his persona has infiltrated even a current exhibit at the city’s modern art museum.

The following was the exert from:

Sebastián Múnera 
Crime and Ornament: False Freedom, False Capture

Whenever try to capture something this something that escapes; whenever we seek to emulate freedom, we falsify it with ornaments and artifice. The act of capturing is never complete: it’s never reprinted with justice. An image of the past cannot bring the past back.

Some institutions capture and collect. Every device captures and makes us believe we own what we capture - yet something always escapes the capture. The Hacienda Nápoles founded by Pablo Escobar and now a spa-cum-wildlife sanctuary) shares land with El Pesebre penitentiary. Between those two spaces there is a false freedom and a false capture.

The spatial and sculptural gestures of Sebastián Múnera become a mechanism for spending time in a given space until a story emerges. After a series of interventions in libraries, the artist premiered as a filmmaker with his cinematic piece, “La Torre”. Later, he worked in zoos, Hacienda Nápoles among them. There he developed the fiction currently on display.

The zoo, as an institution, gave the artist an opportunity to reflect on the gaze and the methods employed by cinema. That is, he began to consider the ornament, the construction to artificial spaces, and something he calls “animal dramaturgy”.

Several years behind his death, Pablo Escobar had a completion of animals from Africa and over exotic lands delivered so that he could have his own personal safari park. Safaris are made to simulate more closely the animal’s original habitat, or at least provide a better simulation of liberty than the experience of a cage in a zoo. Nonetheless, the hippos escaped the park into the Magdalena River, and the giraffes died, unable to adapt to an environment to which the they didn’t belong.

In the story built for this project, the pleasures that take place within the framework of crime are also put in relation: the moment that attend the conjugal visited at the penitentiary escape one day to enjoy the watermark safari next door.

This is something in the impulse to see the originates in an impulse to control. There is an aspiration in the modern man to stop time, to be able to divide the continuum, to separate himself from the world an observe it from above, looking sown onto a plan where everything can be manipulated. The tongue of panopticon is an architectural example of this anxiety: men aspire to a bird’s-eye view to overcome their limitations.

The installation present in the gallery reference ornamental representations of falsified nature and perpetual surveillance.

Below are pictures of the videos in the exhibit.