This essay and subsequent videos were originally published for the Freewaves: Latin America Video Festival held in Los Angeles in November, 2002. Just as the media fragments that make their way to the outside fail to represent the structures of power responsible for the increasingly obscure political and social narratives that define everyday life in Colombia, this particular selection of videos does not seek to describe anything like new tendencies in art-making practices from there. And yet the media reference is apt to describe the inadequacy of representation that always implies a potentially hegemonic function. On the work of José Alejandro Restrepo Paulo Herkenhoff has written, "There are steps that must be taken to make visible what was consigned to the shadows or to obscurity. Perhaps his most striking temporal modality is to impede the filing away of the present itself." Whether it be through the recuperation of audiovisual memory—the collective, urban trauma of Burbano and Bravo or the intimate, familiar accounts of Hernández and Vargas mediated by the passing of time and the filters of memory—or the recontextualization of images that are appropriated from other sources or uses (Arenas, Díaz, Restrepo), these works desire to glean more subtle, intricate narratives from the visual noise that surrounds us.
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