González, Restrepo and Salcedo, three views of making sensitive memory in times of war

Abstract

Beatriz González, José Alejandro Restrepo and Doris Salcedo are united by friendship and colleague. Their artistic projects have placed them in the same place: the peremptory reflection of making memory in the middle of the colombian armed conflict. A sensitive approach at this phenomenon is configured from the semiotic universes (Lotman) that they share with each other. Each one distances himself in the material and procedural exercise of doing work, but their encounter, as architects of other languages of war, is elaborated from a symbolic bet, where the meaning comes from an exploratory work around visual, plastic and performative metaphors. For this, it is important to understand how the meaning of these manifestations in the key of semiosis (Lotman) is configured, with which a living metaphor (Ricoeur) is woven, through a contemporary conceptualization of what it means to make memory through art. Therefore, this article is developed in three reflection scenarios. The first one is aimed at understanding the epistemic and semiotic bases of metaphors in contemporary colombian art, especially with which it is possible to perceive how feeling is materialized in actions or objects. For the second moment, a brief semiotic analysis of three works that are part of the exhibition catalogs of González, Restrepo and Salcedo is presented based on the meanings that the social and political leader has had in Colombia. The third and last moment is aimed at intuiting how these metaphors access this sensitive plane of the war and end up granting a space to collective introspection, in the midst of the humanitarian crisis that the country is currently experiencing.