The importance of this interview is that it was one of the first done with Wilson Díaz Polanco (b. 1963) when he launched his life as an artist with Juan Fernando Mejía (b. 1966). Both artists participated in the “Bienal de Venecia de Bogotá” with their work Copy Master (1995), which reproduced the installation Extractor de atmósferas acumuladas (1994) by Elías Heim (b. 1966). Heim was the only artist chosen to represent Colombia at the Forty-Sixth Venice Biennale (1995). The Díaz/Mejía reproduction was insubstantial (built out of plastic and cardboard materials) and on a smaller scale. The Heim work, selected by the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura (Colcultura), consisted of a complex machine made up of huge cones and “museum-atmosphere extractors.”
The scathing participation of Díaz and Mejía became openly controversial because they had appropriated Heim’s work, with humor and sarcasm, taking two actions. First, they created a poor copy of the contemporary work selected by the official institution; second, they exhibited it at the “Bienal de Venecia de Bogotá”—an event that appropriated the name of the Italian biennial. Coincidentally, the exhibition in question was held in a community space in the neighborhood of Venecia (a working-class neighborhood in southern Bogotá, at some distance from the city’s cultural center).
The event “Bienal de Venecia de Bogotá” commenced in 1995, promoted by a group of students at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia who called themselves LasMatracas. This private initiative led to the creation of an alternative space (far from the institutional art venues) for exhibiting contemporary art. The competition led to two significant developments, starting with involving residents of the Venecia neighborhood in art events in a public space, specifically, a community hall. The second action was to stimulate artists’ interest in the conditions of a neighborhood primarily consisting of peasants forced to migrate into the city by the violence they had experienced in the Colombian countryside.
In addition to the name of the biennial, Las Matracasappropriated the logo and typography of the Italian competition. That first round included the participation of several generations of artists, for example, Antonio Caro (b. 1950), Jaime Ávila (b. 1966), the Frenchman Gilles Charalambos (b. 1958), Lina Espinosa, Miguel Huertas, Humberto Junca (b. 1968), and Jaime Cerón (b. 1967). Today’s “Bienal de Venecia de Bogotá” is directed by Franklin Aguirre (b. 1969), a Colombian artist who has organized six rounds of the biennial: 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2006. In 2008, the exhibition presented a retrospective, chronological review of the work done and shown during the prior thirteen years. In addition to Aguirre, the members of Las Matracas are Paula Rodríguez and Dimo García (b. 1975).