This text is the closing chapter of Consuelo Pabón’s essay “Actos de Fabulación. Arte, Cuerpo y Pensamiento Año 2000: Memorias de una Itinerancia.” In 2005, it was awarded the prize given by the Colombian Ministerio de Cultura to a historical, theoretical, or critical essay on Colombian art. Later, the essay was published in the book Colección de ensayos sobre el campo del art. Compilación de ensayos 2005. The text, which was written after the exhibition Actos de Fabulación (2000), draws to a close the research and exhibition experience organized by Pabón for the arts and the body component of Proyecto Pentágono – Investigaciones sobre Arte Contemporáneo, a Ministerio de Cultura project that took place in 2005. A critic and curator, Pabón provides a concise and clear explanation of three key figures she came across in her research and work on the exhibition. The first—“acts of fabulation,” for which the project is named—is based on the philosophical work and curatorial research performed prior to the exhibition. This concept revolves around the ability of each performative action to change or to affect the specific reality of the place where it ensues. The second figure, which Pabón calls “live monuments,” entails the alliance between the artist and the audience, that is, the way an “inexpert” viewer reacts to and/or participates in the piece. The third figure is what she calls “monumental simultaneism.” This concept envisions the performance medium in Colombia as a Cubist-like construction of a people with a thousand faces, a people that makes use of common symbols to establish different means of resistance.

This document is the formal conclusion to Actos de Fabulación, the exhibition formulated by curator Consuelo Pabón (b. 1961) in the framework of a research project of the same name. Significantly, Pabón’s conclusions are based on the experience she had in the different spaces where the exhibition was held: the Museo de Arte Moderno and Bolívar Park in Medellín; the Museo Bolivariano de Arte Contemporáneo in Santa Marta; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and other spaces in Bogotá [see doc. no. 1129442]. Thus, the author’s discourse in this text—unlike the rhetoric used in her early research for the project—is not overly philosophical. As a result, the experience of installing the works, as well as the encounters with them, has a direct influence on the conclusions reached after the show.

In drawing those conclusions, Pabón understands the curatorial act as an exercise in performative learning. She formulates images that are possible insofar as she envisions herself as member of the audience rather than as curator. This approach allows her to construct an album of memories with intersections and relationships between the works. By relying on intuition, she is able to read the event as a whole without neglecting each individual work, with its own time and space. As a curator, she does not set out to explain all of the symbols that the works entail. What she does, rather, is point out the most logical and specific similarities and differences between the works such that each one forms part of a global discourse while also constituting a discourse in and of itself. Finally, by envisioning a people with many faces, she builds a notion of “fable,” a space where anything is possible. Thus, she is able to disassemble the reality surrounding the performances in the exhibition and to raise awareness of the fact that the medium is engaged in a constant process of reconstruction. Indeed, she asserts that performance is by nature a ceaselessly mutating act of resistance rather than a finished static work. 

Consuelo Pabón is a freelance curator and academic. She teaches philosophy applied to aesthetics at the Faculté de Philosophie de l’Université of Paris. In 1989 and 1990, she taught at the School of Arts and Humanities of the Universidad de los Andes and at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá. Since 1997, she has taught aesthetics to art student at the Universidad de Medellín. 

For further information on the Actos de Fabulación project, and the research, exhibition, artists and venues it entailed, as well as Proyecto Pentágono, see doc. no. 1099666 and 1099681.