Juan Obando, 2018

It shouldn't be surprising that writing has influenced much of Juan Obando's work. With a range of media (from digital to physical) Colombian-born, Boston-based Obando creates installations, video-performances, and publications that examine how meaning is made. He does this primarily by scrutinizing the "social circuits" through which cultural significance accumulates into political power. Words and writing—and more specifically, how words are written—are often such social circuits.

I first saw Obando's work last year at Volta, where he was showing Jeep VIP with the Colombia-based Timebag. Confronting how violence in Colombia has been normalized and even commodified, Jeep VIP takes as its subject a fleet of military jeeps (driven by civilian enthusiasts) that toured visitors to MDE15, an international event hosted by Museo de Antioquia. We sat down in May, just before Obando left for a residency at SOMA in Mexico City, to talk about his work, place, how culture can be co-opted for political power, his experiences with Colombo Americano (a Cold War-era initiative where he learned to speak English), and how one Colombian writer, Fernado González, has shaped his thinking. 

Jeep VIP (stills), 2015

Leah Triplett Harrington: I’d love to start out by talking about Fernando González.

Juan Obando: There’s a Colombian writer called Fernando Vallejo. He wrote a really beautiful book called Our Lady of the Assassins, a wonderful love story between sicarios and an outsider, the writer. In the 90s, in Medellín, these kids got paid nothing to go kill people. They counted their kills and had a deeply religious sense of being in the world. So Our Lady of the Assassins is really beautiful because it portrays all these dynamics and contexts, but also puts the author, Vallejo, in the writing, and in this case, he falls in love with one of these hitboys.

I grew up reading Vallejo a lot with one of my best friends, my childhood friend Daniel Clavijo. He then discovered Fernando González, one of Vallejo’s major influences. González died in 1964, and he published this magazine called “Antioquia” from 1936 to 1945. His main writing was done before the Antioquia Magazine in the 1920s and 30s. Most of his books were banned by the church and couldn’t be taught in schools. This was almost the case with Vallejo, too, and Our Lady of The Assassins. Vallejo left Colombia in the 70s and in 2007 became a Mexican citizen, partly because of how intolerant the Colombian mainstream became towards his work, specially in the early 2000s.

In the 2000s there was a major shift in Colombian culture in that the country became incredibly nationalistic. The government introduced a country brand called “Colombia is Passion,” Colombia Es Pasion. This was a comprehensive global marketing campaign with TV ads, YouTube series, corporate partnerships and absurd stuff like a bunch of Colombian pop artists recording highly-produced nationalistic songs. It was just top-40 pop music, but the lyrics were all about how Colombia is a beautiful land, and how the people are so lively. This was a huge wave of pro-Colombian propaganda that swept the country and was also highly disseminated here in the States. But in reality, there were these terrible human rights situations happening in the country: massacres, displacement, and social cleansing carried out in the name of globalization, progress and traditional values.

Culture played a big part on that, staging a polished image that covered a very harsh reality. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m suspicious when I see slogans like  “support your local something.” In Colombia, this type of hyper-local discourse was used to create a really oppressive environment of ignorance and arrogance.

LTH: I think that's really interesting. Celebrating local, but without any kind of judgment or critique attached to it. I think we're definitely going through a similar kind of moment in the United States.

JO: For us, what was really incredible at that time is that this was a completely rounded cultural project. In the countryside, there were these horrible acts of violence that the police and the military —most of the time in association with American interests— carried out. But this is something has been happening since the 1920s. What changed in the mid-2000s, with the government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, is that this cultural plan appears as a strategic media campaign that was smart, cool and highly pervasive. It was about crafting hyper-celebratory emotional moments in Colombian history, and it was all carried out through culture. Even art, contemporary art —everything was permeated by the “Colombia Is Passion” brand.

LTH: I have a little understanding of the geography in Colombia. Is Antioquia in the west?

JO: West, but not to a point that it reaches the coast. It's west-central Colombia. But the land and the social geography is very disrupted. People from Medellín and Bogotá traditionally don’t like each other. It is really incredible the behaviours that geography can impose, the kind of social geography that gets molded by local values and vice versa.

