This is a review of the work of the Colombian artist Oswaldo Maciá (b. 1960), which identifies and analyzes his most representative works produced between 1995 and the time when the article was published. The article describes the formal elements, central themes, and political and/or social aspects of this artist’s work. The attached interview also provides Maciá’s personal views of some of his work, which helps to gain an overall sense of his body of work. The reviewer refers to Maciá’s use of voices in his creations, whose formal elements such as the tone, pitch, or melody of the spoken language take on the formal characteristics of a symphony, expressed here as acoustic compositions.
The descriptions of works such as Vesper (2007)—an installation consisting of fifty-five Caribbean women’s voices, each one narrating the happiest memory of her life—and Cleanaway (1995)—a work that invites members of the audience to clean their ears in order to listen to the oral testimonies of immigrants who arrived in Colombia in the 1950s—reveal the sociopolitical issues addressed by the artist. He does so by using sound archives to illustrate the discourse that has been oppressed or silenced by the hegemonic narrative of the larger history and the communications media.
Oswaldo Maciá is an artist; he is a graduate of the Escuela de Bellas Artes of Cartagena, and earned his master’s degree from the Fine Arts Program at Goldsmith College in London, England. He has taken part in exhibitions, such as the LI Biennale di Venezia (Italy, 2005) and the Shanghai Biennial (China, 2004), among others. He currently (in 2010) lives and works in London.
Carlos Jiménez (b. 1947) studied architecture at the Universidad del Valle. He earned his master’s degree in theory and history of art and architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has contributed art criticism to the Spanish weekly magazines Cambio l6, Tiempo and El Europeo. He currently (in 2010) writes for ArtNexus, Third Text, and Lápiz magazines, and writes a weekly column for the newspaper El País in Cali.