Citizenship Performance and Urban Social Space in Bogotá, 1985-2015

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Confronting Violence: Citizenship Performance and Urban Social Space in Bogotá, 1985-2015

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Geoffrey Eugene Wilson B.A., M.F.A.

Graduate Program in Theatre

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Ana Elena Puga, D.F.A., Advisor

Jennifer Schlueter, Ph.D.

Shilarna Stokes, Ph.D.

Copyrighted by

Geoffrey Eugene Wilson

2019

Abstract

This dissertation combines performance analysis, cultural materialism, and theory on urban social space to develop a theory of citizenship performance. I analyze three performances that occurred in public spaces in Bogotá, Colombia each of which responds to violence resulting from Colombia’s long civil war and challenges dominant notions of who belongs to the cultural community, as well as how the community behaves collectively. I argue that citizenship performances respond to violence within Colombian culture in three ways: first, they remap community behavior by modelling alternative modes of public moral comportment; second, they destabilize and recode the symbolic languages of the cultural community; third, they assert the cultural citizenship of marginalized communities by presencing their lives, struggles, and histories in public social space.

The first chapter analyzes a performance project by Bogotá’s alternative theatre company

Mapa Teatro, that maps out the social histories of the former barrio Santa Inés, also known as El

Cartucho. Beginning in 2001, Mapa Teatro began work on a series of performances and installations which documented the demolition of the barrio, culminating in a multimedia production called Witness to the Ruins, a citizenship performance that staged the lives of the former residents of Santa Inés on the rubble of the barrio itself, before it was transformed and gentrified into the Parque Tercer Milenio (Third Millennium Park). Because Witness asserts the

cultural citizenship of a marginalized community – a community literally removed from the center of the city – it exemplifies performance that re-positions citizenship within urban public space.

While Mapa Teatro’s work re-maps the city and re-places the lives of marginalized citizens, the second chapter examines urban artist DjLu’s project Juegasiempre, (Always Play), which scrutinizes the ubiquity of the tools of war and dismantles complacent acceptance of violence in the urban landscape. DjLu and other urban artists engage in citizenship performances by (re)covering the visual landscape in ways that question the symbols and institutions that make up Bogotano culture, especially when painting in daylight while being observed by the public.

My third chapter investigates the annual Día del Trabajo (Workers’ Day) march on the central Carrera Séptima, which constitutes a citizenship performance shaped by ghosts of the violent past that illuminates the lives and struggles of working-class citizens and victims of institutional violence, staking a citizenship claim for marginalized communities. My investigation of Mapa Teatro, DjLu, and the Workers’ Day march illuminates citizenship performance from three perspectives: through the work of artists who engage with and question the construction and destruction of urban social space, through the work of artists who alter the visual aesthetic of urban social space, and through performances shaped by the history and architecture of urban social space itself.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank first and foremost my advisor, Ana Elena Puga, without whose tireless advice and encouragement this would not have been possible. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, Jennifer Schlueter and Shilarna Stokes, for their comments and advice on this project and throughout my time at OSU. Many of the faculty at this university have helped to shape my research and practice as an artist/scholar, and for that I am indebted to

Joe Brandesky, Stratos Constantinidis, Lesley Ferris, Jill Galvan, Beth Kattelman, Paloma

Martinez-Cruz, Debra Moddelmog, and Jeanine Thompson.

There are perhaps too many fellow students to name, but there are some who have challenged me to think differently and I would be remiss not to mention Shelby Brewster,

Elizabeth Harelik Falter, Karie Miller, Chelsea Phillips, Charlesanne Rabensburg, Francesca

Spedalieri, Josh Truett, and Elizabeth Wellman.

I would also like to acknowledge those academic colleagues with whom I have engaged outside of the OSU community, especially Jorge Huerta, Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, Noe Montez,

Alex Ripp, Marcos Steuernagel, Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento, Brenda Werth, Anna White-

Nockelby, Patricia Ybarra.

Finally, none of this would have been possible without love and support of my family,

Meaghan, Emily, Sam, Paul, and Jojo.

Vita

Indiana University M.F.A. in Acting ...... 2004

Drew University B.A. double major in Theatre and Philosophy ...... 1997

Teaching Experience

The Ohio State University Graduate Teaching Associate ...... 2013-2016

Drew University Visiting Lecturer ...... 2004

Indiana University Associate Instructor...... 2000-2002

Actors’ Equity Performances

Actors’ Theatre of Colombus, Richard III (Richard) ...... 2015

Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Twelfth Night (Sebastian) ...... 2009

Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey The Triumph of Love (Prince Agis) ...... 2005

New Stage Theatre Three Days of Rain (Walker/Ned) ...... 2005

12 Miles West Fit to be Tied (Arloc) ...... 2004

Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey A Midwinter Night’s Dream (Demetrius) ...... 2002

Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Enrico IV (Carlo di Nolli) ...... 2002

Directing Experience

The Ohio State University Macbeth (Director) ...... 2016

Actors’ Theatre of Columbus All the Great Books(abridged) (Director) ...... 2015

Actors’ Theatre of Columbus The Hound of the Baskervilles (Director) ...... 2014

The Ohio State University The House of the Spirits (Fight Choreographer) ...... 2014

The Ohio State University aPOEtheosis (Assistant Director) ...... 2013

The Ohio State University Marat/Sade (Assistant Director/ Fight Choreographer) .....2012

Publications

Book review of Clowning as Social Performance in Colombia: Ridicule and Resistance by

Barnaby King. Modern Drama. Spring 2018.

“Mockus, Mapa Teatro, and Modos de hacer.” Latin American Theatre Review. Spring 2016.

Book review of La representación de la Conquista en el Teatro Latinoamericano de los Siglos

XX y XXI. Ed. Verena Dolle. Latin American Theatre Review. Spring 2016.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Theatre

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments...... iv

Vita ...... v

List of Figures ...... x

Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1

Citizenship ...... 11

Urban Social Space ...... 17

Chapter 2. Mapa Teatro, Mockus, and Modos de hacer ...... 30

Mockus and Mapa Teatro ...... 38

El Cartucho ...... 41

Mapa Teatro and Project Prometheus ...... 47

Run-Throughs and The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas ...... 54

Witness to the Ruins ...... 60

Mockus ...... 66 vii

Third Millennium Park as Non-Place ...... 72

Conclusion ...... 75

Chapter 3. DjLu and Urban Imaginaries: Performance in the Urban Public Sphere ...... 80

Death of a Grafitero ...... 80

Challenging the Urban Imaginary ...... 81

Becerra’s death sets the stage (Breaking Windows) ...... 91

Act One: Appropriating Signs ...... 103

Act Two: Performance and Spectatorship in Juegasiempre ...... 115

Act Three: Community, Collaboration, and Citizen Engagement in Juegasiempre ... 124

Conclusion ...... 129

Chapter 4. Presences and Dissensus on Carrera Séptima ...... 132

The Séptima: Bogotá’s behavioral vortex of cultural citizenship ...... 144

Workers’ Day March 2014: Presencing institutional violence ...... 149

Contesting Cultural Citizenship: Who belongs? ...... 152

Contesting Cultural Citizenship: How do we behave collectively?...... 163

Workers’ Day March 2015: Embodied resistance ...... 173

Conclusion ...... 175

Chapter 5. The Final Frontier...... 182

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Bibliography ...... 190

List of Figures

Figure 1. Prometeo. Photo courtesy of Mapa Teatro - archivo vivo...... 49

Figure 2. Visitors exploring the scars in the walls during Re-corridos. Photo courtesy of Mapa

Teatro - archivo vivo...... 56

Figure 3. La limpieza de los establos de Augías. Photo courtesty of Mapa Teatro - archivo vivo.

...... 59

Figure 4. Testigo a las ruinas. Photo courtesy of Mapa Teatro - archivo vivo...... 62

Figure 5. Two images of the Simón Bolívar monument in Parque de los periodistas taken by the

author in May 2014 and May 2015 respectively ...... 94

Figure 6. DjLu's caution sign pictograms. Composite by DjLu. Used under Creative Commons

license...... 107

Figure 7. DjLu's Piña Granada. Photo by DjLu. Used under Creative Commons license...... 109

Figure 8. One of DjLu's "War Bugs." Photo by the author, April 2014...... 111

Figure 9. "Cero maltrato." Photo by DjLu. Used under Creative Commons license...... 112

Figure 10. Before and after photograhps of DjLu's "Más no es mejor." Photos by the author,

April 2014...... 118

Figure 11. DjLu's "Orgullo de calle." Photo by DjLu. Used under Creative Commons license. 123

Figure 12. The stenciled saxophonist from "Orgullo de Calle" reused. Photo by DjLu. Used

under Creative Commons license...... 126 x

Figure 13. Sanitation workers with Colombian flag, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author...... 155

Figure 14. Drummers dancing, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author...... 157

Figure 15. Man with Communist flag, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author...... 158

Figure 16. Coca-Cola Workers, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author...... 164

Figure 17. Disguised Man, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author...... 172

Chapter 1. Introduction

On 6 November 1985, thirty-five members of the leftist guerrilla group M19 stormed the

Palace of Justice on Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, taking more than 300 hostages, including almost half of Colombia’s 25-member Supreme Court. Colombia’s army responded with an armored counter-assault that destroyed the entrance to the building, but soon resulted in the rescue of 200 hostages, despite the guerrillas’ entrenched positions. A day later more than one hundred people lay dead, among them twelve justices and five high-ranking members of M19, with other guerrillas, soldiers, and hostages. The storming of the Palace of Justice was the most violent single event in the civil war that has stretched for more than fifty years, the longest continuing civil war on Earth. The war involved leftist guerrilla groups like the M19, the Fuerzas Armadas

Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC), and the

Ejército de Liberación Nacional (Army of National Liberation, or ELN), right-wing paramilitary groups such as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC) or its later reincarnation as the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (Gaitanist Self-

Defence Forces of Colombia, or AGC), as well as the state military and police forces.

Complicating the conflict in Colombia is the country’s status as a leading producer of cocaine.

Drug trafficking has at times funded both left- and right-wing forces, and several cartels have grown large enough to constitute their own armed force, most recognizably Pablo Escobar’s

Medellín Cartel. 1

Bogotá has witnessed bombings on the streets and in the shopping malls, kidnappings and murders in broad daylight, and the impunity of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and cartels, which have taken little heed of the police forces and corrupt judiciary. Writing in 2001, Charles Bergquist,

Ricardo Peñaranda, and G. G. Sánchez reported that only 6% of the homicides in Colombia were brought to trial. Additionally, deep mistrust of the weak and corrupt judicial system suggests that the number of actual homicides is likely to be higher than the number reported. In turn, a higher number of actual homicides would lower the percentage of the total number of homicides that are brought to trial to less than 6%. While mountains of research has been done documenting and analyzing the violence itself, this dissertation examines cultural production in response to that violence – the response articulated in performance by a culture bearing the weight of more than half a century of pervasive trauma.1 More specifically, it attempts to map Bogotá’s sense of itself, its cultural identity – how does Bogotá view itself? Gabriel García Márquez warned in his

1982 Nobel lecture, “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.” This then is an attempt to understand the violence that the people of Bogotá have survived, through patterns that are their own: through performance. An analysis of Bogotano performances related to violence in general would be impossibly long, since nearly every performance in the city has something to do with violence. Daily life in the city is directly shaped by the city’s history of violence, either through the actual presence of violence or through the ghosts of violence in the past. Newly arrived residents who have immigrated to the city have in large part fled from the more violent conditions of rural Colombia or from the economic aftermath violent conflict leaves in its wake.

The events that occurred at the Palace of Justice in 1985 might be viewed as the inciting incident in a chain of events that has led to the gradual disarmament of paramilitaries and guerrilla groups, a process that is at least partially responsible for the decline in violence in the country’s metropolitan areas, particularly in Bogotá, where, according to María Victoria Llorente and Ángela Rivas, the homicide rate in the city fell from its peak of 80 per 100,000 inhabitants in

1993 to 22 homicides per 100,000 in 2004 (5). The administration of Liberal President Virgilio

Barco Vargas (7 August 1986- 7 August 1990) began efforts to disarm guerrilla groups, an effort that came to fruition under the administration of succeeding Liberal President César Gaviria

Trujillo (7 August 1990- 7 August 1994) in the demobilization of guerrillas including the M19, the Ejército Popular de Liberación (Popular Army of Liberation, or EPL) and several others

(Bergquist xiii). In 1990 a Constituent Assembly was approved by the voters to draft a new

Constitution that in July of 1991 replaced the Constitution of 1886. The new constitution controversially prohibits the extradition of Colombians (a problematic concession to drug cartels), but provides for a decentralized and more democratic government. Andrés Pastrana, the

Conservative President of Colombia (7 August 1998- 7 August 2002) campaigned on the promise of beginning serious negotiations with the guerrilla groups FARC and ELN. Pastrana’s

Plan Colombia brought in large scale international aid, beginning with an aid package announced by United States President Clinton in January 2000. Colombia received more than $5 billion from the United States between 2000 and 2007. The aid has been provided largely in the form of military support, although portions have been allocated to social reforms. According to the

United States Embassy in Bogotá, between 2002 and 2008 the number of homicides dropped

44%, while kidnappings and terrorist attacks dropped by more than three-quarters each.

The decrease in violence cannot be solely attributed to Plan Colombia and the international aid that followed. Regional and local governments as well as churches and non- government organizations (NGOs) have developed peace initiatives with varying degrees of success (Bouvier). For example, as I will detail in Chapter Two, Antanas Mockus devised a series of programs to deliberately alter public comportment and the responses of citizens to unethical behavior during his two terms as mayor of Bogotá, 1995-1997 and 2001-2003.

Mockus’ group of programs, collectively known as cultura ciudadana, or “civic culture,” addressed a perceived rupture between the law, culture, and morality in Bogotá (Mockus,

“Cultura ciudadana” 3). Mockus contends that encouraging specific modifications to the patterns of public behavior is a potential avenue for reconnecting the systems of law, culture, and morality. Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerovic and Ilva Navarro Bateman largely credit cultura ciudadana with helping to transform Bogotá (461), while Rachel Berney views Bogotá as a

“model of urban (re)development,” and suggests that public space and Mockus’ cultura ciudadana are key to the city’s transformation (“Learning from Bogotá” 539). Beginning with

Mockus’ cultura ciudadana, this dissertation interrogates four types of citizenship performances as fertile sites for social change, including performances staged by politicians, theatre artists, visual artists, and everyday citizens. These four types of citizenship performances use a range of strategic interventions into the urban public sphere, contributing to an understanding of the ways in which actors from different strata of Colombian political and economic power structures deploy citizenship performances to contest histories of violence. By integrating and expanding

on theoretical frameworks from performance studies, sociology, and philosophies of space, this work develops a theory of cultural citizenship that privileges performance in public space. In opposition to the prescriptive nature of laws and their enforcement, these citizenship performances interrogate what it means to belong to a society. Citizenship performances provide new or alternative frameworks of belonging and public behavior, through reflections on shared history, through suggestions of alternative patterns of public behavior, or through attempts to destabilize or recode hegemonic discourse.

The following questions have guided my research: How do citizenship performances function within the cultural environment? What networks of influence, collaboration, or support exist between performers, citizens, and the government or other institutions? How have performances in the city challenged the boundaries of citizenship, either through contesting discourses of belonging and participation, or through interrogating the rights and responsibilities of citizens? How does the urban environment shape what it means to live in and/or belong to

Bogotá? How is the urban landscape itself a site for contesting the patterns of behavior in a group – the group’s civic culture? How have performers and/or performances engaged with the architecture of Bogotá in order to realign patterns of behavior? How have artists engaged directly with the visual landscape to contest neoliberal narratives of progress and civic culture? How do the streets themselves provoke and shape performances? In what ways does a history of violence alter the ways in which people interact with public space? How does a history of violence change the performances that occur in public space?

