Mordiendo Polvo

“Dust, itself formless and without edges, can both dissolve form and reveal it (…)” — (Steven Connor, “Pulverulence”, 2009)

“(…) the testimony of circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, going away, or being gone.” — (Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, 2021)

Gonzalo García presents fragments of the visual memory of Colombian electoral campaigns in dialogue with other residues we tend to consider insignificant, although these categories may be interchangeable. He works with material that normally accumulates everywhere but is systematically removed by conservation protocols from any properly cleaned and organized archive: microscopic particles that drift, settle and gather ceaselessly across reality, yet originate in the decomposition of that same reality.

The organic and inorganic residues we call dust are time itself in the process of solidifying. They emerge from mountains and minerals eroded by water and wind, from skin cells and other dead tissues, pollen and spores. Over millions of years, they settle into new stratigraphic layers that recycle earlier ones while adding the components of their own time. Some scientists seek to establish pulverized traces of metals, artificial chemicals and synthetic textiles, radioactive fallout from uranium or plutonium bomb detonations, and the nanoplastics now present in the air as a thin layer marking the rise and decline of human civilization: a human counterpart to the iridium-rich clay that records the end of the Cretaceous.

When we speak of corroded political posters, perhaps torn into décollage, it is unclear whether we mean those that briefly occupied urban walls during campaigns or the other cartels that have penetrated society more deeply through their operations: drug trafficking, judicial corruption, waste management. In Spanish, the word cartel carries both meanings. These traces are only marginally preserved in libraries. Most survive as family recollections or in party headquarters, but primarily persist as a fragile collective memory of images and slogans that once made promises to the future.

Outside the formal documentary archive, the artist collected residues from the streets surrounding this building and from its interior, including crushed debris from recent renovations. Instead of performing the laboratory analysis initially proposed, he developed a process for producing his own pigments, presented here in handmade versions with inventive names. Through an experimental photographic process that combines photosensitive emulsion with these materials, or detritus, dust becomes fixed in images. The work records the passage of a politics that is both our recent past and a present in constant demolition.

Emilio Tarazona, curator