With a trajectory of more than 50 years, Miguel Ángel Rojas (Colombia, 1946) is a pioneer of experimental visual art practices in Colombia. His work has always provocatively addressed identity, gender, and politics, focusing on marginalized populations and minorities, like LGBTI+ and indigenous communities.
Returning to the Maloca focuses on the effects of colonial rule on indigenous civilizations in the Colombian Amazon and their present consequences: heavily affected by armed conflict, drug trafficking, political insensibility, displacement, and environmental exploitation.
Exhibited are three new site-specific commissions and pieces developed over the last 25 years. Additionally, for the first time in the artist's career, highlighting specific working materials which will show the process behind Rojas' work.
Yari Yaguará. Regreso a la Maloca [Yari Yaguará. Returning to the Maloca] 2021, references the land where the Indigenous community of Pijao was forcefully relocated in the 60s by the government. They were moved from the native Tolima in the Andes to the Amazons and displaced in 2004 by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).
Territorio de poder [Territory Of Power] 2021, references the Neoclassical floor of the National Statuary Hall Collection in the recently assaulted United States Capitol in Washington D.C. The floor is a recurrent element in Rojas’ visual language. Grano [Grain] 1980, was the first one he made, and right here at MAMBO, reconstructing the pattern of Mozarabic tiles from his native home as a tribute to his mestizo origins.
In Economía salvaje [Savage Economy] and El nuevo dorado [The New Dorado] 2018, Rojas uses coca leaves, and layers of clay pitted against gold leaf to reference the impact arid deforested land has on global climate change. The actual 'nuevo dorado' is the world's natural resources: air, water, and the rainforest, which are the planet’s lungs.
Since the mid-1990s, Rojas introduced in his work dollar clippings and coca leaves. Initially, he explored stories of indigenous life in Colombia (Sueños Raspachines, 2007-2021). Over time, he started to use them to comment upon the production, trafficking, and consumption of cocaine in the so-called first world, as in the Nupcias series (2021), where he juxtaposes the name of a coca-addicted persona—mainly actors, singers, or politicians—with the nickname of his drug dealer.
Aquí estamos, [We Are Here] 2021, the third commissioned artwork for this exhibition, is a monumental stone that resembles the cliff where Neolithic rock frescoes were recently discovered in the Colombian Amazon. It's a piece conceived to be intervened through an action of hand printing, organized in collaboration with children from the Muiscas indigenous community of Sesquilé.
Eugenio Viola
Chief Curator
MAMBO
BIOGRAPHY
Miguel Ángel Rojas is one of the most influential artists in the colombian art context. Pioneer in the use of photography as an artistic medium since 1970, his artistic practice analyzes topics as identity, politics, marginality, gender, sexuality, population displacement, violence, war, extractivism, drug trafficking and the production and consumption of drugs. He uses materials that acquire symbolic and historical value as coca leaves, gold and dust.
Miguel Ángel Rojas (1946, Bogotá). His work is based on the exploration of the real world. With a critical sense he questions the prevailing morality and status quo. He understands the processes in the construction of the work as the very essence of it. Concepts such as style and technical skill are secondary to him, sense and communication are important in his work, therefore he ventures into various means that he considers tools but not the goal itself.
He has participated in exhibitions such as, XI International Engraving Biennial, Tokyo, Japan (1979), XVI São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil (1981), Latin American Artists Of. The Twentieth Century, Museum of Modern Art, NY, U.S.A. (1993), V Havana Biennial, Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba (1994), Re-Aligning Vision, Museo del Barrio, NY, U.S.A. (1997), The American Effect, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, USA, Colombia 2003, Museo de Arte Moderno Mamba, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2003), Cantos, Cuentos Colombianos, Daros-Latinoamérica, Zurich, Switzerland (2004) , For you / For you. Video exhibition of the Daros Latin America collection. Zurich, CH (2009), 12Th Shanghai Biennale, Proregress, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai, China (PRC), 2018.
His work is part of collections such as Daros Latin America-Zurich, Banco de la República-Bogotá, Musac-Castilla y León, La Caixa – Barcelona, Twenty 21c Museum Foundation – Kentucky, Tate Modern-London, Art Institute of Chicago-USA, MOMA -NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.
EXTENDED FILES
Miguel Ángel Rojas
Regreso a la Maloca (Yari Yaguara), 2021
Yari Yaguará is an indigenous territory in the Department of Caquetá, delimited by the Yari river. In the 1960s, several indigenous populations from the Pijao community in Tolima were moved to the Llanos del Yarí as part of a governmental experiment of colonization.
