May 2001

Colombia is a country that is divided in 2 countries. The first one is a typical neo liberal country, where urban people go to work everyday and fight horrendously with their economical competitors, and they can also go out to movies, restaurants, bars, shows, plays People leave in the morning, work all day, and get back home in the evening just to watch the news on TV and 2 or three hours of soap operas. And on the week ends, people go out and drink pints of alcohol, sniff tons of cocaine, smoke kilos of pot, and swallow thousands of pills, dancing in discos and bars, where drag queens, mariachis, salsa bands, DJs, whores, cute boys are going to entertain them.

The other country is the country of horror, where totalitarianism is king. It is a place that is forbidden to normal citizens because they would get killed, or kidnapped, or robbed in a matter of seconds. Almost 30000 guerrilleros are loose in the country, and over 10000 paramilitary mercenaries are fighting against them. Entire regions had been abandoned and thousand of homeless people, running away from the rural violence, are coming into the cities with the hope that the urban fortresses are going to protect them from evil, whether it comes from the right or the left wing.

An entire area of the country, the size of Switzerland, was given away by President Andres Pastrana, (we call him "the little prince", because his father was president in the 70's), to the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia, the FARC, a leftist guerrilla that has financed their war with the kidnapping of Colombians, massacring and robbing entire populations, and becoming a new drug cartel. They turned this area, El Caguan, into their own fortress. It is a place where they plan their attacks, define their war strategies, and where the government "meets" with them in order to negotiate a peace process. But recently, a few videos proved that the FARC are using this area as concentration camps for kidnapped civilians ( they kidnap a person in a big city, or town, and take the person to their camps, where no public force can get in, and only if the family of the person pays millions of dollars they would free the person. If the family refuses to pay, they simply kill the person, and ask for money to return the corpse.) I am not using the term Concentration Camp in vain. They have actually built prisons - and there are videos to prove it - in the middle of remote jungles where they are keeping over 500 war prisoners. These war prisoners are the policemen and soldiers that did not have the luck to die when the FARC attacked the town where they were serving. These camps look very much like the camps the Vietnamese built during the war, surrounded by kilometers of barbed wire, and always under the surveillance of heavily armed guerrilleros. Less than a year ago, a group of soldiers managed to escape, but they were found a few days later and killed immediately by the guerrillas.

I got very interested in the movie and play Cabaret, because it reflects a situation where the most entertaining city in the world, Berlin, with the best and most out of the norm shows, is booming, at the same time the NAZIs are gaining power and performing their horrendous and barbaric acts against the jewish population and other religious, ethnic and cultural minorities. And I can state that Colombia, today, is nothing but a huge Berlin in the thirties, in the sense the movie/play describes it. At the same time there are concentration camps, people being massacred by the hundreds, and millions leaving their homes (over 1.5 million people have become "desplazados" (= homeless and forced to leave their lands)) I can find in Bogota, the capital, the best places to party and dance, I can eat sushi whenever I want, I can wear a leather jacket, and go to a retrospective of Rosa Von Praunheim's movies, organized by the Goethe Institute, or I can go to a Puccini Arias Recital sung by Martha Senn, a soprano. As a gay man, I have over 50 gay bars and discos I can go to almost every night, I can party as much as I want. I can see the most outrageous Drag shows ( in the Pantera Roja, the Red Panther Bar ), or I can see live sex on stage, or even bestiality at the "Calles de San Francisco" Disco. I can have anonymous sex in any of the 15 openly gay bath houses any day. I can dance until dawn to the best trance and techno music in any of the bisexual illegal rave parties, where I can find the best drugs on earth. I've never tried Ecstasy, but most of the young people dancing around me are taking it. And LSD, and acids, trippies, Mitsubishies, Special K... Cocaine and Marihuana are just too easy to be used in a party.