This dissertation addresses these questions by examining citizenship performances that

subvert, destabilize, or redirect dominant notions of Colombian or Bogotano culture on, in, or about the streets. While any performance in a public space may be, to some extent, a citizenship performance, the four types of performances examined herein were explicitly conceived as interventions in the public discourse of citizenship, challenging notions of who belongs to the community and how members of the community are expected to behave. Communities define themselves by a variety of modalities: reciprocally negotiable communication including shared language and semiotics; patterns of behavior and codes of conduct, explicit or otherwise; shared history and culture. Each of these modalities is made possible through shared social space.

Storytelling, including theatre and performance of all kinds, is central to a community’s notion of itself. Patterns of behavior and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are all contested through performance. Citizenship performance may be understood then as any performance meant explicitly to challenge or support a community’s notion of itself – its cultural imaginary.

A cultural imaginary may be contested by asserting the cultural citizenship of marginalized groups, through challenging systems of meaning-making, or by modeling alternative patterns of behavior.

Beginning in 2001, the alternative theatre company Mapa Teatro began work on a series of performances and installations which addressed the demolition of the barrio Santa Inés.

Between 2002 and 2003 the company developed Proyecto Prometeo, a citizenship performance that staged the lives of the former residents of Santa Inés on the rubble of the barrio itself, before it was transformed and gentrified into the Parque Tercer Milenio (Third Millennium Park).

Because Prometeo asserted the cultural citizenship of a marginalized community – a community

literally removed from the center of the city – it enables an investigation of a performance which re-positioned citizenship within urban public space. Additionally, many of the residents of Santa

Inés had already been displaced from their rural homes by the civil war. Thus, Prometeo exemplifies performance as a response to the violent conflict that links citizenship and the urban landscape.

While Mapa Teatro’s work re-maps the city and re-places the lives of marginalized citizens, urban artist DjLu’s project Juegasiempre, or “Always Play,” contests the prevalence of violence and weapons in Bogotá. Just as Prometeo brought artistic scrutiny to the marginalized status of citizens displaced by violence, Juegasiempre scrutinizes the ubiquity of the tools of war and dismantles complacent acceptance of violence in the urban landscape. DjLu and other urban artists engage in citizenship performances by (re)covering the visual landscape in ways that question the symbols and institutions that make up Bogotano culture, especially when painting in daylight while being observed by the public. Juegasiempre juxtaposes and superimposes three types of icons: cultural icons strongly associated with Colombian or Bogotano culture; symbols that evoke corporate, religious, or government institutions; and icons of violence. In this way,

DjLu’s project allows me to investigate the ways in which artists engage with the architecture of

Bogotá and the ways in which the urban landscape has become a site for contesting patterns of behavior and systems of meaning making. Additionally, urban art and graffiti are inherently counter-cultural forms of expression since the artists often vandalize private or public properties, thereby allowing me to investigate performances that contend with the rights and responsibilities associated with cultural citizenship.

While the works of DjLu and Mapa Teatro offer the opportunity to examine how artists engage with urban public space to reshape the cultural citizenship of the city, Carrera Séptima

(Seventh Avenue) offers an opportunity to examine the ways in which public space provokes and shapes performance. The twelve-block pedestrian-only stretch of this central avenue connects the seat of government at the Plaza de Bolívar, home to the Palace of Justice as well as the Capitolio

Nacional (National Capitol), the Palacio Liévano (Liévano Palace, seat of Bogotá’s mayor), and the Catedral Primada de Colombia (seat of Colombia’s Archbishop), with the center of corporate power in the business district. This same stretch is the site of marches, parades, and protests, as well as the citizenship performances of vendors, street performers, and on any given Sunday, a near complete cross-section of the citizenry of Bogotá. Carrera Séptima has also been the site of bombings and assassinations, allowing me to investigate the ways in which the ghosts of a violent past interact with performances in the present. Past violence is present not only in the memory of the citizens, but also in the memorial plaques, in testimonial displays of photographs of the missing and dead, and in the performed protests of the victims of internal displacement.

Thus, protests and marches like the yearly parade on Día del Trabajo (Workers’ Day) constitute citizenship performances that are shaped by the streets and resonate with the ghosts of the violent past. My investigation of Mapa Teatro, DjLu, and the Workers’ Day march illuminates citizenship performance from three perspectives: through the work of artists who engage with and question the construction and destruction of urban social space, through the work of artists who alter the visual aesthetic of urban social space, and through performances shaped by the history and architecture of urban social space itself.

In a country suffering from the prolonged oppression of the longest continuing civil war on Earth, politicians, sociologists, and economists have proposed various strategies for ending the violence and/or helping the people and economy to heal. However, Colombia’s cultural response to this violence has not been paid adequate attention. Building on the theory of Henri

Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau and expanding on the theory behind Mockus’ cultura ciudadana, this dissertation proposes citizenship performance as a mechanism at the intersection of performance, citizenship, and urban social space by which citizens can contest patterns of behavior, systems of meaning making, and the cultural imaginaries of individuals within any given community, thereby expanding participation within a cultural community and the rights and responsibilities thereof. In this way, citizenship performances in urban social space function as a mechanism for incorporating new ideologies and identities into a community. This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to defining and understanding citizenship performances, building on theory of theatre for social change and broadening theory on cultural citizenship. Finally, this dissertation develops a specific frame for understanding artistic practice as part of citizenship performances that contest a history of violence within a community.

In conducting this research, I have interviewed artists, read histories of performances and historical events, examined photo and video documentation of artists and performances in situ, and recorded my own observations a participant/observer during seven weeks in 2014 and 2015.

Following the work of performance studies scholars like Ric Knowles, Jen Harvie, and others who have deployed cultural materialism to examine the conditions under which a work has been produced, I examine the historical, political, and economic circumstances that contextualize each

of my case studies. Also following Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic approach of analysis, I ask of each of the citizenship performances examined herein, “what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge” (4). My analysis, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, does not trace given events based on pre-existing notions of hierarchical truths, but instead creates a map of assemblages. It is a map of Mapa Teatro – the multiplicity of artists enabling and being enabled by the voices of marginalized citizens of Bogotá, interacting with political and cultural organizations, and inserting new visions of citizenship into and onto the visual field of the city. It is a map of urban art in Bogotá, the swarm of artists who have made the city their canvas, flowing into, around, and through the architecture – a million interventions in the aesthetic of the city, altering, rupturing what it feels like to live, work, and play in Colombia’s capital. It is a map of Carrera

Séptima, a twelve-block stretch of road that links the center of political power with the center of economic power; a length of asphalt only open to pedestrian traffic which itself has become a canvas, a stage, a parade or protest route, and a fairground; a contested space that contributes to the construction of citizenship in Bogotá. These maps reveal the routes of exchange and influence between performers, audiences as citizens, and the government and other institutions, and help us to understand the mutually constitutive relationship between these routes of exchange and the topography of the city. I supplement the mapping of relationships and material conditions with performance analysis that unearths the sometimes contested and shifting layers of meaning legible in any given performance event or artifact. The combination of cultural

materialism and performance analysis creates a clear understanding of citizenship performance, its relationship with urban social space, and its efficacy in the struggle against violence.

The term “citizenship” is most often used in a strictly political sense, which refers to the legal status of a person, along with the civil rights and responsibilities that follow from the formal membership in a state. Yet there is also a use of “citizenship” that is primarily social and connotes the patterns of social behavior and systems of meaning making within any giving group. Although the two meanings overlap, my research focuses on the latter definition of citizenship and examines how membership within a society is performed, or how membership in a society is questioned in performance. This notion of citizenship is closely aligned with Antanas

Mockus’ cultura ciudadana, and its focus on the patterns of behavior and comportment in the public sphere. In what follows, I discuss the contemporary theory on citizenship that has influenced my analysis, followed by a detailed outline of the literature on Mockus’ cultura ciudadana. From there I define my use of the phrase citizenship performance. As this project attempts to study citizenship performance specifically as it engages with urban public space, I review the contemporary scholarship on urban theory, art and performance in the urban sphere, and finally, art and performance in Bogotá that has shaped my study.

Citizenship

My analysis of cultural citizenship is rooted in Sociologist T. H. Marshall’s important

1964 essay, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in which he argues that citizenship can be divided into three parts, civil, political, and social, which he maintains developed roughly in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries respectively (94). Marshall designates the rights 11

of individuals to certain freedoms, namely the freedom of speech, thought, religion, the rights to own property and engage in contracts, and the right to justice to the civil element of citizenship.

To the political element of citizenship he assigns the right to participate in the political process of the state, in Marshall’s case the British system of government. The social element of citizenship is, according to Marshall, the right to participate and, “share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” (94).

These three elements together constitute a status that applies to those who are fully participating members of a community, and these members are endowed with certain rights and duties (102).

Marshall proposes that there is no empirical means by which the duties and rights of a citizen can be determined, but rather, “societies in which citizenship is a developing institution create an image of an ideal citizenship against which achievement can be measured and towards which aspiration can be directed” (102). The notion of an ideal citizenship is patently normative, and it is widely recognized that any normative description of citizenship will be deeply troubled by multiculturalism, globalization, and the development of transnational networks (Stevenson,

Turner, Pakulski, Delanty, Isin and Wood). Nevertheless, Marshall’s distinction of the three elements of citizenship began a conversation on the nature of the social element of citizenship, a trajectory that developed what is now referred to as cultural citizenship.

While Marshall associates the institutions of education and social welfare with his social element of citizenship, sociologists such as Jan Pakulski add culture as an element of citizenship, which incorporates rights of identity as well as semiotic codes and repertoires of behavior.

Pakulski associates cultural citizenship with the media and other public spheres but makes no

attempt to describe or analyze the ways in which citizens contest what it means to belong to and/or participate in a culture, beyond mentioning that culture is indeed contested (78).

Pakulski’s argument is founded on the distinction between what he calls the scope and content of citizenship: by scope he means the questions of who is or is not a full citizen, and by content he means questions relating to the specific rights and responsibilities of full citizenship. This definition obscures the processes and mechanisms of participation, those patterns of behavior and semiotic systems in which even some non-citizens participate. These processes and mechanisms of participation are integral to my research, particularly as they play out in the urban public sphere.

Some more recent work on citizenship accounts for the mechanisms of participation and contesting notions of belonging. For example, sociologist Nick Stevenson views public spaces and the interactions that occur in the public sphere as “crucial for the development of the self, the creation of social movements and the fostering of a critically informed public more generally”

(5). Like Pakulski, however, he privileges the media and mass communication as the likely arena for interventions. Engin F. Isin and Patricia K. Wood suggest in the preface to their work

Citizenship and Identity: “As advanced liberalism continues its socio-economic reorganization, there is a renewed attempt, often in the language of new technologies, to obliterate (in word, if not in fact) the difference space makes” (viii-ix). Isin and Wood reiterate throughout their work the importance of space in the construction of citizenship. For them, citizenship cannot be defined solely as a political status, nor as a set of cultural, economic, or symbolic practices. The two notions of citizenship – legal status and set of cultural practices – are constitutive and better

understood as existing in relation to one another. Isin and Wood account for the problems posed to citizenship by the late globalization and multiculturalism, and argue for what they call “radical citizenship,” warning, “To recognize only fragmentation overlooks the resurgence of group pluralization” (154). However, questions of how a radical citizenship might recognize shifting identities in the postmodern world are posed, but not answered by Isin and Wood. I contend that citizenship performances constitute one of the mechanisms by which new identities and ideologies are folded into the culture of a community.

Theories of citizenship that are entirely rooted in the nation state or derived from an ideal of citizenship are no longer adequate to explain contemporary reality. Sociologist Gerard

Delanty argues, “Space is no longer dominated by the space of the state; other deterritorialized spaces have emerged along with the break-up of national society as the privileged codifier of social space” (129). Delanty addresses the complicating questions of multiculturalism and globalization, arguing for what he calls a limited cosmopolitan citizenship, a citizenship which allows for the processes of globalization in culture, while simultaneously remaining rooted in the nation. Delanty contends that globalization, with its concomitant notions of transnationalism and post-nationalism, disrupts the foundations of liberal theories of citizenship, centered on individual freedoms, and communitarian theories of citizenship, centered on participation in a community. He argues that a fully cosmopolitan theory of citizenship, a citizenship of the world, risks universalizing and obscuring the pluralist nature of the twenty-first century urban sphere.

The conflict between cultural citizenship and twenty-first century pluralistic communities is addressed by Mockus’ project. Cultura ciudadana began as a program of Mockus’ first

mayoral administration, whose focus was the development of peaceful coexistence through conscientious alterations in public comportment (Mockus Cultura 3). Mockus developed this program to repair a breach in the three regulatory systems of human behavior – the law, morality, and culture. Clara Carrillo Fernández first developed the theory of these three systems while studying under Mockus at the Universidad Nacional (National University) in Bogotá. The divorce of these systems is evidenced by high levels of violence, delinquency and corruption, as well as by a breakdown in the institutions and cultural traditions of society (Cultura 3). Mockus argues that the path to peaceful coexistence lies in the harmony of these three systems in such a way as to allow for pluralism in law, culture, and morality. This could be achieved through the conscious modification of the habits and beliefs of the citizens (Cultura 3), by “reducing moral and cultural justifications for illegal behavior and increasing moral and cultural support for the law” (Mockus “Building” 145). Mockus’ administration created and implemented a development plan of sixteen specific actions to fulfill this objective, each of which Mockus argues achieved some degree of success. These actions exemplify what I call citizenship performance; later chapters examine the ways in which artists and performers expand on Mockus’ philosophy.

Rachel Berney and Martin and Ceballos both look to the political stability and continuity in Bogotá established by the consecutive mayoral administrations of Mockus and Enrique

Peñalosa, whose term from 1998 to 2000 bridged Mockus’ two terms, as one of the chief causes of the reduction in violence in the city. Berney focuses on how these two mayors engaged with public space – Mockus’ projects to transform behavior in public space and Peñalosa’s development of public space in the city through creation of new public parks and upgrades to

public infrastructure, particularly in transportation and education. Berney however fails to give critical attention to the displacement of poor and marginalized citizens when their homes were destroyed to make room for new parks, despite the very visible critical attention leveled by groups like Mapa Teatro. Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerovic and Ilva Navarro Bateman examine the theatrical elements of cultura ciudadana, linking the project to Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the

Oppressed. While they do not claim that Mockus was directly influenced by Boal, they assert that Mockus, like Boal, was influenced by Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Doris

Sommer also links Mockus to Boal in her book The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and

Public Humanities, particularly in that the former is a politician who thinks and acts likes an artist, while the latter is an artist who thinks like and eventually became a politician. Boal’s contributions to theatre for social change are unquestioned; Mockus remains an obscure figure in theatre and performance studies, and yet his project bore tangible fruit as violence ebbed and confidence in government flowed.

A citizenship performance, as I use the phrase, is a performance that acts as a mechanism for contesting a community’s civic culture, contesting the patterns of interactions and behaviors that occur in public space, contesting the repertoire of tactics in play within the community as challenges to the strategies deployed by the powers that be. Citizenship performances occur in public space and contest civic culture by proposing alternative modes of behavior, as with some of the performances devised by Mockus to promote cultura ciudadana; by challenging a community’s boundaries of inclusion or exclusion, as in Mapa Teatro’s work; by critically inverting symbols and icons of dominant ideology, as in DjLu’s art; or by the community’s re-

appropriation of space in the game of individual tactics over hegemonic strategies, as is seen on

Carrera Séptima.

Urban Social Space

My analysis of how performances in urban public space function in Colombia builds on critical theory by those such as Lefebvre, de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Edward Soja, who link physical space with the human behaviors that occur therein. In Discipline and Punish,

Foucault argues that the architectural structures of our institutions simultaneously produce and are produced by underlying historical discourses. He specifically focuses on the development of the penitentiary as an institution and architectural structure that reflects the evolving relationship between society and the methods used for disciplining and punishing its criminals. Moving from institutions to public space, Lefebvre suggests that the urban environment constructs and shapes the lives of cities’ residents just as the residents shape and construct the streets. Like Foucault’s penitentiary, Lefebvre’s urban social space is both constructed and constructs. However, most of the constructing and shaping of the streets is controlled by those in power, such as the government, property owners, and corporate or religious interests. Soja, building on both

Foucault and Lefebvre, discerns an opacity in urban space and warns that we must be aware,

“how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology” (Postmodern 6).

