Sujetar la impermanencia

This project began to take shape in 2019 at Flora Ars Natura, where Patricia Correa had her studio for several years. From the terrace, one could see the Monumento a los Héroes, a landmark in Bogotá until a few years ago, especially for those entering the city via Calle 80 and for residents of the northern part of the city.

This led her to begin researching the monument, which brought her into contact with Álvaro Leyva, son of Jorge Leyva Urdaneta, Minister of Public Works during the administration of Laureano Gómez, who commissioned the monument in the 1950s. Álvaro Leyva kept a vast photographic archive of the project, which he lent to Patricia Correa, and it is from this archive that a large portion of the works featured in the installation originate.

Following this, the artist continued to expand the archive with documents, articles, and images that show the changes in its design, the bureaucracy surrounding it, and its construction; as well as Idartes’ attempts to revive it, the protests that took place in 2020, the installation she created herself with images printed in blue on paper, and the documentation of its demolition in 2021. Even today, it continues to grow with the documentation of the construction of the metro line that will take its place.

Shortly before its demolition, the monument was appropriated and altered in many ways, ranging from graffiti and protest slogans to installations by other artists funded by the district. Without taking an aesthetic or political stance, the artist brought together images that would rarely share the same space, reprocessing them in media that are fragile from their manufacture to their preservation. The materiality of cyanotype and acrylic gels on stoneware, clay, and cement—light-sensitive techniques applied to brittle materials—emphasizes fragility and transforms these images into objects that demand care, yet also suggest accepting their nature.

The fragility that Patricia Correa brings into question is broad. On one hand, meanings change over time: what was once the name of a battle can easily become the name of a street; time can restore heroes to their human proportions; and what was erected as a landmark may end up as a roundabout. On the other hand, the fragility of symbolic value emerges alongside the city’s functional demands, when mass movement takes precedence over a distant memory.

‘Sujetar lo impermanente speaks to surrendering to the inevitable transformation of everything, including what we perceive or hope to be stable, without losing the ability to look with curiosity and appreciation.

This major project, titled ’The only constant is change,’ remains open.

- Andrea Domínguez Ramírez

Lo único permanente es el cambio

This is a project about memory. Historical memory, urban memory, personal memory. It is the result of reflections on the ephemeral nature of architecture, of monuments, of humanity’s relationship with public space, of the craftsmanship that adorns it, and of the artists themselves.

Reflections that have emerged, accompanied by the sad and lost gaze of the street dwellers, as I have slowly witnessed the great changes that have taken place in the five blocks surrounding El Azulejo in San Felipe.

The appropriation of the Monument to the Heroes by crowds seeking to express their dissent; the void left by its subsequent demolition and the doubts about the true significance of monuments; the distressing invasion of the streets by an immense sense of loneliness during the months of the pandemic.

The disappearance of the Flora Ars & Natura project and, with it, the hopes that some of us had woven around it; the emergence in the area of new shoots of artistic, commercial, and urban movements whose future shape remains unknown; the promise and fear of the future presence of the Bogota metro and the impact it may have on its railings, the ornamentalists, the recyclers, the car repair shops, the glass cutters, the artists.

Inspired by the Portuguese tradition of telling the history of cities through tiles, I created murals featuring blue, ethereal, and ultimately ephemeral images that capture photographic memories on solid building materials such as stoneware tiles and bricks. I used techniques such as cyanotype, acrylic gel transfer, and screen printing to create these images in Prussian blue.

Blues like those found in old architectural plans that represented the idea of a future construction and remained as a memory of it, yet were themselves delicate and ephemeral.

These murals reflect the very nature of the themes that inspired them: a multitude of images that tell a non-linear story of a vanished monument and a neighborhood in transformation—a chaotic yet vibrant and ever-changing composition of architectural and social elements.

To complement the murals, I constructed cement fragments of black-and-white photographic memories of the Monument to the Heroes, and bricks that record in blue the presence of botanical life amid the concrete of 78th Street, seeking to challenge its permanence and stability.

- Patricia Correa