Spaniards Named Her Magdalena, But Natives Called Her Yuma

2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

27:00 minutes

Carolina Caycedo

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In this two-channel video installation, Spaniards Named Her Magdalena, But Natives Called Her Yuma , Carolina Caycedo gathered footage during numerous research trips to dam sites in the Harz Mountains, Saxony, Westphalia and the Black Forest in Germany interspersed with images of the Rio Magdalena region in Colombia. Extending beyond the documentary form, the work illuminates social power structures and control mechanisms, particularly in connection with the activities of multinational corporations: images of controlled bodies of water are spliced with footage of urban crowds, visualising overlaps in the ways these various bodies are managed. The film is overlaid with the narrator’s voice whispering in Spanish and English, speaking of the artist’s personal perspective, and her own experience with a river she has known since childhood when family lived by its edge.

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Carolina Caycedo’s work triumphs environmental justice through demonstrations of resistance and solidarity. The artist uses drawing, photography, film, and performance at venues and vehicles for research and action. Caycedo’s work addresses and laments the corruption of power and the destruction of nature by corporate greed, justified by progress. With regard to pressing concerns of global climate change, causing destruction to communities via droughts and natural disasters, Carolina’s works address the implications and consequences of such carelessness towards the future of the earth and its inhabitants. The artist’s use of technology to mediate these concepts provides a harmonious relationship between content and form. Caycedo’s work offers utopian models to inhabit in a world in which individuals and communities are increasingly subject to commodification, exploitation, and discrimination.

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Colors:

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• landscape.n.01
• infrastructure.n.01
• memory.n.01
• power.n.01
• industry.n.01
• body_of_water.n.01