From the North end of Bolívar Plaza, through crowded rows of Colombian soldiers, I see a 5-foot tall photograph of a woman’s face. Her eyes are pensive, transfixed in defeat, and her wrinkles narrate a consternation that has permanently carved her expression. A few days later, having lunch in a restaurant called Jugueteria-toy store-I find out that her name is Ana de Dios, and her brother has been killed, another victim of La Violencia.
Erika Diettes is the Colombian artist behind de Dios’ photograph, which is one of three pieces in the artist’s latest work, A Punta de Sangre (By the force of the bloodshed). Contemporarily, La Violencia refers to the overall brutality of civil conflict in Colombia, which originates from an era of political unrest and bloodshed during the late 1940s. Such a broad, overused expression easily obscures the pain the term encompasses. “Sometimes people get kidnapped because of money. Sometimes it’s because of power. And sometimes it’s just politics,” Diettes says as she sits down and pulls out a thick black journal filled with photos, notes, quotations, and memories.
In de Dios’ case, no one knows why her brother went missing or why he was killed, and that’s true with the majority of these occurrences in Colombia. While most of the Colombian conflict is generalized as paramilitary vs. guerilla warfare, most of the time, the violence has nothing to do with whether a person is affiliated with either group. Diettes explains that usually, no one knows why their family members are kidnapped. “They could be recruited, it could be vengeance, it could be anything” Diettes says. De Dios’ found out about her brother’s murder from a witness during a town meeting. “He couldn’t remember if [they] had chopped up the body or burned it, but he knew he was killed,” Diettes explains in a succinct but gentle tone. The reality is disturbing, but it’s a reality de Dios has to acknowledge.
Typically, the bodies of the victims are disregarded in the rivers of Colombia, the turbulent waters sweeping them away. “Ana said every time she saw a river, she would search for his body,” Diettes tells me, explaining that because there is relatively no hope for finding the victims alive, their families only seek to give them a proper burial. Rivers almost become cemeteries for the victims, which is why Diettes uses water as a symbol throughout her work. In the second piece of A Punta de Sangre, a panel of translucent water is used, adding a calming sense of reassurance to the exhibit as a whole. “I use the water as a metaphor of memory,” she says. “Life is water. Life flows on. It is cleansing, purifying.” The photograph is reminiscent of Río Abajo, or Drifting Away, Diettes’ original exhibit, in which she borrowed articles of clothing belonging to the victims, and photographed the shirts, shoes, and military uniforms in water, preserving their memories and addressing the human aspect of an issue that has become so politicized. Warfare between the paramilitary and the guerilla is so vague and seemingly pointless that the conflict is comparable to inner city gang warfare. The fighting continues not because of political differences, but out of revenge for the consequences of war. Diettes explains that one family had a son in the paramilitary and another son in the guerilla. “It is easy to be the victim, and it is easy to become the one who inflicts the pain,” Diettes says. “I’m not interested in the politics. I’m interested in Ana’s pain.”
From her quaint studio in Bogotá, I watch a video interpretation of Río Abajo, filmed in the rural areas of Colombia where much of this violence takes place. Even from her 15″ inch Macbook, the photographs are haunting.
The video captures one of her most important feats. In order to allow the victims’ families some sort of memorial, Diettes went to East Antioquia, a State known for being one of the most dangerous in Colombia, and displayed all of the pieces that were part of Río Abajo. Normally, these pieces are printed on 5-foot tall glass, like the three in Bolívar Plaza, and positioned so that the viewer must walk around every one of the glass panels. Designed to resemble tombstones, the exhibit is intended to give the viewer the sense of walking through a cemetery. But in East Antioquia, Diettes wanted to provide the families a memorial, not an exhibit. So she was intent on including each photo she had taken, making sure everyone had the opportunity to remember the person they lost. One hundred and fifty photographs, lit faintly by candlelight, were suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned community hall.
