Animals stand in for a violence kept silent in Historia natural del silencio, which Jorge Panchoaga builds from natural history collections and the cities of Medellín, Bogotá, Cali and Popayán.
Historia natural del silencio, or Natural History of Silence, opens on a line from the Book of Changes: "The sun has sunk beneath the earth, there is an eclipse." Jorge Panchoaga sets it at the head of a series about a history marked by silence and myth, a past that no one wants to talk about.
During the 1980s and 1990s, men and women in cities across Colombia stepped into an underground world. They came from a range of political, social and economic circumstances, and together they helped consolidate the buoyant, irregular, illegal economy that would seep into daily life until it reached the houses and families formed in those years. The business swallowed much of each day, yet it was at night, in the ungoverned hours, that the deals, the parties and a set of clandestine archetypes took shape.
The children of those workers grew up inside what the text calls this sinister economy, watching it develop and finding in it the central figures of their stories, a personal memory so rooted in the ordinary that its violence rarely registered as strange. "This generation soon understood that it had to remain silent," Panchoaga writes. Murdered parents, relatives and friends were buried beneath tales of distant accidents, their deaths reimagined, the facts clarified only in whispers.
To rebuild that buried memory, the series gathers pictures from natural history and art museums alongside photographs made in Medellín, Bogotá, Cali, Popayán and New York. Together they form "an imagined city where animals represent scenarios of violence," the places where many of these stories of death and uncertainty are set. Each of the pictures is printed inside the same rounded black frame.
Between the homes where these lives played out and plain monochrome backgrounds, Panchoaga lays out a kind of archeology of objects tied to these stories. Many of the people in these pictures do not wish to be identified. Only their stories remain legible. What is left is a desolate, imagined city, chained to the need either to forget its past or to face it.