The TV has been constantly bombing us with images of these massacres and concentration camps, and people DO feel the crisis, the economical crisis, and the political crisis in the air. It's just there. And we know it is there. I remember back in 1991, when Pablo Escobar was leaving bombs randomly in the big cities that we used to party like if it were the end of the world. We would get so drunk and stoned that we would not care if the bomb would explode beside us. It was a suicidal feeling, and once we knew the bomb had actually exploded far away from our loved ones, we would keep on partying for days, singing REM's "It's the end of the world as we know it".

In a way people are still partying as if it were the end of the world. And only places like a restaurant, a movie, a sex club, a restaurant, a disco, a bathhouse can help us escape from the harsh country we are in, knowing that getting out of Colombia is getting harder and harder, and that if the country keeps going in the same direction, we will not be able to escape at all, just like Cuba. Can you imagine if the leftist guerrillas reach the power? The first ones to die would be the artists, the intellectuals, and of course, us, homos...

In recent studies, it was shown that Colombians mistrust even from their closest relatives. And all that comes from the fear of not knowing who the other person is. That person can be a guerrillero, a criminal, a drug lord like the ones we used to see in all the discos at the end of the 80's ), a killer And this makes the atmosphere very tense, specially for business relationships. The basis for a stable economy, based on trust, have disappeared. Therefore we are living in small Ghettos, where we only see people we know, and these circles become a survival support team for everyone belonging to them. We meet in the same places, we eat in the same restaurants. And for the ones who have practically no family left in the country, this Ghetto becomes an extended family. And we all talk about the problems of the country. And we all hate the stupid president we have, and we all have plans to leave the country, and we all go together to the movies, or to the discos, and we all know when one of us is not doing fine, and we all infect each other with the flu virus. And we're all scared and worried about Colombia, and we all dream of having a safer place to be, and we all want to get married or divorced, or both. And we all want Alvaro Uribe Velez to be the next president, and we all support our emotional ups and downs. And we all want to make more money. And we all believe in Astral charts and healing hands and reincarnation. It's just a small little ghetto among a million or more ghettos in Bogota.

I get very angry when I see that the government, which I call "the STUPID government", has been giving so many liberties to the guerrillas, without really giving some kind of safety to us, the common people. For example, I know that my name is in a list of "kidnappable" people the guerrilla has, because my brother used to work with the government ages ago. And it is a risk for me to get out of the city, by land, because I might get kidnapped. And that would mena the economical and emotional end of my family. Unfortunately, I cannot express my anger openly, only among my ghetto friends, because that would make me a Paramilitary supporter for the leftist, and I would get killed any given day on any street of Bogota We are living a state of fear in the country, because we cannot express our ideas openly, because either side ( including the government ) can think that you are an enemy, and they would kill you. We say that whoever wants to be a martyr, ends up crucified. And sometimes it is better just to be alive, with your mouth shut. This is one of the reasons why I am not making any direct reference to a political position in my work, I would be shooting myself in the mouth.

The idea of doing an art show directly related to the concept the movie/play Cabaret is using came to me last year, when I was creating "Especulo", my first individual exhition. The crisis was going on, and the fear was there. We were even buying canned food in the supermarkets in case the guerrillas would shut the access to Bogota. And my idea of an exhibition was the same as a show. Santiago, the artist, was creating a space to entertain people. Just as people would go to a movie, they would go to a gallery, because it is also a place to escape from reality. And I decided to show reality as an entertaining show. There was a video, Lover Man (where can you be?)(*RealVideo file), where I was doing a drag performance, just as in any cabaret show. And another video combined with b/w pictures, describing the relationship of 2 very close friends of mine, Bruce-Michael and Greg. And there were 2 video installations that were treating the role of TV in the violence we are experiencing. The first one - Reflections - remembering my experience, after the explosion of a bomb a block away from where I was, and the second one - No Disparen, Prensa ( Posición Neutral ) (*RealVideo file)/ Don't shoot, Press ( Neutral position ) - was the deconstruction of a 45 second scene in the evening news, showing a news team caught between the fire of the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. I did not use the term Cabaret then, because it ended up being a reflection about the Other ( "L'autruité", l'existence de l'autre. ) I was the incarnation of an artist just by wearing the Drag skin. I was involving the users in what was being shown on the news after the explosion of the bomb. I was entering the privacy of BMG's bathroom just to make him and his friend public. I was turning 45 seconds of news into 7 minutes of study about the neutral political position of Colombian TV.