They were fleeing bipartisan violence that had plagued Colombia since the 1940s and the dispossession of much of their lands. From the Andes, they reached the Amazon without knowing how to hunt or navigate. Relocated, the Pijaos rebuilt their lives there and managed to survive. In 2004, a large part of the community was displaced by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Years after these events, the displaced population lives today, scattered. The deforestation of their territory increased after displacement. Recently, the indigenous communities expressed their desire to return voluntarily to the area, even though the State has not yet provided the guarantees of security and dignity required for this to occur. The installation on land is a Maloca, an indigenouss Amazonian communal house, and a typical colonial church which refers to the place where the acculturation process began. The two constructions symbolize the coexistence and the collision between the two different civilizations, the original and the colonizer.
Miguel Ángel Rojas
Aquí estamos, 2021
It is a monumental stone that resembles the cliff where Neolithic rock frescoes were recently discovered in the Colombian Amazon. It is a piece conceived to be intervened through an action of drawing, organized in collaboration with children from the Muiscas indigenous community of Sesquilé. Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients,” archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,000 years ago across cliffs stretching nearly eight miles. It is one of the world’s largest prehistoric art collections in the Amazonian rainforest.
The Muiscas are indigenous Amerindian populations that have inhabited the Cundiboyacense highlands from approximately the 6th century B.C. A small part of its current descendants live organized through indigenous councils in the neighborhoods of Bogotá such as Suba, Bosa, Usme, Fontibón, and Engativá, as well as neighboring municipalities as Chía, Cota, Mosquera, and Sesquilé. A good part of Colombia’s Eastern Cordillera population results from miscegenation between the Muiscas and other groups, mainly Spanish.
“I am mestizo, almost Indian. I am interested in that difference, and I accept it as one of my values. Therefore, with my work, I stress the appreciation of a race with many possibilities and very submissive”, declares the artist.
Miguel Ángel Rojas
Zona de poder, 2021
This work is inspired by the Neoclassical floor of the National Statuary Hall Collection in the recently assaulted United States Capitol in Washington D.C. A place where the principles of democracy were violently questioned. Furthermore, on this floor are several gold objects.
“This work emphasizes the theft and destruction of patrimonial gold pieces taken to Spain. The ingots are copies of those rescued from shipwrecks in the Caribbean Sea, such as the San José Galleon, sunk off the city of Cartagena. I added names of the ten most important pre-Hispanic cultures in Colombian territory, of which there are some magnificent gold pieces left in the Gold Museum of Bogotá. Unfortunately, gold mining in our country has been done for the most part, from the twentieth century—the 1930s—with the looting of indigenous tombs,” states the artist.
The floor is a recurrent element in Rojas’ visual language. He created his first floor at MAMBO Grano, [Grain] 1980, reconstructing the pattern of Deco Mozarabic tiles from his native home using mineral pigments as a tribute to his mestizo origins.
Miguel Ángel Rojas
Restitución, 2009
“In the 1970s, Guaqueros* would frequently arrive in Bogotá with archaeological objects for collectors’ homes. In those days, the nation did not have clear policies on patrimony. Some of these Guaqueros were the first to arrive in Ciudad Perdida, Buritaca and Teyuna. From these places, they would bring ceramic, stone, and gold pieces. Thus, since 1975, I had in my possession a gold Tembeta Tayrona**. In 2009, following an exploratory visit to the Sierra Nevada, I decided to deliver that piece to the nation. I took it back to its place of origin, and I made a symbolic deliverance in the hands of a descendant of the Tayronas: Simon, a Kogui child. The community’s total estrangement of this object surprised me. The idea from the beginning was to hand over the piece to the nation and, if possible, remain in the Gold Museum’s collection. On the 25th of November of 2009, in the presence of the lawyer Mauricio Gómez, I handed over the piece to the Institute of Anthropology and History INCAH. I asked the Institute to initiate the official process of restitution to the Gold Museum,” states the artist.
____
* A Guaquero or Huaquero in Colombia is the person who looks for indigenous burials, also called guacas or huacas, to benefit economically from their findings. Usually, their excavation methods are destructive, preventing further archaeological studies of the looted tomb.
** Tembetá (chin ornament) with a zoomorphic head (ca. 1090-1400 d.C.), from Tayrona culture.
Miguel Ángel Rojas
Parceros, 2007-2008
“Parcero” is a popular Colombian neologism synonym to companion. In this assemblage, the image and the materials refer both to popular thought, where the tiger is an emblem of cunning and sagacity, as well as ethnic factors and urban life. The Amazon seeds express the indigenous roots, and the rubber references the industry and the urban. “The origin of this work is due to how shocked I was while seeing the neighborhood of Ciudad Bolivar from the Oriental mountain ranges. I could appreciate such a tremendous scale in this bleak area in the south of Bogotá, like a great desert upholstered with earthy dwellings,” declares the artist. In this diptych, two identical feline heads face each other, and their aggressive gestures refer to the problematic coexistence of the poorest neighborhoods of Bogotá. For the first time, Parceros is exhibited beside four preliminary drawings that the artist used to accomplish this work, after many corrections.