So, when Fernando Gonzalez talks about the Antioquia project in the magazine, it is always in the plural form, as in “we Antioquians.” He really made it sound like a whole movement, a political party or art collective defined by localization.

Screenshot of homepage, Bazuco, 2005 - 2011

LTH: I want to ask you about ANTI-OQUIA, where you re-imagined González’s Antioquia Magazine. The project suspended some of Gonzalez’s slogans, alongside other texts, so that they were eye level as people came into the space. I see this as a way that you sort of made words and language, abstractions of ideas, into something material that participants had to confront.

JO: As background for this project, in 2005 I started a podcast project called Bazuco with a couple of other friends (Juan Ospina, Juan Rios, and Daniel Clavijo). Bazuco is the word for crack cocaine in the streets of Bogotá. As we started the series, I also became interested in contemporary art made by collectives, especially those using corporate disguises to operate. I was really interested in the idea of corporate personhood. This also came from a feeling of self-awareness about being an artist, or presenting myself as one.

I think out of that self-awareness came the question "How can I hide and still make art?" I was really into removing my authorship and my persona from whatever I was making back then. We decided that the podcast was going to live inside a sort of fictional world via a corporation we called “Bazuco Media Corporation.” We also produced video, prints and even released music and a couple of clothing lines. The idea, in a way, was to kind of impersonate the enemy. To have Bazuco be a corporation, or perform as one. We used bold modern fonts like Helvetica or Futura and slick vector graphics. We had a website that looked like the opposite of everything that was cool in Colombia at the time. The language and themes of the podcast were subversive in the sense that it was all nonpartisan, navigating in this sort of ambiguity between solemnity and humor, using the medium as a platform to mock Colombian culture through absurd music commentary. We weren't aligning ourselves with the hyper-nationalistic thing that was going in in Colombia, but we also weren't countering it. We were just trying to navigate in the middle, which in a polarized context, was easy to do because it was wide open for opportunities. Nobody was operating in that space. Ambiguity became a weapon.

I was super enamored with this idea from González, of navigating pirate waters, the practice of piracy pre-copyright. What does it mean to be a pirate? Who is the enemy these days? What does it mean to operate from the place of the enemy? Gonzalez says something really beautiful. I think there's not a perfect translation for this phrase in English, but he says, "Vivimos a la enemiga,” which I always translate it to "We live as the enemy." But it's more like, "We live enemy-style."

So back to Fernando González and the ANTI-OQUIA project: My friend Daniel used to have a book compilation of all the González’ Antioquia magazines from 1936 to 1945 and gave it to me as a present back when we were doing the Bazuco project. (Antioquia is the state where Medellín is located. It's the area where Pablo Escobar is from, therefore El Cartel de Medellín.) By 2012, Daniel was doing his masters in Spanish Literature and had studied both the works of Vallejo and Gonzalez; and I was very interested in re-activating the image of Gonzalez within the context of contemporary Colombia, specially in Medellín. This is a city with a deep history of antagonistic intellectualism, but also struggling with a much more recent and prevalent history of crime, easy money, and anti-intellectual arrogance. Some scholars have characterized this condition as narcoestética (narcoaesthetics): The set of images and imaginaries resulting from the cartel and drug culture of the 90s.

González’ act of appropriation —taking the name of his home state without official license— was part of what ignited my curiosity for the project ANTI-OQUIA, which I developed as a residency project at Casa Tres Patios in Medellín in 2012. Naturally, I had to bring Daniel into the project, which was actually difficult for me to justify as he is not a “professional artist”, but he was the perfect person to create this project with. Somewhere along this process, I found out that Fernando González was writing the entire magazine himself, even though he was using plural forms in it. So it was funny that somehow I was able to honor that plurality by bringing my best friend to work with me.

My initial proposal was to reignite the Antioquia magazine in its full plurality, under the name ANTI-OQUIA. We took some of the slogans from the original Antioquia magazine and made huge posters which appropriated the coat of arms of the State of Antioquia. I remixed some of González’ original mini-manifestos, such as “Antioquia Is Pirate” and “The Hell With Success”, and turned them into a poster campaign. We created a website for the project with the original manifesto of the Antioquia Magazine, and posted an open call for submissions for a new magazine under this manifesto. But we never credited Fernando González. The idea was to introduce ANTI-OQUIA as a new magazine project, borrowing the tone and original statements from the original Gonzalez publication, without directly credit him in any form. Pirating the original pirate.