Urban social space influences citizens’ lives, and often reproduces or at least parallels the ideological interests of those who have controlled the shaping of the streets themselves. The interests, perspectives, and needs of a city’s disenfranchised, poor, and liminal citizens are 17

overlooked, undervalued, ignored, or intentionally disappeared.

Lefebvre identifies a triad in social space, the parts of which he calls spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces. Spatial practice defines and is defined by society through its routines and its routes, the flows of bodies in and around the city, in workplaces, homes, and sites of recreation and education. Representations of space are for

Lefebvre the “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers, and social engineers” (38). Representations of space are abstract but nonetheless play a role in the relationship between a people and its space. Representational space is “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols,” a “space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (39 emphasis in original). My analysis of performance in Bogotá will focus on those artists who engage with or alter the representational spaces of the city, especially when they challenge, appropriate, or redirect the images and symbols of government or corporate interests, and consequently contribute to altering spatial practice.

Spatial practice – the ways in which a community interacts with each other and the physical environments they share – constitutes one of the foundations of cultural citizenship. De

Certeau distinguishes two “logics of action” in The Practice of Everyday Life, namely tactics and strategies. Strategies, he argues, “become possible when a subject of will and power… can be isolated from an ‘environment’” (xix). This is the logic of action of producers, of governments, institutions, corporations, and those organizations who create plans for public consumption.

Tactics, on the other hand, cannot be isolated from an environment, tactical logic is the logic of the consumers, the myriad choices made unconsciously in the course of everyday life, and their

heterogeneity of everyday influences, de Certeau suggests, make these tactics unmappable – they cannot be predicted or directed, and in this way they are “outside the reach of the panoptic power” (95). Thus, the citizens, in their complex and contradictory flows of decisions, make the city “no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations” (95), as it might appear to be from above, or famously in de Certeau’s case, from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, by poaching on the territories of the strategists. A community of people who have in common an overlapping set of social or behavioral norms, a cultural citizenship, will also have in common an overlapping set of regularly performed tactics. The performances of citizenship this dissertation investigates can be understood as attempts to reconfigure or redirect a portion of the tactics deployed by citizens, or as attempts to augment the repertoire of tactics deployed in response to specific government, corporate, or institutional strategies.

De Certeau makes a careful and useful distinction between places and spaces. Places are static locations, a set of composed relationships between objects and architecture. Spaces are dynamic, allowing for “vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables,” that is to say, “space is a practiced place” (117 emphasis in orig.). Doreen Massey’s 2005 work For Space argues that de Certeau interprets strategies in terms of space and tactics in terms of time (45). So while de

Certeau observed tactics of the common fold from his now famous vantage poin, he ultimately fails, at least according to Massey, to grasp the ways in which the tactics of those who move through a location – the behavioral histories that individuals bring with them, observe, negotiate

– contribute to the ongoing social evolution of the space itself. Massey seeks to understand space as fundamentally heterogeneous, lived, and relational:

The argument here is instead to understand space as an open ongoing production.

As well as injecting temporality into the spatial this also reinvigorates is aspect of

discrete multiplicity; for while the closed system is the foundation for the singular

universal, opening that up makes room for a genuine multiplicity of trajectories,

and thus potentially of voices. (55)

Massey’s notion of space as an ongoing production open to a multiplicity of voices and trajectories underscores the need to understand the myriad ways that citizens from all levels of society – politicians, artists, the working class – encounter and construct the environment.

Marc Augé builds on de Certeau’s distinction between space and place by introducing the idea of a non-place: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (63). Bus terminals, and motel rooms, the compartments of cars, buses, trains, and airplanes, the box stores and mall boutiques that are innumerably replicated in late capitalist society are all examples of what Augé considers to be non-places. Non-places are the detritus of institutional strategy making, and frequently obliterate true social places in their making. My research suggests that citizenship performances re-place non-places. Citizenship performances inculcate history, relation, and identity into, onto, or around non-places, thereby re-placing non-places and establishing a cultural value for the “new” places. This is explicitly the case for Bogotá’s urban artists, particularly DjLu, who acknowledges Augé as an influence in his development as an artist. Current law on street art and graffiti in Bogotá bans this kind of work on historical buildings, public monuments, and private property, but fails to apply to Augé’s non-

places, legalizing by omission graffiti and street art on public property that is neither historic nor a monument, i.e., on concrete dividers, bridges and overpasses, benches, planters, and telephone poles.

Postmodern urbanist Edward W. Soja describes what he calls a “subordination” of space to time in modern social theory, and argues instead for theory which is simultaneously social, temporal, and spatial, what he refers to as historical geography, which he hopes to accomplish by, “recomposing the intellectual history of critical social theory around the evolving dialectics of space, time, and social being” (Postmodern 3). Soja expands Lefebvre’s spatial triad in his own trialectic by proposing a “thirdspace,” in which layers of meaning coexist, “subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history” (Thirdspace 57). Soja’s thirdspace is closely aligned with Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, developed in the essay “Different Spaces.” Utopias, according to Foucault, are entirely abstract and therefore unreal – a utopia is a perfect or perfected space of the imagination and exists in no location, in no real space. Heterotopias are actual spaces in which the real and the unreal collide, contest, represent, and reverse each other. Foucault’s examples range from the simple mirror, in which the image is simultaneously real and represented since one cannot reach out to touch the face in the mirror, to the theatre in which real bodies represent an imagined reality.

Building on Foucault’s heterotopias, Silvija Jestrovic proposes interrogating a city’s

globalization by its “heterotopic capacity,” defined as, “how its meaning has been performed, narrated, sexualized, mediated, and imagined by those who live in it - as well as by those who construct and reconstruct the place from a distance” (202). The citizenship performances I examine herein are certainly examples of heterotopias, but moreover they are heterotopias that intervene in the heterotopic capacity of a city by redirecting or contesting how meaning is made and circulated within the urban environment.

Joseph Roach describes spaces that attract performance as behavioral vortices, spaces that are haunted, to borrow from Marvin Carlson, by histories of performance. Roach locates several of these behavioral vortices, but I suggest the notion ought to be broadened. Nearly every space in an urban environment carries ghosts of prior performances, albeit some to a lesser degree than others, and perhaps most are haunted only be those ghosts recalled by a very few inhabitants, but these are ghosts nonetheless and affect the inhabitants who are aware of them, however few those may be. Perhaps it goes too far to suggest that every space constitutes its own kind of behavioral vortex, but there are certainly spaces in every city which may be analyzed as vortices. Bogotá’s Carrera Séptima (7th Avenue) is haunted by a long history of violent events.

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, head of the Labor Party and presidential contender, was assassinated outside his lawyer’s office on Carrera Séptima in 1948, sparking the Bogotazo and the ultra- violent period Colombia’s history known simply as La Violencia (The Violence); the Palace of

Justice is on the Plaza de Bolívar, at the intersections of Carrera Séptima and Calle 11 (11th

Street), and the avenue continues to be a prime location for marches and protests.

The work of Lefebvre, de Certeau, Soja, and Massey are major points in the evolution of

a spatial discourse that runs counter to the discursive trend toward textuality. In their collection

Performance and the City, D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga set out to interrupt the trend in urban studies of understanding the city as text, or as capable of being seen from above, mapped out as if de Certeau’s tactics did not exist, and failing to heed Lefebvre’s warning against an “overestimation of texts” (Lefebvre 62). Hopkins, Orr, and Solga argue that,

“performance can help to renegotiate the urban archive, to build the city, and to change it” (6).

Performance and performance theory, with their embodied, temporal, and relational layers of meaning and meaning-making, offer alternative methodologies for theorizing twenty-first century urban phenomena. Hopkins, Orr, and Solga are not alone in their criticism of urban theory that emphasizes textuality and legibility (Biron, Soja, Whybrow). However, their first collection highlighted New York City and was entirely focused on the English-speaking world.

Hopkins and Solga collaborated on a second edition, Performance and the Global City, which seeks to incorporate transnational networks, multicultural exchange, and the hybridity of globalization, and thereby to demonstrate, “the enduring value of performance as an interdisciplinary toil for understanding a wide range of built spaces, socioeconomic conditions, and art practices across different incarnations of the ‘global city’ worldwide” (8).

Within Latin America there are many artists whose works interrogate citizenship in, on, or through the urban landscape. For example, Lotty Rosenfeld is a Chilean artist who, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, laid white strips of cloth across the dotted lines on the road, creating a series of crosses traveling into the distance. The crosses evoked the grave markers of the desaparecidos, the disappeared members of society whose final resting places would likely

never have a marker of their own. Nelly Richard understands Rosenfeld’s work as having

“articulated the multiplicative plurality of open meanings that art must maintain in suspense and contradiction if it is to defy totalitarianism’s ownership of unique truths” (117). She suggests that the meanings associated with metaphors in art, the particular ways in which art is decoded by its audience, are flexible and shift, undermining or subverting the “capitalist order of signs” (121). I argue that it is precisely this order of signs which DjLu disrupts with his urban art project,

Siemprejuega, (“Play always”). Even though Colombia is not subject to a totalitarian regime, the government certainly has laid claims to certain truths, truths which are challenged by the works at the center of my research.

While Richard examines the flexible and shifting meanings legible in Rosenfeld’s art,

Marcy Schwartz unearths new layers of meaning in visual aesthetics. Specifically, Schwartz attempts to shift the focus of Latin American cultural studies by incorporating visual aesthetics, particularly the role of urban art. Hers is a response to a perceived trend in cultural studies to define and separate opposing binaries, such as the distinction between high and low art, or between textual and visual aesthetics. Schwartz counters this trend by seeking, “to rediscover the dynamics of verbal and visual art in the experience of the urban in Latin America” (128). Natalia

Gutiérrez’s work Ciudad-espejo (City-Reflection or City-Mirror), like that of Schwartz, focuses on the ways in which art reflects the city. Gutiérrez examines artists who use video and photography to capture and question Bogotá’s urban condition from the outside, that is, from a position of anthropological or sociological interrogation. Mapa Teatro’s Proyecto Prometeo is, according to Gutiérrez, an example of the kind of intervention that allows the citizen the

opportunity to reflect on the image of city, to view the city as if from outside, from a more critical perspective. The intent of the performance, she suggests, was “to give a voice to the silences and oversights of official history” (102). I will build on Gutiérrez’s analysis by suggesting that Proyecto Prometeo not only filled in gaps in the official narrative of Bogotá’s history, but exposed an alternative history that contradicts the official one. The affective potency of the citizenship performance of Proyecto Prometeo lies in its reconstruction of the social topography of a demolished neighborhood.

I begin my second chapter, “Mapa Teatro, Mockus, and Modos de hacer,” with an analysis of Proyecto Prometeo (The Prometheus Project, 2002-3) by the experimental theatre group Mapa Teatro, because this project is directly linked to Antanas Mockus, and because it is clearly an example of citizenship performance. Founded in 1984 by Heidi, Elizabeth, and Rolf

Abderhalden, Mapa Teatro refers to itself as a “laboratory of the social imagination,” creating interdisciplinary performances and installations. Proyecto Prometeo is one part of Proyecto

C’undua, a larger series of projects that began in 2001 at the request of the Mockus administration. C’undua is the location of the afterlife, according to the mythology of

Colombia’s indigenous Arhuaco people, of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region. Proyecto

C’undua examined the afterlife of the barrio Santa Inés, also known as El Cartucho (The

Cartridge or The Bullet) and its residents. At the time, El Cartucho was in the process of being razed to make room for Parque Tres Milenio, displacing the poor and marginalized citizens of the barrio who had nowhere else to go, many of whom were internally displaced victims of the civil war. Proyecto Prometeo was a theatre and media installation staged on the rubble of the

neighborhood during the demolition. With a combination of documentary video footage on two large screens and live performance, Proyecto Prometeo commemorated and restaged the lives and memories of fifteen of the barrio’s former residents, many of whom participated in the performance, intentionally blurring the art/life and subject/object binaries.

My use of cultural materialism to map Proyecto Prometeo as an assemblage investigates the fluid relationships and exchanges of influence and financial support on the contested field of urban social space between performers, state administrations, and citizens who are displaced victims of violence. These relationships and exchanges illuminate the ways in which citizenship performance functions as a response to violence. My analysis of the performance itself will focus on the ways in which Mapa Teatro employed, engaged with, and evoked the memories of a specific site within the urban landscape. These memories produce and validate an alternative version of Bogotano identity. In this way, my analysis will help to illuminate the relationship between citizenship performance and urban social space.

In my third chapter, “DjLu and Urban Imaginaries: Performance in the Urban Public

Sphere,” I turn to the urban art scene in Bogotá, which is unusually vibrant, largely due to the legal limbo in which graffiti and street artists work. My analysis of the process and composition of DjLu’s stencil pieces reveals an artist working within a community of artists generally understood to be counter-cultural, while simultaneously engaging, appropriating, and contesting hegemonic neoliberal narratives prominent in Bogotá’s visual landscape. DjLu’s body of work consists of hundreds of individual stencils spread widely around Bogotá’s landscape. Some of the stencils are compound pictograms of simple contrasting or contradictory icons: an image that

is both pineapple and grenade, images of bugs with wings made out of assault rifles, or factories giving off smog in the shape of the Earth’s continents. These stencils are found on telephone poles and public planters, on walls, benches, and even a few pairs of shoes. Some of DjLu’s works are much more complex: multi-layered stenciled portraits, usually incorporating one or more of his pictograms in the background, and often created side-by-side with other artists to cover the entirety of the space available. These larger pieces take hours to complete and are placed on prominently visible walls and structures around the city. DjLu brings to his body of work a critical perspective that explicitly challenges both the prevalence of violence in Bogotá and the environmental damage wrought by neoliberal economic policies. Thus, his work constitutes a citizenship performance, and invites an investigation into the appropriation of both the visual landscape of the city and the meanings associated with certain visual images.

In addition to broadening an understanding of the relationship between the visual landscape and narratives of progress and civic culture, the analysis in this chapter addresses how the urban landscape has been employed as a site for contesting a group’s civic culture, how artists and performers engage with Bogotá’s architecture in order to realign patterns of behavior, how the streets themselves provoke and shape performances, and how a history of violence alters the ways in which people interact with public space. Graffiti and urban art criticism has largely addressed the work as a form of delinquency and transgression2. The research for this chapter addresses questions of belonging and legitimacy in counter-cultural narratives. While some of the work is situated on legal walls, a significant amount of work continues to appear on private property, as well as on historic buildings and monuments, a trend that reinforces the narrative of

urban art as delinquent and illegitimate. Additionally, DjLu and other popular urban artists in

Bogotá have received funding from the city for various commissioned works, complicating the position of the artists’ criticism of government policy. In order to describe the urban art assemblage, I map out the networks of influence and exchange among the artists, their audiences, historical events, and the political environment.

My fourth chapter, “Presences and Dissensus on Carrera Séptima,” turns from DjLu, a visual artist whose citizenship performance alters the urban visual field, to a citizenship performance staged by ordinary workers on one of Bogotá’s central avenues: the annual march on Día del Trabajo (Workers’ Day, an annual holiday on the first of May, celebrated in many countries around the world). My analysis of this performance on Carrera Séptima contributes to an understanding of the ways in which a history of violence alters how people interact with public space and changes the patterns of behavior that occur. It also sheds light on the ways in which the urban environment shapes what it means to live, work, and play in Bogotá, and how the urban landscape itself is a site for contesting patterns of behavior. The streets give shape to the march, flanked by parallel lines of police in full riot gear. The lines of police funneling the march mirror, validate, and reinforce the power of the state and its attempts to control the flow of the commerce and bodies through the streets. The control is exerted strategically, through careful planning, while the march is performed tactically, with unpredictable variation and unforeseen variations on performance. Meanwhile, less than a block from the parade route on Carrera

Séptima, armored vehicles wait, certainly in preparation, almost in anticipation, maybe not quite in ambush, should (non-state) violence happen to break out, echoing the lurking presence of

violence within Colombia in a time when a resolution to the conflict is underway.

