The Uruguayan art historian and executive publisher of the magazine Arte en Colombia-Art Nexus, Ivonne Pini wonders, “How should the visual arts address our past?” She points out that the “rupture of modernism” did not happen in Latin America, which explains why the past is still a relevant point of reference in the closing years of the twentieth century. Pini identifies a number of “problems” concerning the discourse inherited from the hegemonic center: the “postmodern opening-up,” the complex “reformulation of critical analyses of identity,” and the historical configuration of “multicultural” matters. She also cautions that the peripheral nature of Latin America leads some to think that they can understand it based on perceptions skewed to other parts of the world.  

This essay is relevant because its author, the art historian Ivonne Pini, explains and discusses the prevalent cultural phenomena in Latin America in the final years of the twentieth century, when artists scrutinized the past, appropriated their history, and embarked upon an aesthetic recycling program that drew from a variety of sources. She steadfastly opposes clichéd definitions of what is considered “Latin American,” and instead suggests viewing South America as a multicultural territory. Pini has written several essays and books on Latin American art. Her research has tended to focus on primary sources in an attempt to understand the complexities involved in the birth of modernism, and to challenge the discourses that seek to homogenize artistic processes in South America.    

This essay is taken from the book Fragmentos de memoria: los artistas latinoamericanos piensan el pasado [Fragments of Memory: Latin American Artists Ponder the Past] (2001), that was written by Pini with the help of the research committee at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. In the late 1990s, prior to producing this book, she published a series of articles on contemporary Colombian artists who essentially worked with the concepts of “memory” and “identity” in the magazine Arte en Colombia: “El pasado como experiencia subjetiva” [The Past as Subjective Experience] (1996); “Rodrigo Facundo, Juan Fernando Herrán y Doris Salcedo: al rescate de la memoria” [Rodrigo Facundo, Juan Fernando Herrán, and Doris Salcedo: Rescuing Memory] (1996); “Rodrigo Facundo: en búsqueda de memorias e identidades perdidas” [Rodrigo Facundo: In Search of Lost Memories and Identities] (1998); and “Juan Fernando Herrán” (1997).  

Some Colombian artists produced works of art as a means of combatting the “amnesia” of a society with a propensity to forget its past and its history. Colombia’s particular history, with its continuum (Sánchez, 2003) of war and violence that escalated in the last two decades of the twentieth century, had a marked effect on the country’s art production [see doc. no. 1092308]. Art expressed people’s individual and collective experiences and became a visual criticism, devoid of nostalgia, in the face of Colombia’s harsh, relentless reality.