After this initial approach, we started understanding the project more as a pirate agency which first action was to release a magazine. An organism that could become something bigger or different as it grew. We started thinking more globally about the project. We began holding meetings and communal editorial committees with strangers who would contact us because of the website or the poster campaign. At some point, I was contacted by the Otraparte Museum, which manages the cultural estate of Fernando Gonzalez. They were wondering about what we were doing and I think a little concerned about it. Luckily, Casa Tres Patios is also a significant institution within the cultural arena of Medellín, so they were able to communicate with Otraparte really well.

ANTI-OQUIA, Final publication 8.8 x 6.6 x 0.2 inches. 88 pages, 2012.

ANTI-OQUIA, 2012. 

LTH: So you sort of used the residency to further your relationship with the estate? That’s interesting, the way that you had to sort of operate through institutions to circumvent institutions in general.

JO: If I remember correctly, Otraparte wrote to Casa Tres Patios and were super nice about it. But we are from Bogotá, and that puts us in a weird place doing a project about this very specific cultural icon in Medellín, Antioquia.

One of the greatest things about Colombia though, and something that unites us all, is that every time you meet it’s mostly around drinks, and in Medellín is specifically aguardiente, a heavy anis liquor that you kind of take as a straight shot after every intervention in the conversation, almost as a ritual. So it's always a great conversation with aguardiente. The guys from Otraparte invited us to the museum, and we ended up drinking and kind of collaborating in the narrative of the project. Otraparte started making an ambiguous fuss on social media about our project, fortifying the phantasmagoric presence of the “new” Antioquia as a pirate product. This started a local buzz, which we followed with a series of micro-events around contemporary piracy practices: a pop-up shop called Tiendita Pirata, a night of appropriated tweets sung as folk songs called Tuitrova, etc.

“Pirating” the Antioquia Magazine gave me the freedom to develop my obsession with graphic design and marketing. The campaign was highly successful. The project’s inbox full of submissions after a month and we decided to print everything that people sent us. Everything.

These submissions were hung from the ceiling of the main gallery and then we announced a series of “editorial parties.” We had free drinks, food, and music and invited people to come and put a sticker on their favorite texts. That’s how the final pieces for the magazine were chosen, by the people who came to hang out. Finally, when it was time to lay out the magazine, we took the texts that were voted for the most. Design was the only point in the project where I actually had a solitary role in it. I took all the materials and I did the layout of the magazine. We then printed the magazine, like 1,000 copies. I really like the cover because it’s an arepa —which is a colombian food staple— and three chorizo sausages forming an “A”. The anarchy symbol. Anarcoarepa.

New Horizons

LTH: I also wanted to talk about Newer Horizons, in which you re-created a national symbol, a historical painting, by inserting people in it as a photograph. You created a sort of set and asked people to perform it and hired a professional photographer to document.

JO: That piece was actually part of the ANTI-OQUIA project. It was all about inviting people to become involved in the reconstruction of iconic imagery from that area of the country, from Medellín. The original painting, Horizontes (1913) by Francisco Antonio Cano, in which these photographs are based, is a hit in Colombian art history.

LTH: So people are aware of the painting and will have ideas about it?

JO: Totally. It’s an icon. Medellín and Antioquia are all about colonization. Not colonization as in the transnational kind of process but in the mythological sense of man vs. nature. The first people that got to Antioquia, to that valley, were creole colonials in search of better lands. It’s a very proud moment their history because it epitomizes this idea of conquering the land. In the original painting, the man is pointing to the land and the woman holds a baby. One of my friends, who's a really great artist, Carlos Uribe, redid the painting in the 90s (Nuevos Horizontes, 1999) adding some American airplanes fumigating crops in the background. Then, in 2010, at Centro Colombo Americano in Medellín, he took on his own work and re-interpreted it through a public mural depicting a still from a Pablo Escobar documentary in which Escobar is almost posing in the same way of the man in the original painting (New Horizons).