As I intend to continue to develop the research and argument developed herein, my concluding chapter connects the theoretical frameworks I have deployed and considers the implications and extensions of my theory of citizenship performance. While I postulate that communities are formed on shared social spaces, each of the performances analyzed in this dissertation is situated in physical public space. It is important to note, however, that there are communities, and therefore citizenship performances, which arise from non-physical social spaces. These spaces may be virtual, as in online communities, or imagined, as in communities based on identity formations, life circumstances, or even the global community. Therefore, I consider some of the implications of my argument and possible lines of further inquiry as applied to such virtual and imagined communities. I conclude the dissertation with a brief appraisal of the present status of Colombia’s civil conflict.

1 See for example Berney “Learning”; Bouvier; Bushnell; Carrillo; Berquest, Peñaranda, and Sanchez; Darío Correa and Alonso; Llorente and Rivas; Martin and Cellos; Uribe. 2 See for example, Austin, Baudrillard, Halsey and Young, Rachel Holmes, Kane, Kramer, McAuliffe, Riggle, Rodriguez and Clair, Visconti et. al.

Chapter 2. Mapa Teatro, Mockus, and Modos de hacer

Bogotá’s barrio Santa Inés, known colloquially as El Cartucho, was paradoxically at once one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the capital and a refuge for many of the city’s impoverished citizens, many of whom were among Colombia’s more than six million internally displaced persons – those who have fled from the violence of the ongoing guerrilla warfare more prevalent in the country’s rural regions.3 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Bogotá had become known for its history of murders, kidnappings, and bombings: while foreign governments labeled the city a perilous place to visit, the local residents had become afraid of El

Cartucho. This four-hundred meter by four-hundred-meter community was located a couple blocks from Bogotá’s center of power, the Plaza de Bolívar. On the four sides of the plaza sit

Colombia’s Supreme Court (Palacio de Justicia), the First Cathedral of Colombia (Catedral

Primada de Colombia, seat of the archbishop), Colombia’s parliament (Capitolio Nacional), and the Liévano Palace (Palacio Liévano, seat of Bogotá’s mayor), as well as the College of San

Bartolomé (Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé), Colombia’s oldest educational institution founded in 1604. If the Plaza de Bolívar is Bogotá’s center of executive, legislative, judicial, religious, and educational power, El Cartucho, as Rolf Abderhalden, who along with his sister

Heidi serves as Mapa Teatro’s Co-Artistic Director, has written, “was specifically a site of terror

– the center of fear – of the city”4 (92, emphasis in original). Miller Rubio begins his article on

El Cartucho in Bogotá’s El Tiempo newspaper on 2 September 1991, with the following description:

It is a world of misery where cardboard, basuco, and marijuana are everything.

People live in wheeled carts or on the street.5 They eat a mix of scraps that a

woman sells for 200 pesos that they call ‘combined.’ The law of the strongest

rules.6

El Cartucho was known to be a home to drug dealers, addicts, and prostitutes, but was also a haven for a variety of other informal economies, particularly recycling. Despite being one of

Bogotá’s oldest neighborhoods with a rich cultural history, El Cartucho – its buildings, its streets, and its histories of human lives – has been erased from the face of the Earth by the wrecking ball of gentrification and the bulldozer of neoliberalism. This small neighborhood, which had been the site of homes, businesses, and the daily traffic of some twelve-thousand lives, was demolished to make room for the open and verdant Third Millennium Park (Parque

Tercer Milenio).

While historically important spaces like Mexico’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas (site of the

Tlatelolco massacre on 2 October 1968), Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo (site of the sustained protest the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, mothers of persons disappeared during the so-called Dirty

War), or Chile’s Villa Grimaldi (a torture and execution facility operated under Pinochet’s regime) are privileged by performance studies scholars, blighted spaces like El Cartucho are sometimes ignored or overlooked. Yet I believe that we have much to learn from spaces in which violence was perhaps less obvious but just as significant to the lives of common citizens and the

cultural history of city. I focus on the performative practices of El Cartucho because it exemplifies the violence that stems from neoliberal policies that only account for social space in economic terms, without regard for the social value of the space: El Cartucho provided a home for internally displaced refugees and a centralized clearinghouse for the informal recycling economy. How do citizenship performances function differently in these two types of spaces?

This chapter investigates the series of performance installations Mapa Teatro created with the residents of El Cartucho, beginning with the two performances of Prometheus in 2002 and 2003, and culminating in Witness to the Ruins in 2005. Deploying a cultural materialist methodology, following other performance studies scholars like Knowles and Harvie, I consider the relationship Mapa Teatro has with Mockus, former two-time mayor of Bogotá, as he is both the politician behind Mapa Teatro’s original funding for the project, as well as an eventual participant. 7 My interest in Mockus goes beyond his participation in Witness to the Ruins: his two mayoral administrations came to be known for unusual political tactics that often involved public performances. These tactics were a part of a program known as Citizenship Culture

(Cultura ciudadana), and were designed to promote public moral behavior. I compare the public performances of Mapa Teatro and Mockus to illuminate how citizenship performances of both artists and politicians have functioned in Bogotá, and develop a theoretical approach to investigate how the artists and politician share an understanding of citizenship/belonging that emphasizes the repertoires of behavior embedded within social space. Performance studies scholars have to a limited extent included the importance of behavioral histories in public spaces

(Taylor, Joseph, Roach). By studying the ways in which Mapa Teatro and Mockus have staged

citizenship performances in public space, I am drawing attention to how Mapa Teatro and

Mockus are changing the cultural citizenship of Bogotá.

My focus on these behavioral histories builds on the valuable work of those who have written on Mapa Teatro, particularly geo-ethnographer Karen Till, who adroitly confronts the dissonance between neoliberal imaginaries of urban social space, in which parcels of land are valued according to their economic potential, and the messy results of the gentrifying improvements called for by the neoliberal spatial imaginary, particularly on the poor, whose homes are erased and whose lives are displaced in the name of urban renewal. This chapter thinks through the ways in which Mapa Teatro and Mockus have approached social space, working to unveil the relationship between Mapa Teatro’s artistic practice and Mockus’s cultural politics in order to shed new light on what Till has called their “alternative spatial imaginaries.” I build on her analysis by exploring how repertoires of performance are shaped by social space and vice versa, and how artists and politicians have used performance to intervene into these histories. Ileana Diéguez investigates how Mapa Teatro’s work reconstructs the collective memory of Bogotá as what she calls a liminal scenario. Mapa Teatro’s work with El Cartucho, like the other liminal scenarios Diéguez studies, exists outside of traditionally defined art forms.

Mapa Teatro’s work is part theatre, but also part documentary and part installation (Mapa Teatro refers to this kind of work as “install-actions” [“instal-acciones”]) (mapateatro.org); their hybridity of aesthetic approaches to the work, and active engagement with the underserved communities enables the group to challenge and realign the cultural citizenship of Bogotá.

Moreover, the two performances of Mapa Teatro’s Project Prometheus relied heavily on

performances by actual former residents of the barrio, rather than that of trained actors, blurring the line between art and life. Additionally, I follow Massey’s work in For Space, particularly her call to resituate social space as lived, relational, and heterogeneous. In her conception, space is always experienced bodily, it evolves fluidly, and each of those people who pass through a space shape the space itself, just as the space helps to shape the person. Massey’s work underscores the ways in which the neoliberal spatial imaginary fails to account for the value of human lives and interactions within a given public space. Finally, I engage with Vicky Unruh’s examination of what she calls the “metaphoric ties between the ruin, the recognition of otherness, and the critical reflection implicit in an imaginary of change” (136). Mapa Teatro’s work with the former residents of El Cartucho exemplifies a performance with these clearly present ties. The two

Prometheus performances took place on the ruins of the barrio itself even as the construction of the future Third Millennium Park had yet to begin, in the presence of the stigmatized others – the citizens themselves who were once regularly referred to as los desechables, the disposable people.

On 22 September 2012 Rolf Abderhalden and Antanas Mockus appeared together on stage behind a translucent projection screen in Witness to the Ruins (Testigo a las ruinas) at a gathering titled “Truth is Concrete,” which its organizers describe as “A 24/7 marathon camp on artistic strategies in politics and political strategies in art” (truthisconcrete.org). Witness to the

Ruins is a multimedia documentary that combines video projection and live performance. The touring performance documents the demolition of El Cartucho, as well as a series of performance installations created by Mapa Teatro with the residents of El Cartucho. These performance

installations recounted the personal histories of some of the residents through recorded interviews and staged some of their daily rituals through live performance on the rubble of the barrio itself. While Witness to the Ruins had been produced numerous times internationally, this particular version was notable for the presence of Mockus. It was Mockus’s second mayoral administration that enlisted Mapa Teatro to develop a memorial artwork on El Cartucho, originally conceived as a physical memorial, and provided the initial funding. Mockus inherited the demolition of El Cartucho from the previous mayor, Enrique Peñalosa. Mockus and Mapa

Teatro have more in common, however, than the collaboration on El Cartucho and a shared presence on stage: they have both created performances in public spaces that have challenged the cultural citizenship of Bogotá, that have attempted interventions into what it means to be a citizen of the city, confronting notions of who belongs to the cultural sphere of the city and what is expected of those who belong.

Mapa Teatro’s works on the barrio El Cartucho, documented by Witness to the Ruins, began as a memorial about the space, about the loss of one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, but became a testimony to/for/by those who had lived there. As a self-described “workshop of the social imagination,”8 their engagement with the citizens of this stigmatized neighborhood began with a year-long workshop in which fifteen current and recently evicted residents participated. Working with the artists of Mapa Teatro, these residents created two performances, staged exactly one year apart on 15 December 2002 and again on 15 December 2003. These performances, titled Prometheus: First Act (Prometeo: Primer Acto) and Prometheus: Second

Act (Prometeo: Acto Segundo), and sometimes referred to jointly as Project Prometheus

(Proyecto Prometeo), re-created the living spaces of these residents using their own furniture, replacing it on the rubble of the neighborhood after its demolition. Following Project Prometheus, an interactive art installation was built in Mapa Teatro’s headquarters on Seventh Avenue

(Carrera Séptima). Run-Throughs (Re-corridos, 2003) incorporated video and audio documentation of the demolition of El Cartucho, as well as debris from the neighborhood

(including the front doorway of the last building to be demolished) and bits of recorded interviews collected from the residents. The third performance installation of Mapa Teatro’s series of works on El Cartucho, The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas (La limpieza de los establos de Augías, 2004), was a video installation in two parts as the construction was underway to transform El Cartucho into the Third Millennium Park: cameras provided a live-feed of the construction, broadcast by video projectors on the walls of Bogotá’s Museum of Modern Art

(Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, or MAMBO). At the same time, video monitors were installed along the construction fence built around the site of El Cartucho and played looped video footage of the neighborhood as it had been before and during its deconstruction, making visible to passersby the history of the site, even while the present ongoing construction was obscured by the fencing. In order to experience the installation as a whole, visitors to MAMBO had to travel to the construction site, and visitors to the construction site had to travel to

MAMBO. The final iteration of Mapa Teatro’s work with El Cartucho is Witness to the Ruins

(Testigo a las ruinas, 2005), which has been performed worldwide since 2005. Juana Ramírez, the last person to have lived in El Cartucho, frequently appears in Witness, setting up a makeshift cart in front of the projection screens and making arepas and hot chocolate (two

quintessentially Colombian foods) as part of the performance. I analyze all four stages of the work, Prometheus, Run-Throughs, The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas, and Witness to the

Ruins, as the evolution of a critical citizenship performance that sought change in Bogotá’s cultural economy.

In contrast to cultural and literary scholars of Latin America I attempt to locate identity not within the written forms Latin America has produced (testimonio, magical realism, grotesco criollo, and so on) but rather in the repertoires of everyday behaviors and interpersonal exchanges which define, and are reciprocally defined by, the social spaces in which they occur.

Angel Rama suggests in La ciudad letrada that the urban centers of Latin America are shaped by the lettered elites whose documentation of urban histories has been passed down to us by the curated archival traditions of Western academia. The citizenship performances I examine – the artistic work of Mapa Teatro and the political strategies of Mockus – demonstrate that everyday repertoires of behavior of ordinary citizens, while absent in the archive, nevertheless continue to shape the city and its citizenship.

Mockus and Mapa Teatro have approached cultural citizenship from different, but complementary perspectives: Mockus as politician engaging in performance, and Mapa Teatro as performing artists engaging with the politics of social space. The strategies of the artists and politician differ in more than discipline: Mapa Teatro’s work with El Cartucho seeks to establish the cultural citizenship of a marginalized population; Mockus’s Citizenship Culture seeks to alter the public moral comportment of the citizenry. Both, then, seek to broaden and improve the cultural citizenship of Bogotá through public performance. In this way, the public performances

of Mapa Teatro and Antanas Mockus exemplify what I call citizenship performances: projects that directly confront prevailing notions of who belongs to the cultural community of Bogotá and/or how individuals within the community relate to each other.

Mockus and Mapa Teatro

The political strategies of Mockus’s administration and the aesthetic performances and installations of Mapa Teatro reveal the inextricable relationship between communities and the spaces they share. Moreover, these embodied performances articulate a fundamentally heterogeneous spatial imaginary: one in which communities are formed based on shared social space and reciprocally negotiable systems of meaning making despite the disparate ideologies and identity formations of its constituents. The prevalence of everyday tasks and rituals of the citizens of El Cartucho in the performance installations developed by Mapa Teatro with the barrio’s residents illuminates the ways in which the artists imagine social space. Abderhalden has written that demolishing El Cartucho, “…had put an end to a part of our history, of our social and urban history that is, definitively, a history of ways of doing [modos de hacer]9, of unknown social practices, of irreplaceable histories of life, of unequaled histories of survival”10 (92-3, emphasis in orig.). Abderhalden touches on the notion that spaces are haunted by more than just the events and people that have visited them. They are haunted, too, by the patterns of behavior uniquely situated in each place, the modos de hacer, as Abderhalden calls them, that evolve over time and within a specific social space, which he refers to as a singularity: “The end of the history of a local singularity that turned into, in disappearing, a non-place, homogenous and global”11 (93, emphasis in orig.). El Cartucho’s “singularity” derived from its history as one of 38

Bogotá’s oldest neighborhoods, dating back to the earliest days of colonial development. The history of the neighborhood was, in many ways, a history of Bogotá (Morris and Garzón): from its origins as a trading-post at the confluence of two rivers, to its heights as an elite neighborhood and gateway to the capital city; from the destruction and terror that marked the Bogotazo, through the flight of wealthy citizens to safer neighborhoods to the north, to the stigmatization that eventually labelled El Cartucho Bogotá’s “center of fear.” This singularly unique site, with its deep social and architectural history, has been replaced by its opposite, what Augé calls a non-place, devoid of local social history, one of the key elements of cultural citizenship.

Mockus has also argued that the modos de hacer of El Cartucho constituted an irreplaceable element of the city’s cultural history. In his essay, “Ante la demanda…,” he argues,

“Public space is cement and design, but it is also the scene of codification and implantation of shared repertoires of conduct”12 (26). Both Mockus and Abderhalden emphasize the importance of modos de hacer, or “shared repertoires of conduct.” For Abderhalden modos de hacer constitute a kind of history of life, an irreplaceable history that is specifically localized in social space. For Mockus, “shared repertoires of behavior” become a key to the establishment and regulation of public moral comportment. Mockus observes that “In general, natives and visitors alike will have more direct experience of moral regulation and social regulation than they will have of legal regulations”13 (26). If public moral comportment more directly influences the behavior of individuals than does the law, efforts to alter the moral comportment of citizens through public citizenship performances may very well be more effective than legislation with the same objective.

