"coordenadas" is a collection of ink drawings on paper that, folded in book form, narrate landscapes felt from afar. Since 2020, 308 massacres have been registered in Colombia with more than 1,100 victims. Each of these 222 drawings represents the story of the violated coordinates of entire landscapes victimized by violence: an empty landscape following the murder of a person between January and November 2022.
The elements that compose each book—the ink, the water, the calcium carbonate of the paper, and the uncontrollable figures they form when they meet—reflect the complex interrelationships between human bodies, non-human animals, plant life, minerals, chemicals, water bodies, mountains, valleys, jungles, and clouds, all of which are victims of authoritarianism. By naming only the coordinates where the massacres were perpetrated, the books invite us to see landscapes devoid of human and animal life, which are part of the complex network essential for the existence of life itself. They also invite us to embrace a non-hierarchical, non-taxonomized nature, to remember and honor the massacred lives.
From the diaspora, we feel how the violence that massacres human lives simultaneously affects and devastates all non-human life—mountains, grass, rivers, insects, and fruits. Oppressing or violating one form of life oppresses and violates all life. The coordinates are numbers that delineate geographical spaces but do not express the complexity of the life that grows or ends within them. They fail to capture the intricate relationships between soil, water, rocks, bacteria, lizards, cockroaches, humans, and the systems and structures that deny life—political structures that massacre for a mineral, a thought, a coordinate. The panorama left by state violence and political structures hierarchizes life, assigning values to bodies, spaces, and fertile soil, which are potentially exploited, violated, and dried up. Human bodies—living, thinking, sentient—are not separate from nature but are a vital part of it.