As the video reeled on, I couldn’t help but notice a shot of vultures drawing circles in the sky above a seemingly calm river. “After traveling a year and a half,” Diettes told me, “I found one thing common to all was that the families would follow the vultures.” She explains that instead of a harbinger of death, the vulture becomes a symbol of hope to many of these families. Upon spotting one in the sky, they will run to see if the bird has found the body of someone they know. So for the third piece of A Punta de Sangre, Diettes had a vulture captured, brought to her studio, and photographed. In the photograph, she has somehow managed to capture a look of sorrow and shame in the bird, who she named Lucho. She explains the intrigue in interpreting this animal, typically associated with the negative side of death, as something more positive, allowing the vulture to become an almost angelic symbol to “show people the way.” Diettes points out how, in her photograph of Lucho, his beak is pointed downward, resembling a prayer position. “In the photograph, it is like he’s saying, this is my job. I have to do this,” Diettes says. “He is like the executioner asking the victims for forgiveness.”
An Anthropology graduate with a BFA in Communications, Diettes studied at Universidad de Los Andes, a prestigious college in Bogotá. “I always wondered, how do people survive violence? How do you live with it? That’s what made me want to study anthropology.” She continues, explaining that the violence people suffer eventually transforms them. “You can see it in their eyes,” she says, pointing out a young man’s face in her overflowing journal. The original inspiration for her work was a newspaper article, chronicling the struggle of one victim’s family. “I had taken photographs of clothing before, but for fun. Then I read this article and put it together.” So she decided to have lunch with a friend who knew some of the victims’ families personally. She proposed her project-that she would like to take articles of victims’ clothing and photograph them in water. He asked Erika how serious she was, and then the two went to his office where Diettes met one of the victim’s mothers. “I told her [about] my plans. She was skeptical and said, ‘you better come next Saturday’. So I did.” Soon enough, many families started sending Diettes boxes of clothing, which she would promptly return after photographing, letting the people know she was serious. “Every little thing,” Diettes asserts, “I gave back.”
Many times, however, these families are forced out of their homes and simply have nothing left, like the woman Diettes met who had nothing left from her son but a tree he planted. “She brought me two little branches wrapped in a napkin.” Because the woman realized Erika typically used clothing in her work, she asked, “does that mean my son is not worth anything to you?” Diettes, of course, photographed the branches. Undoubtedly the memorial held in East Antioquia proved that Diettes’ endeavor is not about what Río Abajo is worth to her, but to the families. Erika’s work provides a social purpose that functions beyond addressing a topic of unrest in modern Colombian society; it provides a representation of the people that have collectively come to be known as Los Desaparecidos-the missing. The photographs give their loved ones fulfillment in knowing that someone was interested in validating their son, daughter, brother, or sister, and this fulfillment perhaps makes it easier to continue the mourning process in a natural way.
Ana’s face, in the middle of bustling Bolívar Plaza and next to the deep, concerted eyes of a vulture, beg the viewer’s gaze-including my own-as an ice cream vendor tells me he’s been displaced by La Violencia. There’s no way of telling whether he’s sincere or just using the crisis to evoke my sympathy and spare change. At any rate, I give him both, knowing that many impoverished Colombians register themselves with the government as displaced because doing so makes them more qualified for funding. Like the description next to A Punta de Sangre reads, the stories behind La Violencia are lost as “a short note before entertainment gossips section.” But the stories are also lost in politics, as the issue becomes a means for people to receive quicker government funding. And they’re also lost in phrases. Phrases like, Los Desaparecidos,which amass everyone’s disappeared relative or friend in one simple and concise expression. Even using the word stories diminishes the very essence of its function in the situation. It’s a word that is certainly lacking. It lacks the embroidery of a modest pink dress, the epaulets on a soldier’s uniform, and the school crest ironed on a red sweater of someone that died too young. Maybe the shortcoming of words is what partially inspired Diettes to use photographs to communicate. “The pain cannot be expressed through words,” she says. “Words limit some things.”