If cultural citizenship and political citizenship are, as political theorist Engin F. Isin and geographer Patricia K. Wood suggest, relational and mutually constitutive, it follows that the granting of legal rights (and human rights) is directly related to which groups of people are perceived to fully belong to a cultural community or nation-state. That is to say, groups on the margins of society, those that are perceived as non-members of society, those that are perceived to contribute less than a full share, those that speak other languages, or have different histories, different religions, different clothes, different skin, are frequently denied the human and legal rights granted to those who meet normative perceptions of citizenship. Thus, expanding perceived cultural boundaries to include new communities helps guarantee the rights and responsibilities of those communities. If legal citizenship is constructed from perceived cultural citizenship, then performances that challenge and realign the boundaries of cultural citizenship also challenge injustices in political and social formations of citizenship. It follows then that there are two avenues by which the cultural and political citizenship of a community might be challenged. First, new groups of people may be incorporated into a cultural community by making their bodies visible, by acknowledging their voices and histories, as in the series of performances and installations created by Mapa Teatro on El Cartucho. Second, the rights and responsibilities of citizens may be augmented, altered, or destabilized, as was the intent behind

Mockus’s Citizenship Culture. These two projects enable us to consider how performances in public social spaces open opportunities to engage with audiences as citizens, as political bodies- in-space, extending the experience of the performance beyond an act of reception to a constitutive experience of communal identity reformation. Citizenship performances in public

social spaces might ask: “Who are we?” or “How do we behave collectively?” They demand that spectators reencounter social space in new ways, renegotiating how those spaces are formed, socially, and in turn, refocusing how social spaces construct community and citizenship.

The historical discourse on cultural citizenship has somewhat obscured the social space in which, and with which, citizenship is constructed. This logic derives from a discourse that has predominantly linked citizenship to a nation or state, and it follows that since the spatial boundaries of legal citizenship are defined by formal state boundaries already present on the map, the relationship between citizenship and public space is occasionally overlooked or underplayed.14 While Mockus’s cultural politics challenge the expected behavior (the rights and responsibilities) of the citizens of Bogotá by modelling or enabling positive alternative moral behaviors on the streets of the city, Mapa Teatro’s work with El Cartucho re-centers the community by re-placing fragments of their lives and homes on the rubble of the former barrio, thereby reasserting the cultural membership of a stigmatized community. Thus, both Mockus and

Mapa Teatro engaged cultural citizenship spatially, broadening membership and realigning the rights and responsibilities of those who belong. They demonstrate that performances in public space can resituate cultural citizenship – can alter what it means to belong to a community, who belongs to the community, and how individuals in the community behave collectively.

El Cartucho

Stanislas Guigui’s photo essay Calle del Cartucho offers a compelling counterpoint to

Mapa Teatro’s performances and installations. Mapa Teatro’s works document the everyday rituals and struggles to survive within a highly dangerous barrio, but the danger itself is missing: 41

there are no machetes and no chains, no assault rifles, knife fights, drug dens, homeless addicts, or quarrels with the police, while these are the very elements that Guigui’s photographs capture.

His work offers a glimpse of the drug addicts, the mounds of trash and recycled materials, and the muddy denizens who walk the street or huddle together under blankets offering toothless smiles to the camera. In the few photos that don’t capture an act of violence or drug use, Guigui instills a deep sense of poverty, broken lives and broken streets, desperation, isolation, despair.

El Cartucho has a long and complicated history in Bogotá. Located very near to the historic center of the city, it had been, up until the middle of the twentieth century, a relatively affluent residential neighborhood, known for the architecture of Colombia’s republican period.

The large houses, most of which were constructed between 1830 and 1920, differed from

Spanish colonial architecture in the influence of English, French, and Italian styles, as well as in the development of new building materials and construction techniques.15 El Cartucho was once home to the largest church in Bogotá, the Iglesia de Santa Inés, demolished in February of 1957 for the construction of 10th Avenue (Morris and Garzón 36). The demolition of one of Bogotá’s religious sites for the sake of economic development heralded the long deterioration of the barrio and was concurrent with the foundation of the informal recycling economy. The demolition of the church also foreshadowed the Enrique Peñalosa project that would demolish the entire neighborhood.

El Cartucho had been a central location for the collection of trash and recyclable materials since the nineteenth century (Alcaldia Mayor de Bogotá “El Cartucho” 30). The confluence of the San Francisco and San Agustín rivers made it a centralized location, ideal for

the transportation of goods by water, which attracted a large number of street vendors selling their wares fresh from the rivers at outdoor markets. By the end of the nineteenth century, Santa

Inés had developed into a port of entry to the broader city, providing services and provisions to travelers and immigrants arriving by road, boat, and especially by train after the construction of the nearby Station of the Savannah (Estación de la Sabana) in 1887 (Alcaldia Mayor de Bogotá

30).

The recycling economy sprang to life in the 1950s, during the decade known to

Colombians simply as The Violence (La Violencia), when thousands of internally displaced persons migrated away from their family lands to the cities in search of safety and new livelihoods. The displacement may have also been influenced by agrarian reforms that led to the consolidation of lands in the hands of wealthy owners, leaving many farmers and laborers without sufficient lands of their own. When they arrived in the country’s larger cities, they brought with them few marketable skills, and many were illiterate. Settling at first in the outskirts of the cities, and sometimes in the garbage dumps thereabouts, the collection and redistribution of recyclable materials was an obvious evolution. The Alcaldia Mayor de Bogotá’s

El Cartucho: Del Barrio Santa Inés al Callejón de la muerte recalls the period following the assassination of Liberal Party leader and presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on 9 April

1948:

Those of us who lived in Santa Inés saw how people arrived from different parts,

and we named them according to their accents: calentanos [from the hotter

climate areas in Colombia’s interior], costeños [from the coast], or paisas [from

the vicinity of Medellín]. The poor folk resented this, they said that Bogotá was

like a frozen wasteland. Perhaps because of this it would be calm, tranquil, serene,

as if an unseen terror obliged them to maintain the calm and cool heads that were

not present on the 9th of April. Even so, floating in the air was that stench of

intoxication of aguardiente [Colombia’s fiery liquor], blood, sorrow, treacheries,

deaths, and desolation. (33)16

Following the assassination of Gaitán and the decade known as La Violencia, the wealthy elite of Bogotá fled the city center to newer developments in the northern part of the city. In

February of 1957 the Church of Santa Inés (Iglesia de Santa Inés), at the time the largest church in Bogotá, was destroyed to make way for the construction of 10th Avenue (Avenida 10). Morris and Garzón argue that this event marked the beginning of the deterioration of the barrio. Perhaps more accurately, the destruction of the church was a major event amidst a long trajectory of degradation. Nevertheless, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the influx of persons displaced by violence, economics, and political corruption continued. As the guerrilla war in Colombia shifted in response to the rise of drug cartels in the late 1970s, local cartels began to exert a growing dominance, particularly in El Cartucho.

By the early 1990s, El Cartucho had become known for inexpensive marijuana and basuco, a coca paste with potency similar to crack cocaine popular in Colombia. Four local gangs dominated the drug trade and had established almost complete control over the barrio.

Named for various regions of the country, Los Paisas, Los Boyacos, Los Llaneros, and Los

Santandereanos had direct ties to Colombia’s major cartels. The gangs fought amongst

themselves but collectively worked to keep the police at bay. Violence was so frequent that

Carrera 12A became known as the Little Street of Death (Callejón de la muerte). Bribery and corruption among the local police and judiciary rendered the authorities toothless, and the stigmatization of El Cartucho as a wasteland of addicts and gangsters began to take root. and the cartels running El Cartucho were left to police themselves (Alcaldia Mayor de Bogotá). This reflects the deep division between the police and city authorities on the one hand, and the lives of traumatized and stigmatized community – a division between the law, culture, and morality that

Mockus’s administration was attempting to address. As a community deemed too dangerous to enter, the residents were denied the right to security that a police presence provides, underscoring the relationship between membership in the cultural community and the rights afforded to members of a community. The authorities and media demonized the neighborhood, finding in it a center of fear. The excision of that locality from the map of Bogotá follows from a neoliberal project of beautification and improvement. When El Cartucho became too dangerous, when the barricades were erected, the total elimination of the space itself became necessary. A significant portion of the economic activity within the barrio was rebusque, the black market, outside of the neoliberal capitalist system the country has sought to establish.

Once a slum characterized by drug dens, dealers, addicts, and prostitutes, and reeling from the stench of mounds of refuse, this stigmatized neighborhood was bulldozed beginning in

1998 in the name of gentrification by Peñalosa’s mayoral administration. Peñalosa made his name by improving the infrastructure of Bogotá and beautifying the city’s blighted sites. El

Cartucho was replaced by a large park with numerous playgrounds, public amphitheaters,

walking paths, and open grass fields. The Third Millennium Park was completed in 2003.

Residents of the neighborhood were given some relocation assistance by the city, but this assistance largely ignored the fact that the residents’ livelihoods were destroyed just as their homes were. The streets of El Cartucho had been home to an informal recycling economy, bolstered by the neighborhood’s proximity to the central bus terminal for the city’s mass transit system, TransMilenio, another of Peñalosa’s projects. The removal of the residents of El

Cartucho from the center of the city, then, also made access to the city’s transportation network more difficult, and those whose livelihoods depended on the recycling economy were now forced to adapt.

The demolition of El Cartucho and the displacement of the barrio’s residents failed to counter the underlying social ills that led to El Cartucho’s stigmatization. The neighborhood’s status as Bogotá’s center of fear grew out of its centralized location near a transportation hub, newly arrived internally displaced persons’ need for a means to make a living in the capital city, and the demand for drugs and prostitution. None of these conditions were ameliorated when the bulldozers and excavators leveled the barrio. Nor were they counteracted when the grass was planted and the playgrounds were built for the Third Millennium Park. El Cartucho’s status as the center of fear was, in a way, a myth: El Cartucho became a symbol of addiction and the drug cartels that ran large swaths of the country. Destroying the signifier, however, utterly failed to destroy the signified. It destroyed instead, a singular place within the cultural history of Bogotá, displacing thousands of residents, many of whom were among the most impoverished in the city.

It was the story of these residents that Mapa Teatro set out to explore in 2001.

Mapa Teatro and Project Prometheus

The two performances of Prometheus, conceived and directed by Heidi and Rolf

Abderhalden and staged one year apart, were developed following a year-long workshop with a group of fifteen of the last remaining residents of El Cartucho as the demolition was ongoing.

Those residents were Luis Carlos Arango, Claudia Carpintero, Daniel Carpintero, Jhornel

Carpintero, Jairo Cárdenas, Carlos Carrillo, Jorge Gaitán, Giovanni García, Edison López, Hilda

López, Ángela Moreno, Margarita Palacio, Luis Ernesto Pardo, Camilo Rengifo, and Sandra

Tangarife (mapateatro.org). Students from the Superior Academy of Arts of Bogotá (Academia

Superior de Artes de Bogotá) also participated in the workshop and performance, including

Ulises Becerra, Adriana Caballero, Hugo Caicedo, Zorayda Chala, Ayrin Gambin, Javier

Garzón, Ángela Montaña, Judith Pérez, Jair Ramírez, Martha Isabel Rival, Claudia Torres,

Miguel Ángel Torres, and Rafael Zea (mapateatro.org). A bank of bleacher seating was erected for the audience to look out over the rubble of El Cartucho. Hundreds of lanterns were placed so as to mark locations of the streets and buildings that had so recently been demolished. Two large projection screens were erected. A combination of documentary footage of the demolition process, images of the daily life of the residents of El Cartucho, footage from the workshop with the fifteen residents, as well as close-up live-feed video of the performance itself was edited together non-chronologically and projected during the performance. Each of the fifteen residents chose a fragment of Müller’s text on the Prometheus myth, and recited or responded to the text in his or her own fashion.

Working with the artists of Mapa Teatro over the course of a year, the residents of El

Cartucho developed Project Prometheus in response to Heiner Müller’s short text on the

Prometheus myth.17 In Müller’s version of the story, a short, three-page excerpt from Müller’s longer play, Cement (1972), the titan Prometheus is caught giving fire to humans. As punishment, Prometheus is chained to a cliff in the Caucasus Mountains, his liver regenerating every day after being eaten by a dog-headed eagle. Prometheus survives for three thousand years by consuming the eagle’s feces for nourishment, after which time the gods take pity on him and send Heracles (Romanized as Hercules) to release him. When Heracles arrives, he has to surmount a titanic mound of excrement, an excruciating task that takes another three thousand years due to the stench. At long last, Prometheus tries to refuse Heracles’ assistance, accustomed as he is to living in and feeding off of the refuse. In Rolf Abderhalden’s estimation, Prometheus is in a paradoxical situation, one which rejects any univocal interpretation, it is “a species of paradoxical tension, a contradiction that prevents the fable from being interpreted in any definitive or univocal manner” (95).18 As such, Müller’s telling of the Prometheus myth stands as a provocative parallel to the lives of El Cartucho’s residents, who resided in a barrio which was both extraordinarily dangerous yet also a refuge.

Mapa Teatro allowed the residents to respond to Müller’s text and to their experience in the barrio in whichever way they saw fit. The Prometheus myth acted as a sounding board, conduit, and catalyst for their personal histories. According to Abderhalden, the myth functioned as a ready-made, “an encountered object that is taken out of its context in order to be interpreted and re-signified by a multiplicity of readings, looks, and gestures” (96).19 The workshop

culminated in the two live performances of Project Prometheus. The first performances,

Prometheus: First Act and Prometheus: Second Act, were conceived and developed as a way to give a voice to the displaced residents of El Cartucho and shed light on their histories – histories which did not align with the stigmatized mythology the barrio.

Figure 1. Prometeo. Photo courtesy of Mapa Teatro - archivo vivo.

These performances re-situated a marginalized community at the center of Bogotá, and reconstructed the lives and memories of the residents of the neighborhood, even as their homes and businesses were being deconstructed by the state in the name of urban renewal. For the first performance on 15 December 2002, some of the buildings of El Cartucho still stood, while for the second performance, on 15 December 2003, staged after demolition was finished, the barrio was a complete ruin. The residents’ demolished homes were reimagined in each performance as the former locations of the streets and buildings of El Cartucho were re-mapped with thousands

of candles set out on the ruins. Each of the residents brought to the performance pieces of furniture from one of their favorite rooms in their demolished homes. These living spaces were then recreated and resituated in the performance – the residents’ own furniture, their chairs, cabinets, tables, and beds replaced in the same space they had once occupied, resting on the stones that had once given them shelter, engaging and communicating with their own ghosts, intentionally blurring the art/life and subject/object binaries. These partially reconstructed living spaces became the sites of performance for the former residents, each of whom presented his or her own interpretation of a fragment of Müller’s Prometheus. Some of the residents chose to speak the text while performing their former daily tasks in the kitchen or living room. Others commented on the story or interpreted their own lives through Prometheus’s struggle and

Heracles’s attempts to rescue him. Ten-year-old Hilda Zorayda López chose to perform her piece with a bed, stepping up on it and hopping off, surmounting her own imagined obstacle as she described the fear of beds she had harbored when she first arrived in El Cartucho as a young girl

– until then she had never slept in one before. In each case, the rituals of everyday life were emphasized, underscoring the value of the routines and repertoires of behavior lost.

The lives revealed in the performances were not the extraordinary, but rather the wonderfully ordinary – the unique daily routines, desires, and fears of a cross-section of

Colombian individuals. Notably missing from the performance were the mythologized characters of El Cartucho: there were no drug dealers, addicts, or prostitutes. The performances did not deny the dangers of the barrio, rather they revealed representatives of a silenced community whose quotidian rituals cry out against the stigmatized image of El Cartucho as Bogotá’s center

of fear. Prometheus gave a voice to those who had found refuge and relief in a perilous place.