LTH: Is this mural still there?  

JO: The murals at Colombo Americano are supposed to be temporary. Every six months or so a new artist is commissioned. But with Carlos, they took his mural down after two days. He made a big fuss about it, and still the work lives on through photographs (I think the piece was recreated years later at a very important show at Museo de Antioquia, but now as an interior mural painting). I was very intrigued by this story when I met him, about his relationship with this painting, and his version with Pablo Escobar where these black lines define the landscape. That mural was kind of erased from history in a way, but its censoring also created a mythology around it, which is something that usually happens in these cases. Censorship ends up reinforcing what it aims to invisibilize.

A Bird Without A Song, 2015

LTH: It seems like you use fiction or the imaginative that only become real through a certain stylization. In your statement you talk about how you use social phenomena as a raw material, which is something invisible, but also very powerful. Social phenomena are the channels through which something cultural, or subjective, becomes real.

JO: Yes. In a way it’s analogue to computational systems and the synergy between software and hardware. New software development does not immediately express itself in a specific physical manifestation until it accumulates enough value and power to require the system to upgrade, therefore asking for an update to its physical structure. In the same way —and even if we don’t see it— cultural currency and social phenomena, reaching a certain point, generate political power and social structures through numbers, accumulation and trade.

I think mine was a generation of artists in Colombia that were very influenced by similar ideas about systems, globalization and capital, and also by what was happening in Mexican art in the 1990s. In the case of Mexico, young artists were responding to non-representative institutions as symptomatic expressions of a system in need of an upgrade. When you don’t have space to introduce a new version, a new form, the questions arise: “What is real? What is virtual? What is really an institution and what is outside of it? How do new versions of it look like?” This translated to us in Colombia into seeing the country-state as an institution. And for me, in the 2000s, there was a sense of institutionalized official culture that inspired me to operate outside of it.

LTH: You’re going to Mexico next week. Where are you going and what are you going to be doing there?

JO: I'm going to SOMA, founded by Yoshua Okón. Yoshua and his friends started a now iconic space called La Panadería in Mexico City in the 90s, an independent art space responding to the needs of artists who were very young at that time. When La Panadería closed a lot of them started international careers, but some went back to Mexico and Yoshua decided to open SOMA, which is a residency but also an alternative graduate school for artists from all over the world.

LTH: How and when did you get involved?

JO: We became really influenced by La Panadería because their curator, Michèle Faguet, ended up living in Colombia afterwards and opening a space called La Rebeca, which was the first independent art space in Bogotá that I remember. So through Michèle we all got this history and access to these artists, who weren’t artists like the ones you’d learn about in school since they were up and coming. Anyway, last year I was invited to SOMA to do a residency and workshop on Fernando Gonzalez and Piracy because he is really unknown, especially outside of Colombia. During my residency I started working on my project, The Snapp, which is a mobile app. I also started talking to Jose Luis Paredes, director of Museo del Chopo, who is really into media art, and he was interested in thinking what could be the form of one my current projects (an artificial intelligence-based sound installation titled “Perpetual Nirvana” that attempts to perform new compositions in the style of the band Nirvana) as a museum exhibition. So I’m going back this summer to cement our discussions and assess the progression of the project, while doing another residency and workshop at SOMA.

The Snapp, 2017

LTH: How do you think your work changed, if at all, when you moved to the US? How do you think it’s changed in each of the places you’ve lived in the US? It seems like your work is so embedded in place and community, and I’d love if you talked about your process there.

JO: There’s something really interesting that Kurt Cobain said in response to questions about the Seattle music scene. He used this term “community patriotism” to scoff at the idea of a monolithic local scene. The discourse of community and locality is something I’m not interested in and I'm very suspicious of. So, even though some of my work focuses on micro-communities and their immediate contexts, it's funny that you used the word “embedded” because I never felt that I have been. I still feel like a tourist in a way.

In my condition as an immigrant and foreigner, I feel like I’m forced to have a distance or live with a distance, especially in the United States. I still have an unresolved relationship with this country, which I don’t think will ever be settled because of the way its international policies of interventionism are still at play in Colombia and the world at large.

