This document fleshes out the ideas that lay the basis for the performance Una cosa es una cosa (1990)by Colombian artist María Teresa Hincapié (1956–2008), a work that received first prize at the XXXIII Salón Nacional de Artistas held in 1990. The prize was granted pursuant to a unanimous decision of the jury whose members were: Spanish sculptor Martín Chirino (born 1925), Venezuelan art critic María Elena Ramos, North American critic David Ross, and Colombian critic María Elvira Iriarte, and artist Miguel Ángel Rojas (born 1946). This was the first time a work in the performance genre was awarded a major prize in Colombia.
The most important concerns of this work by María Teresa Hincapié are time and its circular nature, daily life, the feminine, the fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the essential, all of which are closely tied to the research and thought of video artist José Alejandro Restrepo (born 1959). Indeed, Hincapié and Restrepo engaged in close dialogue and worked together a great deal until the mid-nineties. By 1990, Restrepo had made two works that evidenced a more mature phase of his artistic development: Terebra (1988) and Orestiada (1989). In them, Restrepo critically examines the arbitrary nature of categorization, hierarchy, and any form of taxonomy. These works also voice Restrepo’s reflections on edition, linearity, and narrative in history, all of which resonate in Hincapié’s work.
In the performance Una cosa es una cosa, María Teresa Hincapié slowly placed the objects from her daily life in a space. She then picked them up, put them away, and reorganized them on the basis of random taxonomies, though always laying them out in a square spiral in reference to the circular nature of time. Una cosa es una cosa is the work that earned Hincapié recognition on the Colombian and international art scenes. Indeed, it was a watershed that paved the way for performance and experimental art in Colombia, while also playing a key role in expanding the vision of contemporary art from Colombia in the international art scene.