The stigma of danger cloaking El Cartucho had obscured the travails of those who had nowhere else to go. In opposition to this stigmatization, Prometheus rebuilt the histories of ways of doing, asserting the cultural citizenship of a marginalized community – a community literally removed from the center of the city, thereby repositioning citizenship within the urban landscape.

Prometheus brought artistic scrutiny to the marginalized status of citizens displaced by violence, acknowledging their history as Bogotá’s history – as Bogotano history.

El Cartucho exemplifies a neighborhood whose place in the social imaginary is less dependent on the architecture of the buildings or the history of specific events that have taken place within its boundaries, as it was on stigmatized repertoires of behavior that evolved over time. Thus, understanding how the audience may have interpreted the performances of

Prometheus requires knowledge of the conflict between the stigmatized mythology that El

Cartucho was a dangerous barrio full of gangs and drug addicts, and the space as it was lived by the majority of its residents. Prometheus recreated the living spaces of some of the residents – a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room – as if to say, these were regular people, they lived their lives in the best way that they could. There were poor, many internally displaced, and this neighborhood offered shelter, a means for survival in Bogotá’s social landscape. The destruction of the neighborhood was the elimination of lived spaces, with complex social history, whose evolution has been ongoing since the first houses were built. Prometheus did not just commemorate the loss of a space, it confronted the neoliberal spatial imaginary of the city that viewed the neighborhood as a blighted space in need of improvement.

By employing in the performances actual residents of El Cartucho, by offering the residents a way to re-live the space, Prometheus opened to the audience a window into the human condition of the space. Ileana Diéguez Caballero writes in Liminal Scenarios:

Theatricalities, Performances and Politics, 20 “Through the tension between mythical universes, real and aesthetic experiences, this performance generated a utopian anti-structure in the heart of the city”21 (156). She examines transdisciplinary artworks as intersections open to multiple trajectories. Not only did Prometheus reveal unexpected lives, it was itself performed in an unexpected form that privileged the non-artists, allowing the residents to write and perform their own histories, albeit under the guiding hand of Mapa Teatro. In her book on photography of the city of Bogotá, art critic Natalia Gutiérrez examines those photographers who, in her view, capture with their photography the forms and relations that shape the city (11). She suggests these works of art capture, “a city created of common places, no-man’s lands, and paradoxically, places where unconfessable desires are fulfilled and one comes to know unrecognizable aspects of oneself”22 (12). Gutiérrez’s notion of the city-mirror23 – an image of the city that reflects more than the physical spaces depicted – is closely related to Foucault’s heterotopias, which he develops in his essay “Different Spaces.” Heterotopias are simultaneously real and imagined; specifically localizable objects or places that also conjure imagined objects or places. The mirror is Foucault’s primary example of a heterotopia – an object that has an actual physical presence, but which also contains a “contested, represented, and reversed” presence (178). The face in the mirror is not actually there, on the surface of the mirror, nor is it an accurate representation of the face it reflects – it is, in fact, reversed. Like Gutiérrez’s mirrors and Foucault’s heterotopias,

Prometheus reflected more than was on the surface: a representation that was reversed, a mythology founded on a fact which had outgrown the truth, a spatial imaginary that had proven inadequate through the no-longer quiet voices of those that had been pushed aside.

The spatial imaginary that led to the eviction of El Cartucho’s residents did not seek to provide new opportunities for those residents, although they were given a modicum of social assistance. Instead, the goal seems to have been to eliminate criminal activities by erasing the social spaces in which those criminal activities took place, all in the name of gentrification and creating a new green space for the city. This conception of the neighborhood conflated the illegal activities of a few with the peaceful activities of the poor. As the performances of Prometheus attest, El Cartucho was home to more than drug dealers and thugs. There was an expectation on the part of the authorities that once El Cartucho was demolished there would emerge from the ruins about three-hundred drug-addicts who would have nowhere else to go. The houses full of addicts would no longer exist, and the addicts, the mummies as they were called, would need to be dealt with by the authorities. There were no mummies. They were young and old, having travelled to El Cartucho from a variety of different locations throughout Colombia, and with a variety of cultural backgrounds. One of the few things they had in common was a need for a place within society, and El Cartucho had been supplying that need. However full of crime, many of the residents were still peaceful, no matter how hopeless the site may have at that time appeared to be.

Even though the two performances of Project Prometheus included actual residents, their voices and stories were mediated by the workshop process shaped by the artists at Mapa Teatro.

Moreover, many of the interviews Mapa Teatro conducted with the residents were video recorded and projected during the performance. The curation of these video projections – the selection and editing process – further mediates the story of the residents’ lives. Within the performances of Project Prometheus, the projections humanize the desechables, the disposable people whose homes and livelihoods had been erased, but while the humanization of a marginalized community might be applauded, mediated humanization risks a homogenizing effect – to an extent, the work of Mapa Teatro has cleaned the neighborhood of both the mounds of refuse for which El Cartucho had come to be known, as well as of its criminal element. Not one of the residents included in the workshop or performances was an acknowledged criminal; there were no dealers, addicts, or prostitutes among the participants, and while several of them recount in the performances and interviews some of the hardships endured by living in the crime- ridden neighborhood, the criminals themselves have no presence in the performance. There is an aesthetic distance palpable in the performance: a distance generated by fragmented memory, mediation, and physical location, a distance and fragmentation that has continued to increase as time has passed and as the projects of Mapa Teatro have moved away from the original site of El

Cartucho to their headquarters on Seventh Avenue (Carrera Séptima), to MAMBO, and eventually around the globe.

Run-Throughs and The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas

The fragmentation and distancing that developed in Mapa Teatro’s work is clearly evident in Run-Throughs, which ran concurrently with Prometheus: Second Act and was the first of two multi-media installations created by Mapa Teatro out of the archive they generated in El 54

Cartucho. Run-Throughs was an interactive installation located at Mapa Teatro’s headquarters on the pedestrian-only section of Seventh Avenue between 23rd and 24th Streets. The installation was open to the public free of admission day and night, and an estimated six-thousand people visited. Video projections of the destruction of El Cartucho – the same archive of video used in the Prometheus performances – were projected in the courtyard of Mapa Teatro’s Republican- style casa. Stones, doors, walls, and windows recovered from the rubble of El Cartucho were arranged around the sides of the courtyard and throughout the installation. Each of the rooms of the casa had themed installations of materials recycled from the destroyed barrio. In one room there was a scale on which visitors could weigh themselves, not to ascertain their weight in kilograms, but rather to ascertain the monetary value of their weight in recycled materials. In another room hundreds of empty bottles collected from the ruins were displayed. Yet another room contained various radios found among the heaps of debris, each radio playing recorded interviews with a particular family. Small cracks and holes had been created in the walls between the rooms, “scars” as Abderhalden has referred to them (Figure 2). For Abderhalden, these

“scars” represented the histories of violence of the former neighborhood: “The histories of scars of El Cartucho, of the people of El Cartucho. All the fights, all the disputes, all the conflicts which at the end finished with a scar on the body. So it was about the skin, about the traces on the body of the history of El Cartucho” (“Truth is Concrete”). Many of the buildings in El

Cartucho bore the scars as well – holes in the interior and exterior walls – through which denizens might peek or eavesdrop.

Figure 2. Visitors exploring the scars in the walls during Re-corridos. Photo courtesy of

Mapa Teatro - archivo vivo.

Run-Throughs asserted the vital history of the recycling economy as it had evolved in El

Cartucho – a history obscured by the neoliberal spatial imaginary that fails to value the modos de hacer that evolved in the neighborhood and that enabled El Cartucho to serve as a refuge for the displaced persons of Colombia. There is an explicit link here between the histories of modos de hacer – the histories of recycling and of scars – and the collective memory of the space. These histories of modos de hacer were not a part of the neighborhood as it had been imagined by the rest of Bogotá’s citizens. Rather, these histories of modos de hacer were only a part of the neighborhood as it had been lived by the barrio’s residents. The interactive Run-Throughs also transported El Cartucho from its original location at Bogotá’s center of fear to a popular destination for citizens and tourists alike. The installation made the histories of El Cartucho’s residents immediately accessible to Bogotá’s community at large. While Prometheus reconstructed histories on the rubble of El Cartucho, Run-Throughs exposed those histories to new audiences outside of the original boundaries of the barrio. Run-Throughs invited a broad swathe of Bogotá’s population to experience the histories of El Cartucho. The sights, sounds, and smells of the barrio present in the installation continued the project of de-centering the myth of El

Cartucho, giving voice to the histories of the residents and their daily rituals. While these histories were evoked in Run-Throughs, the installation took place far outside of the demolished barrio, a gap that was bridged in part by the next installation produced by Mapa Teatro.

A year after Run-Throughs, Mapa Teatro developed a second multi-media installation,

The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas (La limpieza de los establos de Augías, 2004). This installation was developed in two parts: in the first, visitors to MAMBO viewed live-feed

projections of the ongoing construction on the Third Millennium Park, while for the second part, video monitors were installed along the construction fence surrounding the future park that played looped footage from the deconstruction of El Cartucho. According to Bulfinch’s

Mythology, Heracles was given a series of ten tasks to accomplish by his cousin, King

Eurystheus, the fifth of which was to clean the Augean stables in a single day. The stables housed one thousand cattle and hadn’t been cleaned in thirty years, resulting in a quantity of dung nearly impossible to clean. Heracles accomplished the task by diverting the Alpheus and

Peneus rivers (Bulfinch 139). The title of Mapa Teatro’s piece re-invokes the character of

Heracles, arguably one of Greek mythology’s greatest heroes, just as it continues to evoke imagery enormous quantities of filth and the apparently impossible struggle to remove it.

Construction of the Third Millennium Park had begun and a barrier had been raised so that passersby were unable to view the progress. Despite a lack of support from the city, Mapa Teatro installed video cameras around and above the fence to broadcast the ongoing work in real time to

MAMBO, while a series of video monitors were installed on the fence itself that played footage of the demolition of El Cartucho. The two halves of the installation invited those pedestrians around the former barrio to come to the museum to see the ongoing construction that was obscured by the fence (Figure 3). Similarly, those visitors to the museum were compelled to travel to the site of El Cartucho/ Third Millennium Park. In this way The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas inscribed a new pathway for the citizens of Bogotá, and many of the visitors to the museum travelled to El Cartucho for the first time, while some of the residents around the ruined neighborhood made their first journey to the MAMBO.

Figure 3. La limpieza de los establos de Augías. Photo courtesty of Mapa Teatro - archivo

vivo.

Each of these performance installations juxtapose fragments of the physical neighborhood El Cartucho with the neighborhood as it is/was lived and imagined. The audience- as-citizens encounter with El Cartucho is actual, virtual, and mediated all at once. Moreover, each of the install-actions required the citizens-as-audience to experience the imagined space through quotidian behavior: in Project Prometheus they walked on the rubble of the streets, experiencing the performed histories of the residents among imagined, no-longer-present 59

buildings; in Run-Throughs they passed through the actual façade of one of the buildings in order to encounter documentary fragments of the resident’s lives; in The Cleaning of the Stables of

Augias spectators traveled between two physical locations to experience the past in-situ and the present from a mediated distance; in Witness to the Ruins, the life and daily routine of one resident is foregrounded and privileged over the documentary history of the space.

Each of these installations was progressively more distant and more mediated from the original location of the barrio. Run-Throughs and The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas involved both fragmented physical links to El Cartucho as well as installations in locations elsewhere in Bogotá, and neither directly involved the former residents of the neighborhood. The last piece in the series, Witness to the Ruins, summarizes the work Mapa Teatro did with the El

Cartucho residents. This performance travels internationally, further distancing the work from its original location, and only occasionally incorporates one of the original residents, the last resident to leave her home in El Cartucho, Juana Ramírez. Thus, the series followed a trajectory of increasing mediation, fragmentation, and physical distance from the neighborhood it seeks to memorialize, much like memory itself.

Witness to the Ruins

Witness to the Ruins has been performed in two variations. The first, a combination of multimedia and live performance with four moving projection screens, has been presented on nineteen separate occasions between 2005 and 2014. The premier was a co-production between

Mapa Teatro, the Wiener Festwochen, and the Zürcher Theaterspektakel, which opened at the

Forum in Vienna in May of 2005. It continued on a short European tour to the Festival Four by 60

Tour Days in Motion in Prague, also in May, and then on to the Hebbel Theater in June of 2005, and completed the tour with a presentation in Zurich that August. Witness to the Ruins had its

Colombian premier in March of 2006 during the tenth Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de

Bogotá. The next two performances both took place at the National University of Colombia’s

León de Greiff Auditorium in Bogotá, once in November of 2006 and again in April of 2007.

Witness to the Ruins continued to be performed at festivals and symposia for the next seven years. It was staged at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ Encuentro in

August of 2007; at the Festival Escena Contemporánea in Madrid in January, 2008; and at the fourteenth Festival de México en el Centro Histórico in April, 2008; before returning in

September, 2008 to Colombia for the Festival de Teatro de Manizales. It has been produced on three occasions in Brazil, twice in São Paulo in October, 2008 and April, 2011, and once in

Salvador de Bahía in September, 2012 for the Festival Latinoamericano de Teatro de Bahía.

Finally, Witness to the Ruins was produced at the “To Think of Cali” (“Pensar a Cali”) symposium in Santiago de Cali, Colombia in November, 2008, at “No Boundaries: A series of global performances” at Yale Repertory Theater in March, 2009, at the fifteenth Festival

Internacional De Artes Escénicas in Guayaquil, Ecuador in August 2012, and at “Rutas

Panamericanas” in Toronto, Canada in February 2014 (mapateatro.org).

Figure 4. Testigo a las ruinas. Photo courtesy of Mapa Teatro - archivo vivo.

The performance begins with an introduction by Rolf Abderhalden. The text of this introduction has been published in Spanish as “Artista como testigo,” and in English as “The

Artist as Witness.” After the brief introduction, documentary footage is projected with portable projectors on four movable screens of the destruction of the barrio, interviews and stories of the fifteen resident-participants, and fragments of the performances of Prometheus, Run-Throughs, and The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas. A small crew of performers move the screens and projectors at various points throughout the performance. Here and there, the performers hold up white sheets that become improvised screens, at one point wrapping themselves in the sheets and standing or sitting in front of the movable screens – their bodies in that moment become the projection surfaces. In this moment the performers take upon themselves the mediated histories 62

of the marginalized and erased community. The story of El Cartucho becomes their story; it is an aesthetic assertion that the story of the residents of El Cartucho is the story of the artists themselves. The very last resident of El Cartucho, Ramírez, accompanies the performance by setting up a small makeshift cart, downstage of the screens or off to one side depending on the venue, and making arepas and hot chocolate, exactly as she once did on the streets of El

Cartucho. According to Abderhalden, Ramírez never imagined that she would be able to make her arepas and hot chocolate outside of the barrio that had once been her home. The presence of

Ramírez on the stage and the quotidian occupation of making two quintessential Colombian foods asserts the value of everyday behaviors – of modos de hacer – within the performance. By traveling internationally, and especially through the presence of Ramírez, Witness to the Ruins has brought international attention to an erased community. The traveling performance continues to assert the cultural citizenship of the community – a community no longer delimited by the boundaries of a four-hundred meter by four-hundred meter neighborhood, but now within the global community of artists, performers, scholars and citizens.

The second variation of Witness to the Ruins, sometimes billed as a “lecture- performance,” and often featuring Mockus as a guest, includes the same video elements as the original production, projected on a single split-screen. In this variation, Rolf Abderhalden and

Antanas Mockus sit to the side or behind the projection screen and engage in an unscripted and informal discussion and narration of the video. This variation was first produced for the “Injured

Cities, Urban Afterlives” symposium at Columbia University’s Miller Theater in October, 2011.