At the same time, I’ve also always been interested in American culture, the kind of pervasive popular culture of the United States which became global in the 90s. I would say that MTV kind of shaped me more than going to classes to learn American English as a kid. I was watching MTV and Seinfeld when I was 12 years old, while becoming completely addicted to American skateboarding and punk culture. When asked about my early influences, this is the stuff I would cite.

Going to grad school in Indiana was a moment in which I felt completely detached from the world, but completely connected through the Internet. I mostly remember having great conversations with my mentors Fabian Winkler and Shannon McMullen, being in my studio and playing in a band with my friends from school. In terms of art making though, I was always looking through the glass of the Internet, and there I saw the potential reach of my work. In a way my work became “Americanized” and also kind of alienated from certain audiences in Colombia. I think it still is, maybe. Even though Colombia is a completely globalized, highly Americanized country, there's still a global association between the Internet and the United States. Grad school was more about understanding that I could make work anywhere. I could be in the farthest, remotest part of United States and I could make work that is relevant to me and to what is happening globally. When I moved to North Carolina it was the same thing. I saw myself as a very distant observer with a large window to the world.

Museum Mixtape (Dirty South Edition) - Rhizome Commission,  2014

LTH: In North Carolina you created Museum Mixtape, where you invited  local rappers to freestyle in museum galleries. These museums are public spaces, and the project critiques how museums fulfill, or don’t fulfill, their function as public spaces. Will you talk about this?

JO: I think the project really came about from my experience of not finding like-minded people, especially in art spaces. Or even finding people at all when I would go to places like the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Some days there would be nobody else but me and the security guards in this humongous, modernist, beautiful buildings full of (for me) boring abstract art. I started realizing how detached I'm from the history of American painting, its tradition. It just rubbed me the wrong way. But that's all my prejudice about what American painting represents in terms of political and cultural power.

LTH: North Carolina has the first state-funded museum in the country, the North Carolina Museum of Art. It was founded in the 1950s, during segregation. One of my dream projects is to write about the context of founding a state museum against such a violent history. Then almost forty years later, North Carolina becomes a hotbed of the Culture Wars in the States with Jesse Helms leading a charge of conservatism and censorship by way of cuts to arts funding.  

JO: In that sense, part of what inspired Museum Mixtape was the politically charged conversation about cutting funding for the arts, too. This is a partisan conversation in which the discourse of “art as a common good” is used to either benefit the aesthetic practices, expressions, and cultural economies of an exclusive sector or to act as strategic leverage for other larger (and potentially more dangerous) political agendas. Meanwhile, there are institutions still operating under highly outdated models and completely disconnected from contemporary cultural traffic, the internet, and even their own local demographics. The question is not about art funding, then. It is about who this funding —and art— is really for.

LTH: Were museums open to the project? How has this changed since you’ve moved here?

JO: Most museums were open but there was some reasonable doubt in some cases. Other museums were very defensive. They wanted to approve or edit the lyrics. In Boston, this piece has had an amazing reception as museums here appear to have started to reflect on their own dynamics and roles. Still, I have seen other patterns of hyper-institutionalization which, coming from a context in which there's so much cultural flexibility —precisely from the lack of institutions and official support—, can feel stiff. It seems like art and culture in Boston relies highly on institutional backing, which can be great. It is very fortunate for a city to count with this network. But that also can lead to a lack of critical response, a passiveness.

LTH: Totally. Boston isn’t necessarily institutionalized, but the magnitude of its institutions creates a framework that’s certainly institution-centric. I think that artists here often times, subconsciously or not, seek validation from the major institutions. I think that’s part of the reason that we have such a struggling commercial scene here, and why there are so few alternative spaces.

JO: Forms and formats in such a context become naturally predetermined by institutional culture. It’s easy to fall into that, especially for me as a faculty member at a school. I think my experience in Boston has been very similar to my experience in Indiana, in which I’m highly immersed in an American academic culture, but trying to project outside of it. The show at Distillery, Full Collabs, was kind of an attempt on this.

This show expressed a deeper interest in the images of audiences, spectators, and consumers as parts of systems, rather than in participants themselves (as in past works such as Jeep VIP and Museum Mixtape). I was interested in social media filters, emojis, and stock imagery as archeological symbols representing current systems of power and control beyond the local and the anecdotal. Maybe it all started with A Bird Without A Song.

