What Exists, What Doesn’t Exist / Installation
(rubbing drawings of gravestones from the Central Cemetery of Bogota: lithographic pencil on parchment) / 2013
The vertical architecture of Bogota’s Central Cemetery and the verticality of the city outside its boundaries behave in a similar way. The cemetery reproduces Bogota’s processes of accumulation and decay: death, hosted inside this graveyard’s mausoleums, acts as a mirror to life. I made a diagnosis of the physical state of the cemetery’s buildings, the cemetery as a mirror to the city, and the dead (inside) as a reflection of the living (outside). I thus traced the surface of its oldest edifice, grave by grave, through full-sized frottage drawings of each gravestone. Laid side by side, the drawings form a replica of the cemetery: they are a document of this places’ presence, its scale, and the fragile state of its markers. When displayed in an exhibition space, this project also enables the intrusion of a space for death (outside) in a space for life (inside).