This text by Colombian artists Graciela Duarte and Manuel Santana, founders of the Echando Lápiz [Using the Pencil] Project (which has been in operation since 2000), describes the conceptual idea behind the initiative. Its goal is to reflect on the urban structure of the city dominated by manmade things and on the meanings and values associated with what nature has been subjected to over the course of history. There are references to the illustrations of the Botanical Expedition and the idea of exploring nature (in the city) through drawing and its particular form of cultural representation. There is a description of the environment where the project takes place, an explanation of the methodology, and a number of strategies, such as: workshop, routes, conservatories, and exhibitions. That is, activities that reflect the social goals of the project since the idea is to establish a close relationship with the community. The text ends with a list of some of the exhibitions where the project has been presented, such as the 40 Salón Nacional de Artistas [40th National Artists Salon].

This manuscript is important because it succinctly documents the guidelines for an art project of a social nature that was created by the Colombian artists Manuel Santana (b. 1960) and Graciela Duarte, and reveals their interest in creating strategies designed to promote community dialogue and involvement. It is also a reflection on contemporary art practices in that it questions the product of art and privileges a drawing-centric process: a form of approaching the world and the essential state of being. It is also significant for its appropriation of the country’s cultural and scientific history by recalling the project proposed by the wise man José Celestino Mutis in the eighteenth century and the Chorographic Commission in the mid-nineteenth century that sought to identify the territory, its people, and their customs.

The Echando Lápiz [Using the Pencil] Project organized workshops in several cities in Colombia, inviting participants to explore their botanical environment and create detailed drawings of local plants, trees, and flowers, and to ask their family and friends to tell them about histories, myths, and practical and medicinal customs. All this information was recorded in a field diary, or a “diary of observations” in the style of the wise man Mutis, treating the exercise of writing as another form of drawing. The project thus encouraged the use of drawing as part of daily life, as a way of reclaiming one’s perception of one’s surroundings; in other words, a poetic way of seeing, that anyone can use to record the beauty of their natural world in great detail or as a whole. The Echando Lápiz project also proposed another pedagogical practice in the artistic field by promoting a collective social component: broadening the concept of a school to include a wider dissemination of knowledge. The project (which was launched in Bogotá later on) was expanded to include several other regions of the country when the División de Artes Plásticas [Visual Arts Division] invited it to participate in the Banco de la República’s “Obra Viva” [Live Works] program and other workshops organized with the help of the Instituto Distrital de Cultura y Turismo [District Institute of Culture and Tourism].  

In 2008, the subject of “Entre lo individual y lo colectivo” [Between the Individual and the Collective] was raised at the Laboratorio Artístico de la Orinoquia del Programa del Salón Nacional de Artistas [National Artists Salon Program’s Artistic Laboratory of the Orinoquia Region], which resulted in a discussion about public spaces, systems of expressions, and the role of the visual artist. The goal was to probe certain facets of the imagination to reconstruct collective bonds through strategies designed to create networks and connections between people. From June to October 2008 a workshop was held at the Magdalena Medio to commemorate the bicentenary of the death of José Celestino Mutis.

Manuel Santana is a visual artist at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, where he has been the academic coordinator of the art program on various occasions. He is also an art instructor at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.