Full Collabs, 2018

LTH: You mean you are more interested in observing anonymous people anonymously in Full Collabs?

JO: In Museum Mixtape and Jeep VIP, there was a big interest in people and characters, and people as characters. The rapper in the museum, the military hobbyists as drivers for VIP tours at a biennale, those are fictional moments. They’re not intended to portray a real situation but to work as a metaphors for larger systemic disconnections. But with “A Bird Without A Song”, I was more interested in the images of human beings rather than having human beings on camera themselves. I appropriated profile pictures from Tinder and animated them myself. I was really fascinated by the idea of how pervasive this technology is, in which people give away their representation to be manipulated in any way possible. Apart from being sold and trafficked as data, these images comprise a global database of material with the potential of being molded, in this case into a video animation. After working on that piece, I became more interested in the idea of post-digital humanity, which in turn asks for a re-examination of context, place and time. Full Collabs was a continuation of this new interests, exploring the post-digital human form under late capitalism.

LTH: So place doesn’t matter so much?

JO: It doesn't at the start, but then the work needs to be shown and therefore reintroduced to a real social and political context, so it does. For example, I showed The Snapp before in Colombia, during the art fair (ArtBo) there in October of 2017, and the readings on that work were completely different. In Colombia, we use finger-snapping to hurry people up, especially service people, so some people took that piece as a kind of commentary on Colombian elitism. For me, the piece commented on click-based activism as social signaling for community-based operational dynamics, specifically in the US. Finger-snapping is such an online ritual translated to the offline world and for me this was key as I continued to investigate the value of post-digital personhood within capitalist structures: the way in which the replacement of a human gesture with an app doesn’t seem as distant or absurd in the age of apptivism. This is reflected in the way this piece is perceived here in the States.

Some read it as I intended to, or in the worst/best case, just as a purely functional and useful tool totally in sync with its perceived “natural” environment. So I think that's the way that being in Boston has affected the work. These latest projects have been definitely influenced by the local experience but only as a sample for the larger neoliberal technocratic ecosystem in which we operate. This definitely affects the perception of the work as well. Even though Colombia is a hyper-commercial and hyper-globalized context, you can find some latency and referential boundaries at play when a piece like this is shown there; while in the States —and in Boston— there is this incredible proximity to the larger system that the work tries to engage with. I am still unsure if this distance —or lack thereof— allows for the staging of an appropriate field of vision in which the work can fully speak for itself.

Juan Obando started working in his native Bogotá in 2005, where he received a BA in Industrial Design and a minor in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidad de los Andes. In 2010 he received his MFA from Purdue University. In 2012 he was awarded a commission from Rhizome/The New Museum (NYC, NY) for his project “Museum Mixtape”, in 2015, Colombia Ministerio de Cultura awarded him with a Circulation Grant for his project “Jeep VIP”, and in 2017 he received a MassArt Foundation Grant (Boston, MA) for his upcoming project “Perpetual Nirvana”. Among his recent exhibitions are Full Collabs (solo), Distillery Gallery, Boston, MA, 2018; VideoSur, Palais De Tokyo, Paris, 2018; The World As It Is!, J1, Marseille, France, 2017; Jeep VIP (solo), Volta Art Fair, New York, NY, 2017; Museum Mixtape (solo), Reverse Art Space, Brooklyn, NY; Selections, Bakalar and Paine Galleries, Boston, MA, 2016; AÚN, Salón Nacional de Artistas, Pereira, Colombia, 2016; Historias Locales / Prácticas Globales, MDE15, Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, 2015; The Champions (solo), El Parqueadero, Banco de la República, Bogotá 2015; Default Browser (solo), (bis) | oficina de proyectos, Cali 2015 and NADA, Bogotá 2015; Colombia Hoy, I Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena 2014.

juanobando.com

All images courtesy the Artist. 

RECONNAISSANCE
Reconnaissance is an in-depth examination of an event or history within the peripheral arts community. Produced by researchers not necessarily tied to the place or artists who were actively involved, Reconnaissance gives hisorical perspective to a major impact within the said community.