Bricolage, collage and city in the photographs of Adriana Torres

by Jaime Ceron

The central areas of Latin American cities can serve as evidence of transformations that have characterized their social uses. The visible abandonment of many of these areas creates conflicts of social and economic order, but its origin appears to be cultural. What kind of cultural representations underlies the mobilization of the "good people" to other areas of these cities? How this translation generates changes in the perceptions of the different groups that make up the social fabric that supports these cities?
In the case of Bogotá, the mid-twentieth century, the assassination of a political leader announced a shift away from the center of the city as a place of shelter for hegemonic social classes. This transformed radically the social use of the historic center and surrounding areas where business from many different economic lines begann to find place. The centerof Bogotá ceased to be a dwelling place and gradually became a transit site.
Currently, more than half a century after the beginning of this process, the heart of the city is the seat of political, educational and cultural institution, while its surroundings are home to a number of opportunities for trade in basic services, a certain level of informality, as hardware stores, grocery stores, repair shops, auto parts stores and informal recycling areas or various food sales.
Adriana Torres makes photographic collages that are based on some of the axes of movement of an economy that moves between informality and formality and include both areas near the historic center of the city as somewhat marginal areas. It addresses the immediate environment e.g. the Third Millennium Park that has long been the meeting place and room of a high percentage of the homeless of Bogotá, until the city administration was gradually displacing the shoulder to move to other areas of the city.
In her images appears some Bogotá sectors whose use has clearly been modified and whose cultural value has therefore been redefined. In that sense are areas where the material supports of some urban signs have been the raw material for the "creation of new signs" in a direct line with what Levi Strauss called bricolage. Anthropology defined by the term human ability to generate an intervention on the material conditions of the real, that is precisely what happens in these areas.
Adriana Torres relates photographic fragments of the here mentioned places on a principle of contrast that emphasizes the existence of various logic valuation of the real. The collages of Adriana Torres evidence the crossroads of the multiplicity facets and imaginary dimensions of Bogotá.

JAIME CERON.
Art theorist, National University of Fine Arts and curator of art in Colombia.Bogotá, September 2006