carolyn castaño

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In Mujeres Que Crean (Women Who Create)
video, installation
year






In Mujeres Que Crean (Women Who Create), lightboxes and watercolor drawings depict Mujeres Que Crean members and clients re-enacting poses and gestures culled from historical artworks. An accompanying video sets these women against drawn tropical landscapes inspired by 18th-century botanical illustrations of the Magdalena River Valley. Both elements explore the role of women as mothers, sisters, and children of the armed-conflict, their human stories of loss and resilience underscored by the decline of the fragile ecologies surrounding the rural towns and villages they fled. 

Functioning simultaneously as a theatrical backdrop for Mujeres Que Crean (Women Who Create), and as an independent textile work, Paradise (Paraiso) is a large-scale, digitally-printed curtain depicting an original painting of the Magdalena River Valley. It links domestic space and notions of home with the theater of war where the ongoing battle over Colombia's natural resources is being fought.




The Earth; The Starting Point
Preface (p. 3)
No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.