But a few months after the exhibition was over, the first images of the FARC's concentration camps appeared on TV. A cameraman followed the trip into the jungle of the leaders of a mother's group - who fight for the liberation of their kidnapped sons, who are policemen and soldiers. And the images were just SO appalling, terrifying, that I started crying when I saw them. It was very scary to see in the news these women receiving letters for their families, or "survival proofs", as the government calls them, from these "prisoners of war", who were kept behind barbed wire walls. They had no shirts on, and they all had these very bizarre laces around their necks. And you could see a few guerrilleros outside, with heavy machine guns, guarding them. Smiling to the camera. The first images of a Concentration Camp, a 21st century concentration camp.

That is when I decided to use these images for a new show, this one being a direct reference to the idea of Cabaret.

The ideal space looks very much like the central navel of a church, a rectangular space with no natural lighting, no windows, where darkness can be controlled.

Until now, there are only 4 pieces in the show, but I am sure a few more will come out in the near future:

1 - Campo de Concentración / Concentration Camp
2 - Ghetto
3 - Lámpara de piel / Skin Lamp
4 - I will Survive ( Divas Video )

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1 - Concentration Camp

Using a video camera, very much in the way I treated the video parts of Reflections and Posicion Neutral, I will capture from the TV screen, and then re-edit, the images of the FARC's concentration camps that appeared in the TV news. It is important for me to capture the images from the screen, because it reinforces the idea that it is a spectator watching, and NOT the original broadcast images. And I am also defining that video is a low resolution representation of reality, by overtly showing the lines and pixels that compose the TV/Video image. I will use footage I recorded from the live show, and if possible, I will try to get a non-censored footage, with more images. I want to capture the details that a live TV news show does not have the time to show. I want to show the reaction of these women entering this prison in the middle of the jungle, I want to show the faces of the soldiers, their eyes all the little details that a broadcast signal, in a commercial format, just makes very difficult to see. I am even thinking about slowing the image down during post production. This video will be projected on a curved surface, on one side of the room. I want it to be a curved surface because only the areas located in the center of the video will be on focus, the others will be gradually blurrier.

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2 - Ghetto

Ghetto is a combination of pictures and videos, portraying the lives of the people in my Ghetto, my closest friends. Every single adult Colombian has to have a single, national identification number, called the Cédula de Ciudadanía. I will ask my friends to write that ID number on their left forearms, remembering the numbers tattooed on the arms of every prisoner in Germany's concentration camps. I will capture that action in video, and I will make portraits of them in B/W. These portraits will be enlarged and placed in the "art" space. I will also make short video interviews, capturing the essence of each one of them. I will ask questions about their everyday life, and their point of view on how to survive in a country like Colombia. In other words, I will try to capture in video the conversations we usually have when we get together. In a way, the everyday life can also become a way to escape from the fear of war. For example, Monica Ruan has to deal with her undergrad thesis in History, a 9 years old daughter - waking her up everyday at 5 am, and getting her ready for the school bus to pick her up - and a work that could be more rewarding. I am convinced that everyday individual stories can tell more about the way people live, their routines, their rituals, than boring editorials in politicized newspapers, or books that nobody will ever read, because they are way too far from their own reality. These videos will be shown in 2 ( or three, if I have the money) black and white viewfinders that will hang from the ceiling, and each of them will have a concave mirror underneath to magnify their images. I am an enemy of cacophony. That is why I always use headphones, so the experience becomes an individual one. The Concentration Camp video will be silent. Noisy video installations can be a total pain in the neck, specially for people who have to be near the exhibition space everyday.

