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By Fernando Toledo
Denmark. The conference room of a multinational corporation. The asepsis of the Scandinavian atmosphere comes in through the windows. The president of the corporation is busy making sure everything is ready. The coffee is set in proud-looking thermo bottles that are placed on top of a stainless steel shelf. Next to the containers, the pale blue Royal Copenhague cups are piled. One of the head conclaves is about to start. The main characters burst into the room in an organized throng, and take their places. An usher brings an object hidden under acanvas: it has the shape of a catafalque. The supposed sarcophagus lies on a silver platter extirpated from the mines on Mexico or Bolivia. There’s an expectation silence. The young man lifts the cloth with a gesture of unwrapping. As expected, it is a polished oak box. The president starts to open it. With his right index and thumb fingers, and though extremely tidy movements, he starts to exhume hieratical puppets that, as if from an Orwell tale, have made Lego famous. At this opportunity they seemed different to what their synthetic resin ancestors used to be. Their looks, somehow dark and witty, correspond to those of the main characters of the most recent release of the Aventura series; the perfection of the now classic ensemble directed to kids, that recreates, through tiny freaks and pieces that accompany them, the chances of the most dangerous regions of the world. The violence, seen from beyond, is a joke, or maybe, the possibility to redeem a sort of village idealism coloured with the coldness of a supposed progress. With the characters, the childish customers will build their own imaginaries of Star Wars super heroes that dream about being. The first one to appear is the death with the ribs shown. Next, a landlord with a Texas hat, a “chaman”1 with a sinister face, and then other stars with wicked expressions come in to complete the company. Some of them have a machine gun trapped in their arches that pretend to be extremities. Then, the bully comes out, evil faced, not shaven; you can tell it’s him because he has a scar in his chick; he carries a machete. And we couldn’t miss the kidnapped, tied up with chains. They’re all here. Every single figurine goes from hand to hand within the whispers of approval. The puppet has been blessed by the powerful crowd that without noticing has spent a long time detailing the relationship of the small public. The catalogues are ready. The same thing happens with the colour boxes that are piled with pieces that fill up toy stores in Europe, the 5th Avenue or Cantro Andino.2 Once again, like it happens in Indiana Jones movies and Disneyworld sets, the archetype is built. The prejudice, this time accented by a pure whiteness, is about to attack the minds of the little ones around the sphere, with the complicity of the fatherly negligence. This includes the Latin American kids. This story is pure fiction, but it could be real. The puppet existed; it was in the department stores. The same thing happened with the catalogues of millionaire quality that suddenly disappeared and that suggested, like cartoons, the adventures that any baby could invent with the pieces of that riddle of wickedness. The dangerous, unfortunate, and rotten Latin America, with its models, was still in the eye ball of the industry’s autocrats. The pyramids, the cartoons of Mayan gods and the villains with their gloomy faces, all of them like toys; that’s how they demonstrated it. Some years later, Nadín Ospina got hold one of those catalogues and one of those games that had survived the late contrition. Those pieces of contemporary archaeology started to disturb him: the Lego bad guys danced in the universe of pre-Columbian idols with Mickey Mouse ears; of terracottas with Bart Simpson’s face, of Chacmooles with the image of Goofy; of indigenous pectorals with Donald Duck’s face, or of figurines of Chinese ceramics. Without danger they joined the Gods of that urticant Olympus that was constructed by the artist, in a mixture of parody and melancholy, to set forth the breadth of certain influences over the icons that have the desire to deprive the identity of its meaning. The pieces, with their scattered grenades and their small shrubs of red poppy, with the synthetic resin scorpions and the colourful snakes, struggled to enter the lineage of the often the prototypes recreated by the creative ones from other latitudes in plastic or celluloid and spread by the power of the great investments. Step by step, the new characters were isolated. The imagination of the artist bestowed them therank of rough fantasies with self strength. The critical approach, regarding the stereotype, started to gain shape. It became urgent to set forth a sharper point of view about the identification that had already been sketched before, but was still enriched with an anthropological test of the preconception that became a puppet. Again, the foreign mechanisms, the prejudicial reading of reality, tried to interfere with the group assumptions and with the essence of a culture that is riding its way to define itself as the fruit on a new crossing of races, where weird things seem to validate them selves, or at least, seem to reinforce them selves.
The means of expression of Nadín’s new speech, which are labelled under the name COLOMBIA LAND, retake a conceptual road and give it an even more tragic dimension, through a hyperbole driven with enormous sharpness and a foreign metaphor that didn’t spring by accident: it was necessary to use the language of painting, which has also enriched the universe of postulates al ready handled, and of common places, and recreate it with a flavour of pop art that, later, was also imported to emphasize a position planned according to the hypothesis that they see us like this because that’s how we portrait ourselves. But we couldn’t leave aside the installation performed with the use of a fauna of corporeal figurines that make up the axis of Lego. The use of a combination of languages reveals, with a satirical flavour, not only the perfidy of the puppet, but the framework of the country’s reality as an environment that the artistic chore has poked, as if with that look, often comfortable, redemption existed; as if the repeating review of the tragedy would achieve the exorcism. Perhaps this is about a game of trivialities and easiness. Also regarding this circumstance, in the piece of art exposed, there is posture that instantly leads to meditation.
It is inkling full of irony about the unlucky prejudices; it lies in the essence of Nadín Ospina’s sample of his latest work, which the Centro Cultural de la Universidad de Salamanca at Bogotá presents with great honour as closure to its 2004 cultural activities.
NOTES
1 A chaman is a traditional wizard common in Latin American indigenous cultures.
2 Centro Andino is one of the most popular malls at Bogotá, Colombia.