The article “Ejercicio de agrimensura”by Lucas Ospina was published on the website http://esferapublica.org on June 7, 2007 on the occasion of Polaris (2007), an exhibition by Colombian artist Beatriz Eugenia Díaz. The show was held in April and May of 2007 at Galería Santa Fe (Bogotá) in the framework of the IV Premio Luis Caballero. The text was later published as the seventh chapter of Una historia crítica en ocho capítulos y medio (2008), a compilation of critical texts by Ospina on the exhibitions that took place in the framework of the 4th edition of the Premio Luis Caballero. In the extensive introduction to the text, Ospina asserts that the most apt word to describe the show would be “poetic,” even though that word is overly ambiguous. He then proposes two critical exercises that address Díaz’s work as if it were a map. First, a cartographical approach to the 983 drawings arranged on the gallery’s walls; the drawings were made using stacks of white paper torn vertically and impeccably cut horizontally. Second, Ospina discusses “the signaling of a visit” to the exhibition indicated by the audio recording of birds emitted by the forty-seven speakers located throughout the gallery.

This text describes the formal aspect of Polaris (2007), a work by Beatriz Eugenia Díaz (b. 1965). Its approach to the work is based on the notion of the map which, as image and conception, exemplifies the construction of a cartographical and sensorial exercise in the Galería Santa Fe. The text fails to point out concepts key to the work such as the definition of the word “Polaris”—a star that, from the human perspective, does not appear to move and, hence, can serve to mark the north. As the title of the work, the word “Polaris” attests to the relationship between the objects in the show and the sound recording heard in the semicircular gallery space construed as a segment of an orbit around a pivot located in the northern part of the city. This layout effected a deformation in the map of Bogotá and generated new conceptual and formal spatialities in both the gallery and the city.  

Lucas Ospina (b. 1971) provides a detailed description of the installation. He not only discusses the objects and their layout in the space, but also how they are perceived as a whole in a show that formulates a complete experience. In keeping with the guidelines of the Premio Luis Caballero, Díaz’s proposal takes into account the gallery space itself. Granted by the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño and Bogotá’s Secretaría Distrital de Cultura y Turismo, the Premio Luis Caballero is the greatest distinction conferred on Colombian artists over the age of thirty-five. As of 2010, there have been five editions of the event. For further information on exhibitions held in the framework of the Premio Luis Caballero, see [(2) doc. no. 1129798, and doc. no. 1130308]. 

Colombian artist Beatriz Eugenia Díaz has a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and a master’s degree in visual poetics from Universidade Federal da Bahía, located in Salvador in northeastern Brazil. In 2007, she was awarded an honorable mention at the fourth edition of the Premio Luis Caballero. She lives and works in Bogotá. For more information on Díaz, see [doc. no. 1132660]. 

Artist Lucas Ospina received a degree from the Universidad de los Andes in 1995 and, in 2003, an advanced degree in sculpture from Temple University in Philadelphia. He won first prize at the IV Salón de Arte Joven in 1994. He has written art criticism for Bogotá-based newspaper El Espectador. At present (2010), he teaches at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.