Miguel Ángel Rojas
Sueños Raspachines, 2007-2021
The series Sueños Raspachines talks about the only possible solution to replace the monocultures of coca and poppies: to improve the peasants’ living conditions. Since drug trafficking is the second most profitable business worldwide after oil, it is paradoxical that small coca growers (peasant and indigenous communities) are the least compensated.
The “raspachín” who is the one who harvests and collects the coca leaves, is the primary worker in the entire production chain. “I had some terms such as land, food, health, education, and peace translated into the language of the Nasa community in Southern Colombia. They informed me that there were no literal words to translate it to Nasa. Instead, they were rather complex concepts. For example, ‘housing’ translates to ‘not permanently cold.’ I took those written translations from his handwriting and transcribed them onto handmade paper. On the bottom edge of the paper, I wrote the Spanish translation,” mentions the artist.
Food: To the heart happiness
Housing: Not permanently cold
Education: Identity formation
Health: Without sadness
Work: Work put heart
Peace: Among humans continuously united
Land: Soil protector to us
This new series, made of coca leaf paper, was specially created for this exhibition
Miguel Ángel Rojas
El nuevo dorado, 2018
Economía salvaje, 2018
Rojas produced the monumental Economía salvaje [Savage Economy] and El nuevo Dorado [The New Dorado] for the 12th Shanghai Biennial, and this is the first time both works are exhibited in Colombia. It consists of two satellite photographs of the Amazon, which are intervened and transformed into a mural. The true “nuevo Dorado,” or “new gold,” is the world’s natural resources: air, water, and the rainforest.
Referring to the forestry law sanctioned in 2012 by the Brazilian government that allows cutting four hundred hectares of Amazonian forest per person, Rojas brings up critical global issues: the indiscriminate destruction and the consequent disappearance of the Amazon. With Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s president, his economic policy focused on exploiting recently protected lands by signing a decree that grants the Ministry of Agriculture the power to delimit indigenous reserves. Thus, the work of Rojas gains more significance.
“The Amazonia area is, in fact, the Earth’s most important lung, and it is home to an infinite amount of species and communities who live in perfect balance with the environment,” declares the artist. “First, the plots of land which are stolen from the Amazonia are robbed of their wood, and then they are turned into deserts through gold surface mining, or used to cultivate coca.” Placing the large agro-industrial producers, mining companies, and drug trafficking as the primary liability for the destruction of Latin American territory. Rojas uses Mambe (dehydrated and ground coca leaves), gold leaflets, clay taken from the South American tropical region, and silver leaflets to intervene the two works.
Likewise, these artworks point out the public sector as accountable for the climate crisis and its role as a guarantor of a sustainable economy. Rojas explains: “This breathtaking disaster, which is protected by law, does not happen only in Brazil but also in the rest of the countries contained within the Amazon basin. Given that it is a world heritage site, and to guarantee the future of life, the Amazon should remain untouched”.
Miguel Ángel Rojas
El camino corto. El túnel del tiempo, 2012
A ceramic fragment of a “mambeador” (coca leaf chewer), belonging to the Pre-Hispanic Tumaco culture and at least 1,000 years old, is the basis for talking about the use of coca in distant times. “I started by building the head from the fragment, then I watered Mambe on it and placed around it eight contemporary heads modeled in corn and covered in part with gall: an organic substance synonymous with bitterness,” declares the artist. The coca leaf is a natural product that has been used for ages, different from its alkaloid extracted in the laboratory: cocaine. In Andean cultures, they use the coca plant for shamanic and healing purposes. The traditional use is “mambeo,” which consists of chewing and mixing it with saliva, usually for a purpose and in a specific ritual context. For example, the natives of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, say that they chew coca to “weave thoughts.” Others chew it before strenuous activity, like embarking on a trip because it gives
them energy.
Miguel Ángel Rojas
Nupcias, 2021
Rojas frequently uses materials loaded with symbolism, such as coca leaves and dollar bills, to refer metaphorically to the tremendous cultural differences that divide a society of disrupted values. The artist reflects on issues related to drug trafficking, drug use, and double standards through these materials.
In Nupcias, the artist presents names of famous people from the world of politics and the star-system, all coca users, along with the nickname of his dealer. This new series, presented for the first time in this exhibition, is accompanied by Malos Habitos, Malas leyes [Bad Habits, Bad Laws] 2009, an animation in which the names of drug traffickers and consumers are drawn on a coca leaf and dollar bill.
VIDEO