One day, the artist Marta Elena Vélez found among her things a Polaroid picture she had taken on one of her many visits to Barú: it was a view of the sky, the sea, and a piece of beach. From that horizon, she began to paint ‘La playa de los Muertos de Barú’, a work that refers to the human remains buried on the beach where the natives of the island clashed with the Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century.

To the right of the beach appears the representation of vegetation that resembles a mangrove swamp, which is crossed by a naked man riding bareback on a horse; at the bottom of the work, between the vegetation and the sea appears an iguana, static as a rock, looking at the sunset.

When talking about this painting, the artist recalls with laughter and nostalgia her days in Barú surrounded by young inhabitants of the island, doing dance contests, impossible contests to win, because in her eyes they were all the best. A sense of freedom emerges from her story and her painting; in that scene of the naked man on the horse, the union between man, animal and territory is recreated in an instant. Driven by her spontaneity, she conceives this work as a tribute to the enslaved people who were brought in boats from Africa to America between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It is said that formerly the population of Barú was located near the Playa de los Muertos in the bay of Barbacoas, a more visible territory with better access, which is known among the Baruleros as Barú Grande or Barú Viejo. After a while, and in the midst of several changes in land tenure, the population had to move to the interior of the island because they acquired land there.

Groups of enslaved people arrived to Barú and managed to escape and buy their freedom to form their palenques, and from there “build a history based on a collective territory, where all members of the community were owners of the land” [1].

However, various actors such as smugglers and drug traffickers, tourism promoters and various inhabitants of the interior of the country, in addition to the state, were reconfiguring the ownership of their territory.

On Barú, the artist made another painting showing a landscape with a series of typical houses of the place. That painting, along with 'La playa de los muertos', was part of the exhibition 'Marta Elena Vélez 1980 - 1986', a retrospective exhibition held by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín. That same year, the artist participated in the V Bienal

[1] Madrid, M. (2020). Barú y comunidades negras: una historia al borde de la extinción.