April 6 – June 9, 2024
Ader la Casa
Fictions constructed to protect, hide or to forget. National myths that become inseparable from personal memories, flooding family albums and burning child fantasies. I can think about the globality of certain tropes as the one of the hero, that same one that attempted to be a father but decided for a public life. This project, Arder la casa, explores the contingencies of political violence in Colombia through my family history and my father’s exile. In 2015, after finishing his term as mayor of a small town bordering Venezuela, my papa crossed the Colombian border — fleeing the political persecution he had been subjected to for decades. I remember him disappearing on different occasions when I was still a child. But fairy tales that my parents told me justified his absence. Now, for the first time, I could understand my family was fragmented and separated in the harshness of a country where political violence reaches the worst statistics in the world. Witchcraft, religion, socialism, and mafia culture are at play within the cultural environment of the story. My father’s exile marks an inflection point from which the project develops. Traveling between past, present, and future, I unveil our history to reveal traces of violence, separation, and cyclical escapes. The project utilizes archives such as pictures or newspaper clippings, paintings, analog photography, video, and sculpture.
Margarita V Beltrán is a Colombian artist and photographer based in Bogotá. Margarita has worked on issues of gender, race and political violence in the context of Colombia and Germany. Her long-term project “Arder la casa, on political violence, family and exile” explores the layers of violence in Colombia through the story of her family, who recognize themselves as victims of the armed conflict. This project was selected by the publishing house Hydra (Mexico) for the creation of a photobook. During her stay in Germany, she developed Reclaiming spaces BIPOC, a photographic project on structural racist violence in eastern Germany, which received funding from the German Ministry of Culture in 2021. She has taught photography with a decolonial approach at Bauhaus University. Margarita has exhibited in Photoville New York, PH Museum Italy, and several galleries and museums in Colombia. Margarita is a member of Diversify Photo and Native Agency.
