Álvaro Barrios: El Mar de Cristóbal Colón

Featured concurrently of the exhibition J’ai tué le papillon dans mon oreille of Minia Biabiany, Álvaro Barrios’s work brings the discussion to focus on the history of bloodshed in the Caribbean region.

Álvaro Barrios lends the Caribbean Sea a spatial dimension that had been charted and flattened by Westerners.

Inked in blue on the front and in bright red on the back, the silkscreen prints El Mar de Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus’s Sea) enlarge the subdivisions that compose the grid of a nautical chart and quantify the slaughter of native peoples and the exploitation of enslaved African population. The cartographic fiction comes undone. The mapmaker’s victorious, dictatorial grid is blown up to bits.

Álvaro Barrios was born in 1945 in Barranquilla, Colombia, where he lives and works.

magasin-cnac.org