Gradually, Colombians have become parias, rejected from many countries. Almost every country in the planet requires a visa for Colombians to even stay in transit in their airports. Most of us have been abused and treated as criminals whenever we enter a foreign country, because of the image we created of ourselves as drug importers. And if you are not rich, and you do not have a credit history it is almost impossible you will get a visa for countries like France, Mexico and the USA. This segregation is affecting many of us still in Colombia, and that is one of the reasons why the person has to write the ID number on her forearm, and not somebody else. The other reason is that it is a war among Colombians that is going on. There is no difference between a guerrrillero and a paramilitary, not even ideologically: they're both Colombians wanting to gain more power, and earn more money and control. They can both come from the same neighborhood, even from the same family. It is not the supreme race trying to control and exterminate lower species: here' we're all the same. And it hurts to know that we're killing each other with chainsaws and swords.

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3 - Skin Lamp

I studied in the French School of Bogota. And whenever you would reach the last years of High School, History Teachers, coming from France, would treat the World War II topic. And they were very explicit about the Holocaust. Just like a transition / maturity ritual, all of us had to see "Nuit et Brouillard" by Alain Resnais, a documentary on Auschwitz, filmed just ten years after the end of the war, in the fifties. And one of the many images that I still remember from that movie, is the archive files, showing the products, like soap, lamp covers, fabric and books, made out of the skin, hair and grease of the people who had been killed in the gas chambers.

Colombia has been in a permanent war since 1948, the year Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was killed. The urbanization process started just months after the magnicide, when thousands of people left the fields to seek refuge in the big cities, like Cali, Medellin and Bogota. And since then, the main cause of death for young people is violence, whether it was cause by political reasons in the 50's, or by drug conflicts in the 80's. We have been killing each other for over fifty years, and we have learned to live with death around us Have we really learned or have we been able to forget very easily in order to stay alive?

I decided to start creating art - which is a different form of speech - with my own skin: I remove pieces of my skin and let them dry in books, just like petals and flowers, and then I will use them to create objects. Just like the NAZIs created objects with the bodies of their dead victims, I am going to create objects with my own skin, the only part of my body, that after being torn apart, is going to be dead. In this case, it is going to be a lamp, remembering, and creating an hommage to those who really died because of totalitarianism. It is the reflection of what is happening to me right now. I am still alive, seeing how little by little others are dying, and because of the way the media is treating the news of their deaths, they are quickly forgotten. They become numbers, and nothing more. The act of removing my skin can be painful, and it is also a way of stating that whatever I create has be directly related to my own history, and not only a pure visual recreation.

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4 - I will survive

You might ask yourself, where is the Cabaret here? Where is the entertainment? The exhibition itself will be an entertainment form. But I need to do more than that.

In the beginning of the thirties, songs like "Das Lila Lied", and "Maskulin, Feminin" represented the "illusion of freedom" that had finally been reached in Berlin. And drag shows and performances were very common. Hirschfeld had been fighting for the abolition of the paragraph 175 for almost 25 years, and the notion of equal rights was floating in the air ( and, I repeat myself, the nazis were also beginning to appear ) People would party every night, dancing and drinking, listening to very particular pieces of music, that were later censored.

Since the end of the 70's, disco and the discotheque changed the way people party. Drugs and Dance became one. And since then, there has not been a bigger "party" anthem like Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive", which is also a gay anthem in Colombia. I love performing in Drag, it is a political statement for me. And one of my favorite performances is "I will survive" in two acts: the first one is the perfect Diva, gorgeous, glamourous, elegant, yet sober. The second act is the same Diva on drugs and alcohol. A pathetic, neurotic, shadow of that glorious gayish diva. And video is the perfect tool to show them both at the same time.

Songs in the thirties could be ironic and political, and at the same time entertaining. But since the seventies the political message disappeared, and the irony became futility. A song stopped being political the moment you could dance to it. So it is in the performance of the song that political issues would come in. The pathetic diva is nothing but the portrait of all the people I see dancing until dawn, sniffing poppers and kilos of cocaine. And also the portrait of a country that demands the legalization of drugs in order to stop the massacre of Colombians. " I will survive on drugs" a totally simple message can be turned into a political storm.