In this exhibition, Ana Patricia Palacios returns to a subject that runs through much of her work: female identity. As she puts it, the exhibition opens a gap between the past and the ways in which it remains present, allowing a fluid set of relationships to emerge and shape the present in which we live.

Some of the works presented here begin with historical photographs and archival material from the twentieth century and earlier. Others incorporate elements such as flags and cargo ships, referring to the movement of people—both voluntary and forced—and, with it, the identities and ideas that have played a part in shaping modernity. Modernity is understood here not as the fulfillment of a morally superior ideal, but as the result of an interaction between ideas inherited from the past, the new technologies that entered into them, and the possibilities those technologies opened up.

Palacios describes the body as a mobile territory that “carries with it roots that it nourishes and cares for, crossing borders without losing its sense of belonging and memory.” In this way, she points to the marks of identity that spread like waves through the places where people arrive. This approach echoes Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, with its ideas of expanded identities, transnational cultures, and hybridity—cultures shaped along the historical routes of the slave trade and forced migration.

The artist also observes that the mass displacement of enslaved Africans for agricultural labor and mining contributed to the development of a tradition of domestic service in towns and rural communities throughout this hemisphere. We can trace echoes of the ways in which the Black woman’s body has come to be understood as a displaced body, a working body, a reproductive body, a caregiving body, and a bearer of memory. Her identity and her role as a mother were historically subordinated to the colonial roles of caretaker, wet nurse, companion, and children’s playmate within the domestic sphere.

In Colombian literature, particularly in the work of Tomás Carrasquilla, race is addressed through the costumbrista tradition, which focuses on customs and everyday life, while still revealing the social tensions and hierarchies shaped by social status and racialized ways of seeing. This framework underscores the dominance of a traditional, white, Andean-centered culture. In this sense, Carrasquilla’s work shows, through the ordinary details of everyday life, the persistence of conditions marked by a lack of freedom and equality.

In the face of this tragic history, Palacios also draws attention to the beauty of nature, which is itself subject to displacement. Within the African diaspora, the artist points to an inexhaustible richness of languages, traditions, songs, cuisines, and forms of social organization that we can recognize and celebrate.

The work presented here begins from a perspective that, while external to the experience itself, is an attempt to acknowledge it with empathy and respect. It raises the question: can we speak of the “Other” from an aesthetic and critical perspective?

Artists who see themselves as part of a global community, connected by aesthetic, theoretical, and political interests, can be compared to members of the global scientific community. Within that community, an epistemic ideal holds that knowledge can be shared among individuals without regard to their personal particularities. As Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of semiotics, wrote, “the origin of representation essentially contains the concept of a community whose limits are not fixed and whose knowledge can grow without limit.” In other words, to expand our horizons and make room for other voices and other histories. Who can speak? This is what Kafka’s A Report to an Academy is about: the normalization of silence. Perhaps we are no longer willing to accept that.

Patricia Gómez Jaramillo