In 2012, it was presented at “Truth is Concrete” in Graz, Austria in September and again at “Six

Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art,” at San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art’s Phyllis Wattis Theater in December. The “lecture performance” version of Witness to the Ruins has also appeared at “Panorama Sur” in Buenos Aires in July, 2013, at the Teatro

Camilo Torres at the University of Antioquia (Universidad de Antioquia) in April, 2015, and most recently at the Lecture Performance Series at Shibaura House in Tokyo in February, 2016.

How are we to understand the performances and installations Mapa Teatro has created about El Cartucho? Only Witness to the Ruins continues to be performed. The installations were temporary and are no longer present to act as a commemoration, no longer acting in the present on the cultural citizenship of Bogotá. Can we think of Witness to the Ruins as a kind of permanent commemoration? Of what value is this commemoration if it is rarely performed, and often for academic communities, instead of being performed for the general public? Does the presence of video documentation of the performances count as a kind of lasting commemorative for those who stumble upon them in the virtual spaces of YouTube and Vimeo, or through websites like those of Mapa Teatro or the Hemispheric Institute? Does the assertion of the cultural citizenship of the residents of El Cartucho now expand out to an assertion of their citizenship, not within the cultural community of Bogotá, but the cultural community of the internet? The world? Repertoires of behavior are, in my estimation, essential pieces of cultural citizenship. But the question remains, to which community do they belong? Here I go back to embodied presence within a shared space, whether that is the shared urban space of a specific neighborhood, like El Cartucho, or whether it is the shared space of the internet, a globalized

culture insofar as it is accessible beyond the confines of actual physical space and branches out into virtual spaces.

In her essay, “Performing Ruins,” Diana Taylor considers the rhetoric of social cleansing that surrounded El Cartucho, and the devastating marginalization that occurs in response to that rhetoric. For Taylor, the barrio Santa Inés is a “renovation ruin” (13), a ruin that exists only in a trace of memory, rather than in an architectural artifact. Taylor points to the use of words like

“blighted” to describe neighborhoods that are simply impoverished. One of the many connotations of the Spanish word, “cartucho,” as in its English translation is “disposable.”

Cartridges are made to be used and disposed, just as the people of El Cartucho – and the barrio itself – had come to be understood. It had become commonplace to refer to the people of El

Cartucho as desechable, disposable: “…From the eighties they were pejoratively called

‘disposable’, and were related to the delinquency and filth of the cities” (Morris and Garzón

63).24 The work of Mapa Teatro, particularly the performance of Witness to the Ruins, counters this rhetoric of social cleansing, as Taylor puts it, by “presencing” (which she borrows from the

Spanish presenciar, “to make present”) the marginalized community. Witness to the Ruins goes beyond memory and witnessing by placing Juana Ramírez on stage. Citizenship performances like Witness to the Ruins broaden the cultural community through the act of making present those who have been marginalized, obscured, or erased.

Any attempt to understand the performances of Prometheus must take into account the social mythology of the space in which the performance took place, a mythology rooted in the patterns of social behavior. Public spaces are ghosted not only by events, but also by behavioral

histories that evolve over time. Patterns of behavior repeated within a given social space not only contribute to the construction of socialized space, but also the construction of cultural citizenship and social identity. These patterns of behavior constitute a code, one of the languages of membership within a community. Thus, communities informally establish citizenship through repertoires of behavior, through codes of conduct. The demolition of El Cartucho, and with it a history of modos de hacer, constitutes a partial erasure of the cultural citizenship of this community. Not only have their houses and businesses been destroyed, and their lives physically marginalized – shoved away from the center of power – but part of the very basis of their claim to cultural citizenship within Bogotá has been revoked through the obliteration of the socially constructed spaces that enabled their repertoires of behavior.

Mockus

Mockus attempted to renegotiate the cultural citizenship of Bogotá, and was the impetus behind Mapa Teatro’s work in El Cartucho. He was elected mayor of Bogotá at a time when the city was one of the most dangerous in the world. In response, Mockus implemented a series of projects known as Citizenship Culture over the course of his two mayoral administrations, each of which was designed to promote alternative public moral behaviors, and each of which was accompanied by the collection and analysis of empirical data for evaluation. Doris Sommer writes, “If civic spirit had worn so thin that it refused fiscal cures and security measures, the first prescription was to revive the spirit through art, antics, and accountability…. For Mockus civility was goal enough, and getting there became an experiment that mixed fun with function”

(“Useful” 1671). These programs incorporated elements of whimsy and promoted alternative 66

moral behavior either by modelling new alternative behaviors, such as when he dressed as

“Super Mockus” and went about the city picking up trash, or by symbolically eliminating old behaviors, such as when he “vaccinated” hundreds of schoolchildren against violence with symbolic vaccines in a public performance. Through these programs Mockus hoped to “confront the culture of the city, its languages, perceptions, customs, clichés and especially people’s excuses” (“Building ‘Citizenship Culture’” 144). Mockus’s public theatrical performances, many of which included costumes and props, arose out of the belief that the high rate of violent crimes in Bogotá in the 1980s and 90s were not just the product of drug cartels, but also a breakdown in the three systems that regulate public interactions: the law, morality, and culture. Mockus’s political performances intervened in the cultural citizenship of Bogotá by directly attempting to realign the expected moral comportment of the citizens. The performative interventions of

Citizenship Culture focused specifically on reconnecting a perceived rupture in what Mockus argues are the three regulatory systems of public moral behavior: the law, morality, and culture.

As he sees it, the perspectives of the political right and political left both have their drawbacks: the right predominantly addresses crime through increasing police resources, while the left more often addresses the needs of victims. Mockus claims:

Nevertheless, these perspectives don’t account for culture as one of the central

factors in problems of security. In consequence, some public politics end up

criminalizing and frightening the citizens as a possible source of danger, and

advocate for the necessity of intense police and judicial control of the population,

while others adopt a helping posture that assumes the citizens are victims in need

of help and in large part excludes the citizens’ agency25. (“Ante la demanda” 23).

Mockus’s prominence in Bogotá began with his appointment as Rector of Colombia’s

National University (Universidad Nacional de Colombia). He first joined the university as an

Assistant Instructor for the math department in 1975. He moved up the ranks of academia, earning a Master’s degree in Philosophy in 1988 and serving as Vice-Rector for the University until his appointment as Rector in 1990. During his tenure as Rector of the National University,

Mockus contributed to the creation of Colombia’s 1991 Constitution, which decentralized the government, reformed the legislative and judicial branches, and most controversially, banned extradition to foreign countries – a reform unequivocally institutionalized under pressure from the drug cartels and repealed under international pressure five years later, notably after the death of Pablo Escobar. As Rector, Mockus earned a reputation for unconventional tactics that bordered on the eccentric. The most notable example led to his resignation: faced with an unruly crowd of more than one thousand students in the university’s León de Greiff auditorium, Mockus got their attention: he dropped his trousers and mooned the crowd. The tactic worked. In one simple action, Mockus had defused a potentially volatile crowd, but the ensuing uproar at the university left him no recourse but to resign his office. Nonetheless, his reputation for bold and creative action in the face of difficult pressure led to a populist movement to elect Mockus as

Mayor of Bogotá. Mockus brought to his mayoral administration a determination to improve the city’s citizenship culture not only through new legislation, but also through a series of public

performances and programs designed to model and/or promote a public moral comportment more in line with the existing law.

Perhaps the most famous of Mockus’s Citizenship Culture programs involved what have come to be known as his traffic mimes. In 1997, he hired twenty mimes and directed them to publicly shame both the drivers who ignored basic traffic laws and pedestrians who failed to use cross-walks, and to applaud acts of kindness and goodwill – deliberately reinscribing a system of moral mutual interaction within the community (Dundjerovic and Bateman, 462). This program was so successful that the number of mimes was raised to 200 the next year. In another of the

Citizenship Culture programs, Mockus mailed thousands of large laminated “citizenship cards”

(“tarjetas ciudadanas”) to the citizens of Bogotá. On one side was a green thumbs up, and on the other a red thumbs down. The residents were encouraged to use these cards as a simple system by which to judge the behavior of their fellow citizens, modeling a new pattern of public moral expression to combat the disillusionment legible in the city’s residents after more than half a century of violent conflict (Dunjerovic and Bateman, 463). Many of the city’s drivers left the

“citizenship cards” permanently displayed in the windows of their cars, while other drivers abandoned the cards altogether, preferring instead to give the thumbs up or thumbs down sign manually.

In 1995, Mockus created one of the more controversial laws of his mayoral administrations. The so-called “Carrot Law” (“Ley zanahoria”) restricted the sale of alcohol after one o’clock in the morning, effectively enforcing the closure of bars and clubs at that hour.

Alcohol abuse was directly linked to a significant proportion of the violence and accidental

deaths in the city: high levels of alcohol were recorded in 49% of traffic related deaths, 33% of homicides with firearms, 49% of stabbing homicides, 35% of suicides, and 10% of other accidental deaths (Mockus Cultura 11). Public backlash from the law prompted Mockus’s second administration to revise the law so alcohol could be served until three o’clock in the morning. In response to a growing number of clubs violating the policy and a desire to develop the twenty-four-hour culture of the city, closing time was pushed back an additional two hours in

2014, to five o-clock in the morning. The reversal of the “Carrot Law” demonstrates that even as the Mockus administration sought to shift the citizenship culture of Bogotá toward ostensibly improved public moral comportment, there were limits to what the citizens were willing to tolerate.

Other actions of the Mockus administrations include: the creation and monthly publication of a Bulletin of Violence and Delinquency (Boletín de Violencia y Delincuencia); after five children were killed and one hundred twenty-seven were injured by fireworks on

Christmas in 1994 the use of fireworks was prohibited (“Cultura ciudadana” 12); carrying firearms was prohibited in 1997 and a voluntary disarmament program collected 2,538 firearms

(12); 4,750 police officers were enrolled in month-long courses at two private universities on mediation, conflict resolution, human rights, and police codes, among other topics (13); conferences were organized on reconciliation and peaceful conflict resolution; citizen- government relations were addressed by developing a more inclusive planning process with the participation of effected communities and more transparency in government procedure; finally, outdoor rock, jazz, and hip-hop festivals were organized, with 210,000 people showing up to see

eighty-two bands for “Rock at the Park” (“Rock al parque”) in 1997, and as many as 30,000 in attendance for “Jazz at the Park” (“Jazz al parque”) the same year, with hundreds of smaller concerts happening in all twenty of Bogotá’s localities. (18).

The success of Mockus’s Citizenship Culture was palpable: following the enactment of the “Carrot law,” in 1995 alone the number of homicides in which elevated levels of alcohol were involved was reduced by nearly 10% and the number of deaths by drunk drivers fell by more than 24% (“Cultura ciudadana” 11-12). The number of children injured by fireworks dropped from 127 in 1994 to forty-one in 1996, with zero deaths in that year (12). Additionally, according to María Victoria Llorente and Ángela Rivas, the homicide rate in the city fell from its peak of 80 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993 to 22 homicides per 100,000 in 2004 (5), a ten-year span that includes both of Mockus’s terms as mayor, while water usage was down by 40% and traffic fatalities were down by more than 50%. Although Citizenship Culture can by no means claim sole responsibility for the significant drop in violent crimes, it was certainly a contributing factor. For example, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the demobilization of the M-19 guerrilla group and its transformation into a political party (Alianza Democrática M-19, or AD/M-19) which finished third in the 1990 presidential election, as well as the ratification of a new

Constitution and other reforms on the international, national, and local levels.

Mockus occupies a paradoxical position in relation to El Cartucho and its demolition. He inherited the demolition project from Peñalosa when it was approximately 80% complete, and chose to complete it. Additionally, Peñalosa’s administration arranged for temporary relocation assistance for the residents of the neighborhood, which Mockus’s administration continued

without augmenting. Mockus may thus be implicated in the tragedy that unfolded. He was at least partly responsible for the destruction of the neighborhood, even as he was the impetus behind the commemorative project that would become Project Prometheus. This is not to argue that Mockus ought to have ceased the demolition. It is impossible to say how events may have unfolded, and there was certainly political pressure to complete Peñalosa’s work, especially as so much of Peñalosa’s work in Bogotá had come to be celebrated.

The central proposition of Citizenship Culture, that it is possible to directly intervene into the patterns of public moral behavior of a community by modeling positive alternative behaviors, parallels the recurring focus on the lives of ordinary citizens in the artistic practice of Mapa

Teatro.

Third Millennium Park as Non-Place

Abderhalden referred to the Third Millennium Park as a homogeneous and globalized

“non-place,” a sentiment that deploys French anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept. For Augé, non-places are those transitory sites that lack a unique social history. He argues, “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (63). Train stations, shopping malls, and hotels are examples of these non-places – locations that are duplicated around the globe, buildings that carry no locally-unique social history. The Third

Millennium Park, once one of Bogotá’s oldest historic neighborhoods, has become one such non- place whose history of human behaviors, of modos de hacer, has been wiped clean. The transformation of the historic El Cartucho into the non-place Third Millennium Park was one of 72

several projects initiated by Peñalosa, Bogotá’s mayor from 1998 to 2000. Peñalosa’s other projects included the city-wide network of busses, known as TransMilenio, as well as other parks, schools, local libraries, and urban renovation projects. Karen Till’s article, “’Greening’ the

City? Artistic Re-Visions of Sustainability in Bogotá” criticizes the rhetoric of “urban renewal, revitalization, gentrification, and most recently sustainability” (n.p.), under which Peñalosa has been praised for his accomplishments. For Till, this rhetoric “assumes problematic analogies between places and commodities, between cities and entrepreneurial firms” (n.p.). Till undermines this rhetoric by deconstructing what she calls the “spatial imaginaries” of the politicians and urban planners involved. The spatial imaginary of late capitalist neoliberalism conceives of social space through a logic predicated on economic development and land-use values, overlooking the value of human relations, human rights, and cultural history. The urban landscape is divided up into properties that can be evaluated as either good or bad based on property value and economic potential. Till examines Mapa Teatro’s work as an alternative spatial imaginary that can “remind us that places are lived, performed, and inhabited” and that these social spaces, “invite residents to explore the lingering and possible pathways of remnant landscapes, material objects, and forms of belonging” (n.p.). I suggest that modos de hacer are key to cultural citizenship and “forms of belonging.” To demolish a social space not only displaces human lives, it demolishes human trajectories, pathways of human social interaction; it is to demolish a fragment of what it means to belong to the surrounding community. The decision to gentrify El Cartucho into Third Millennium Park arose from a spatial imaginary that

ignored the social value of a lived, performed, and inhabited space in favor of the economic value gentrification would provide to other neighborhoods nearby.

Like Till, Doreen Massey has also sought to complicate the ways in which space is imagined. For Massey, all too often space is flattened out, conceived of simply as a map, an abstract surface: “So easily this way of imagining space can lead us to conceive of other places, peoples, cultures simply as phenomena ‘on’ this surface. It is not an innocent manoeuvre [sic], for by this means they are deprived of histories” (4). Massey argues that space has been reducible to time in the history of thought; space, she argues, is understood as a slice of time or equated with representation. Understanding space, as she says, as an “open ongoing production…. makes room for a genuine multiplicity of trajectories, and thus potentially of voices” (55). It is precisely this multiplicity of trajectories and voices that Mapa Teatro’s performance installations have revealed. El Cartucho was more than a center of fear in Bogotá. It was a refuge to internally displaced victims of the civil conflict, a home to some of the city’s poorest citizens, and a marketplace for the informal recycling economy. The Third Millennium

Park is none of these.

Peñalosa’s project to revitalize and gentrify the center of Bogotá by demolishing the city’s center of fear ultimately failed. The destruction of El Cartucho failed to address the poverty of the barrio’s citizens, failed to provide economic alternatives to the black-market recycling that found its home within the neighborhood, and failed to confront the rampant drug use and the syndicate of dealers that maintained a strong control of the barrio. The construction of the Third Millennium Park succeeded in displacing the citizens of El Cartucho, but it did not

succeed in addressing the material conditions that contributed to the stigmatization of the barrio.

