Art inhabits conflicts in the interdisciplinary festival Funka Fest

In the painting of the Colombian artist Tomás Ochoa, the photo pixels enlarged to large dimensions are replaced by gunpowder, which when burned fix or reveal the image of landscapes on the canvas, burning the fabric itself.

The artist translates landscapes of territories traversed by the Colombian armed conflict into the canvas, following the example of Arhuacos mamos (indigenous shamans) who traveled dangerous areas under paramilitary control in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, trying to heal with rites places marked by the violence. “This propitiatory rite became political action, but above all in poetic action,” says Ochoa.

One of the works in the series ‘Black Line’, in powder on canvas, is part of the visual arts exhibition of the Funka Fest interdisciplinary festival, which will take place this Saturday and Sunday at the Palacio de Cristal in Guayaquil. The international festival also has a theater section and a concert by the Argentinean singer-songwriter Fito Páez, a musical highlight this Saturday.

The exhibition ‘Geographies of the singular’ will have 12 works by Latin American artists, nine of them from Ecuador and one representative from Colombia, Puerto Rico and Cuba in the South Urna of the Palace.

The verb ‘to inhabit’ is the thematic axis of this fourth edition. Ana Rosa Valdez, curator of the exhibition, says that the selected artists present critical ways to inhabit the contemporary world and reveal strategies to inhabit conflicts, to “give them a sense, let themselves be traversed by them, turn them into their own”.

Iza Páez honors the struggles of people with diverse sexual orientations in ‘Rainbow Energy’, a lighting installation. It is a color installation with neon tubes that show on one side the pink and blue colors, designated for the feminine and masculine genres; and that reflect on the obverse on a wall the colors of the Glbti flag, the diffuse tones of the rainbow and the chakras in Hinduism.

The piece celebrates the queer movement and poses utopian associations. “The work reveals that beyond these social constructions of gender there is a diversity, such as the colors of the chakras, which are present in all people regardless of gender and sex,” explains Valdez, art critic.

The Ecuadorian Nikita Félix presents ‘Espectros del Cajón’, sculptures that represent sick or wounded animals that she found in Guayaquil, in which she accuses “a kind of indolence and the normalization of that situation”.

The exhibition offers the diversity of contemporary art media, with paintings and sculptures, photography, performance, installations and video. And that diversity is evident in the multiplicity of perspectives from which artists interpret the verb to inhabit.

According to the curator, they explore the notion of ‘living’ from historical or social studies, from personal experiences or in dialogue with the landscape tradition of art history, from an urban-everyday experience or from a spiritual one, in an exploration of worlds interiors

Source: https://www.elcomercio.com/tendencias/arte-festival-interdisciplinario-funka-fest.html