Primero Estaba el Mar
2012 - Installation (Installation)
Felipe Arturo
Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement. Each waveform represents a syllable of the sentence “Primero estaba el mar.” This sentence is the first verse of the Kogui poem of creation. For the Koguis, an indigenous community from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on the Colombian Caribbean coast, water was the absolute presence before the creation of the universe. The Colombian writer Tomás González used this phrase as the title of his first novel, in which he narrates the story of a couple in Medellín who, following the anarchic and hippie trends of the 1970s, abandon civilization and move to a solitary beach. Instead of leaving modernity behind, however, the couple becomes a colonizing force, transforming the natural environment of the beach into a rationalized territory. Under the logic proposed by Primero estaba el mar, the variation of the order of the waveforms represents different possibilities for this sentence. The work produces eight different phrases that assimilate the idea of repetition and change; the sentence has eight syllables, and each syllable-waveform is repeated eight times in order to reconstruct the title eight different times, resulting in a total of sixty-four pieces.
Felipe Arturo considers elements from urbanism, architecture, and art in relation to politics, history, geography, and economy. His works and projects often manifest as sculptures, installations, or videos, departing from concepts such as structure, sequence, and matter. They are deeply influenced by vernacular architecture and construction techniques, and reflect processes of assimilation and resistance to colonial and postcolonial processes. He frequently combines the language and materials of Modernism (e.g., concrete) with the informal methods of autoconstrucción (self-construction).
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