That is to say, the demolition of the old neighborhood and renovation of the space into the Third

Millennium Park only served to temporarily displace the social and economic injustices that had become so visible within its boundaries. Lacking any political solutions, the material conditions which led to the slow decay of El Cartucho were bound to relocate. It came to pass that the center of fear of Bogotá, once situated in the barrio Santa Inés, resurrected itself in the barrio known as El Bronx, which borders the northwest corner of the Third Millennium Park.

Conclusion

Discourse on history, memory, and social identity in Latin American theatre has strongly favored the politics of performance and the body, and while social space certainly arises in these discussions, it seems to me that an integrated theory of social space and performance has yet to be articulated. What do we have to gain by reasserting (or reinserting) social space into the discourse of memory, history, and politics of Latin America? To what extent has discourse on material space – actual places – been superseded by discourse on idealized space, thereby privileging the abstract over the actual? The performances of Mapa Teatro and Antanas Mockus illuminate a deeper understanding of community formation – one that sees community as a heterogeneous population living within a shared and relational space – a notion of community that does not solve, avoid, or eclipse the problems posed by colonialism, neoliberalism, or globalization. Moreover, much of our discourse itself is constructed in spatialized language: we frequently read and discuss globalization, colonization, topographies, maps, frames, intersections, liminality, and marginalization. This rhetoric creates mental, abstract topographies, 75

rather than describing or attempting to understand the actual topography – the physical landscape itself, and especially the repertoires of behavior, the modos de hacer, the everyday habits of those who live, work, play, visit, or just pass through any given social space, and the ways in which these trajectories shape and are shaped by that space. Each and every one of these quotidian performances contributes to the construction of the social space, the ways in which a place is encountered and negotiated in practice shape the place, just as the place itself shapes and organizes those behaviors. That is to say that the modos de hacer visible on any one occasion are organized and shaped by the history of behaviors that have gone before in the same geographic place. Artistic and political performances and installations like those of Mapa Teatro and

Mockus’s Citizenship Culture suggest that quotidian patterns of behavior can be intentionally interrupted, or consciously maneuvered, and when these intentional interruptions are repeated on a large enough scale – depending on the community in question – they open the opportunity for re-alignment of the very repertoires in question through the body’s own instinctive or latent processes. Cultural citizenship within a community may therefore be intentionally altered, though perhaps not explicitly shaped, by performed interruptions given wide enough attention and/or repetition. Mockus and Mapa Teatro are clear examples of how engaging in public performances can, first, expand our notions of who belongs to a cultural community; second, change the ways in which a cultural community behaves, collectively; and third, encourage a community to more inclusively extend legal and human rights to the populace.

Through Mapa Teatro’s performances and installations, the lives of the residents of El

Cartucho counter-acted the stigmatized mythology of the barrio, re-centering a marginalized

community and reasserting their cultural citizenship. Unruh has observed that contemporary

Latin American artists, “link the urban-ruins trope to constructive, nonutopian imaginings of a less ruinous future and to creative engagements with the city landscape, however devastated, in search of something of value” (136). In the case of Mapa Teatro’s work in El Cartucho, I suggest that the value the artists seek is an acknowledgement that urban spaces, and especially neighborhoods, are always linked to human lives and human behavior. These performances and installations suggest that the patterns of behavior of the marginalized have value – a value unaccounted for by the neoliberal spatial imaginary. Unruh also notes that ruins are associated with what she calls, “the underbelly or dark side of Western modernity’s rationalist narratives of unfettered progress” (136). Indeed, Peñalosa’s work, including the demolition of El Cartucho and its transformation into a verdant park, has been widely hailed by economists and sociologists as a significant accomplishment in the transformation of the city into a safer, more modern global city. The transformation of El Cartucho can be read, however, not only as a transformation from a blighted neighborhood to a supposedly clean and safe park, but also as a transformation from a valuable cultural space, carrying within its walls and streets a history of the city and the people’s lives who had intersected with the topography, to a non-place, an ordinary replication of twenty-first century parks that might just have easily have existed in nearly any modern urban metropolis. Walking through the Third Millennium Park on an ordinary afternoon, I was struck by its disuse. Playgrounds are eerily quiet, fields are barren except for bits of refuse, and a plethora of permanent performance stages stand agape, silently singing of

empty concrete slabs, bringing into question any notion of progress that substitutes one kind of ruin for another.

3 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees website lists 6,044,151 displaced persons in Colombia for 2015. www.unhcr.org. Retrieved 12 Dec. 2015. 4 “era un sitio específico del miedo – el centro de temor – de la ciudad” 5 Basuco is an unrefined precursor to cocaine commonly found in Colombia. The paste is usually smoked and has a potency roughly equivalent to that of crack-cocaine. 6 “Es un mundo de miseria donde el cartón, el basuco y la marihuana lo son todo. Viven en carros de balineras o en la calle. Comen una mezcla de sobras que una mujer vende a 200 pesos a la que llaman combinado. Impera la ley del más fuerte.” 7 Antanas Mockus was mayor of Bogotá from 1 January 1995 to 10 April 1998 and again from 1 January 2001 to 31 December 2003. He resigned the office in 1998 in order to campaign, unsuccessfully, for the presidency. 8 “laboratorio de la imaginación social” 9 The Spanish phrase “modos de hacer,” which I translate here as “ways of doing,” has a broader meaning than any English translation would be capable of capturing. The verb hacer can mean either “to make” or “to do,” but is also employed in ways for which neither “to make” nor “to do” apply, i.e. “hacía mucho tiempo…,” which might translate as, “it has been a long time since…” Therefore, I use the Spanish phrase throughout to preserve the broader connotations of making, doing, and being that an English translation would truncate. 10 “…se ha puesto fin a una parte de nuestra historia, de nuestra historia social y urbana que es, en definitiva, una historia de modos de hacer, de prácticas sociales inéditas, de historias de vida irreemplazables, de inigualables historias de sobrevivencia” 11 “El fin de la historia de una singularidad local que deviene, al desaparecer, un no-lugar, homogéneo y global” 12 “El espacio público es cemento y diseño, pero es también escenario de codificación e implantación de repertorios de conductas compartidos.” 13 “Nativos y visitantes, por lo general, tienen más amplio contacto con la regulación moral y la regulación social que con las disposiciones legales.” 14 The field of cultural citizenship studies blossomed from T. H. Marshall’s 1964 essay “Citizenship and Social Class,” but has largely focused on the cultural citizenship of nation- states, thereby favoring national culture over the cultural heritage of regional communities, as well as those of indigenous and minority groups. 15 The National Capitol (Capitolio Nacional) is the largest and most famous example of Colombia’s republican architecture. 16 Los que vivíamos en Santa Inés veíamos cómo llegaba gente de otras partes y los llamábamos según su acento: calentanos, costeños o paisas. Los pobres se resentían, decían que Bogotá era como un páramo helado. Quizá por eso era apacible, tranquila, serena, como si un temor (terror) 78

recóndito la obligara a mantener la calma y la cabeza fría que no tuvo el 9 de abril. Todavía flotaba en el ambiente el tufo de aquella borrachera de aguardiente, sangre, dolor, traiciones, muertos y desolación. 17 Müller’s prose version of the Prometheus story is short fragment of his longer play, Cement (1975). 18 “una especie de tensión paradójica, una contradicción que hace que su fábula no puede concluir de manera definitiva y unívoca” 19 “un objeto encontrado que es sacado de su contexto para ser interpretado y re-significado por una multiplicidad de lecturas, de miradas, y de gestos” 20Escenarios liminales: Teatralidades, performances y política 21 “Atravesada por la tensión entre universos míticos, experiencias reales y estéticas, esta acción generaba una antiestructura utópica en el mismo corazón de la ciudad” 22 ” “una ciudad creadora de lugares comunes, territorios de nadie y, paradójicamente, lugares donde se cumplen algunos de los deseos inconfesables y se conocen aspectos desconocidos de la propia personalidad” 23 Ciudad-espejo 24 …Desde los ochenta era denominada peyorativamente como “desechable”, y se relacionaba con la delincuencia y la suciedad de las ciudades. 25 Sin embargo, estos enfoques no tienen en cuenta la cultura como uno de los factores centrales en los problemas de seguridad. En consecuencia, unas políticas públicas terminan criminalizando y temiendo a la ciudadanía como posible fuente de peligro, y abogan por la necesidad de un intenso control policiaco y judicial sobre la población, mientras que otras adoptan una postura asistencialista que asume a la ciudadanía como víctima necesitada de ayuda y excluyen en gran parte su agencia.

Chapter 3. DjLu and Urban Imaginaries: Performance in the Urban Public Sphere

Death of a Grafitero

In the evening of 19 August 2011, sixteen-year-old grafitero Diego Felipe Becerra was shot by patrolman Wilmer Alarcón at the intersection of Boyacá Avenue (Avenida Boyacá) and

116th Street (Calle 116) in Bogotá in the upper-middle class Niza Sur neighborhood near the exclusive and prestigious Club Los Lagartos in the northern part of the city. Becerra was transported by the police to a nearby clinic where he was pronounced dead. Initial statements by the police alleged that patrolman Alarcón was responding to the report of an armed robbery of a bus when he encountered Becerra and his friends painting graffiti on a wall. The youths ran and

Alarcón gave chase on foot. According to General Francisco Patiño, commander of the Bogotá police, the officer shot Becerra when, “It appeared that the boy was going to shoot him” (“Diego

Felipe”).26 By the 22nd of August, the autopsy had revealed that Becerra had been shot in the back at close range. The official police narrative had begun to crumble as the story made headlines in newspapers and TV news programs: “Diego Felipe: One Death and Many

Questions” declared the weekly Semana; “The Police Assassinated my Son: Mother of Young

Grafitero” read El Espectador. Becerra’s mother, Liliana Lizarazo, and stepfather, Gustavo

Arley Trejos, began campaigning to find the truth, pointing out inconsistencies in the narrative:

Why, if the boy was going to shoot, did he have his back turned? Why, if they had

supposedly committed an act of robbery, did the police not capture the other boys,

especially when one of them went to the clinic after the incident and was face to

face with the police? Why are there no known passengers of the supposed bus the

boys intended to rob? (“Diego Felipe”)27

It eventually came to light that the emergency phone call reporting the armed robbery of a bus had been invented and a driver had been paid to give false statements to the media, and it became clear that the gun the police claimed that Diego Felipe Becerra had pointed at Patrolman Alarcón had been planted at the scene after the fact. Investigations into what exactly happened that night would continue for years. One thing was certain that August: a young man was dead for the crime of spray-painting Felix the Cat on a wall in a wealthy neighborhood.

Challenging the Urban Imaginary

Becerra’s death would initiate a sea change in the way Bogotano citizens view, understand, and construct the city around them and set the stage for urban artists to develop new modes of citizenship performance. In his 1992 work Imaginarios urbanos (Urban Imaginaries),

Bogotano urban scholar Armando Silva developed a concept he called the urban imaginary as a frame for understanding the way that residents of a city conceptualize the urban public space.

Silva’s unique contribution to Latin American urban studies was to situate citizens’ imaginative worlds – their desires, fears, and fantasies – as constitutive elements in the social construction of urban public space, which he consistently refers to as an aesthetic process. Taking up Silva’s notion that the visual topography of a city is an aesthetic process, just as much as it is an 81

economic and political process, Argentinian cultural theorist Néstor García Canclini develops the heterogeneous but nevertheless collective nature of Silva’s urban imaginaries in his 1997 collection of essays, also titled Imaginarios urbanos, and later in a 2007 interview with Alicia

Lindón. Understood from the work of these two authors, the urban imaginary functions as my framework for considering residents’ collective concept of the city in which they live.

Following Silva and García Canclini, I deploy the urban imaginary to investigate one of

Bogotá’s prominent urban artists, DjLu, and his ongoing project known as Juegasiempre

(Always Play). Conceived as both a body of artworks consisting of thousands of painted stencils on the walls of the city and an agenda of engagement and activism with the people of Colombia,

Juegasiempre constitutes a citizenship performance that directly intervenes into the visual topography of the capital city and destabilizes the control of information dominated by the government, commercial interests, religious institutions, non-profits, and property owners. I argue that Juegasiempre exemplifies citizenship performance in several ways. First, the content of the images he creates critiques many of the social and political modos de hacer in Colombian society, including the ubiquity of violence and the tools of war. Second, DjLu’s process of creating stencil art often begins with taking photographs of typical Colombian people on the streets and ends with the artist painting his work on public walls in broad daylight – itself a modo de hacer almost unique to Bogotá – frequently acquiring an audience as he works. And third,

DjLu has engaged in urban art activism, including his participation in the open discussions that led to Bogotá’s progressive reforms following Becerra’s death, and his major commission to decorate hundreds of planters that run the length of the pedestrian-only section of Carrera

Séptima with one of his most frequent collaborators, Lesivo. His critically engaged art, his public performance of creating the stencils, and his extracurricular political and economic activities make DjLu one of the most prominent and respected urban artists in Bogotá. Through the content, process, and activism of Juegasiempre, DjLu seeks to challenge the urban imaginary of

Bogotá’s citizens.

There has always been an element of anonymity involved in the world of graffiti and urban art, and while much of DjLu’s project is conducted within the confines of the law, he maintains a division between his work as an urban stencil artist and his life as a private citizen.

For example, he told me his employers do not know he works as an urban artist (Personal interview). For this reason, I will maintain his anonymity. Some details of his life will help to contextualize and problematize DjLu’s project, but in order to protect his anonymity I omit specific details. DjLu was raised in an upper-middle class family where he attended private schools and studied architecture in college at the behest of his parents who wanted him to find a lucrative career that would put his creative talent to good use (Personal interview). Following architectural school, DjLu enrolled in a fine arts program at the Universidad Nacional (National

University), the largest public school in Colombia. At the Universidad Nacional DjLu was confronted with a paradox of belonging and inclusiveness. First, the public university was far more diverse than the private schools he had attended previously. The population was more diverse in terms of ethnicity, nationality, and class. At the same time, the program in which DjLu found himself exhibited an exclusivity with which he was unfamiliar. During our interview,

DjLu frequently mentioned the circles of the elite within the fine arts community. Everything

depended on assimilating into these social circles. Assimilation depended not so much on talent, though certainly that also, but on ability to speak the right language. Furthermore, membership in these circles entailed the potential for advancement within the community, for example, by presenting opportunities to secure gallery space for showings and to be seen by curators and collectors. This influence of the establishment was nearly all-powerful. Without it, a career in the fine arts appeared to be all but impossible. The rite/right of passage into the gallery art world depends to some extent on the ability to reciprocally negotiate within the community. This is just as true for the established art world as it is for the world of urban artists. The languages are different, but the means of acceptance are the same: do you have the talent? Do you speak the lingo? The streets provided DjLu with one way out of this conundrum. There are no curators in the streets. One doesn’t have to speak the right language or know the right people to get one’s art into the streets. And the streets of a major city provide a built-in audience.

In what follows I describe the urban imaginary as developed by Silva and García

Canclini, and establish it as a frame for analyzing citizenship performances like Juegasiempre. I then move on to consider the ramifications of Diego Felipe Becerra’s murder and the shift in

Bogotá’s urban imaginary that is legible in the city’s response to his killing and that opened a legal space for urban artists. Finally, I analyze three aspects of Juegasiempre in which DjLu engages in citizenship performance: through his appropriation of the visual system of signification, through his critique of social and political issues in Bogotá, and finally through his engagement with the communities in which he moves.

The frame for conceptualizing urban space in the vast majority of performance studies scholarship derives from the geo-culturally northern and European works of those theorists such as de Certeau, Lefebvre, Foucault, and Soja. While these are canonical figures in the theorization of space, they are firmly situated in the global north, and, as Massey has persuasively argued in

For Space, in a discourse that has privileged time over space. This is not to say that the work of these venerable theorists cannot or should not be deployed in studies on the global south, but rather, if we are to attempt to understand the complex, heterogeneous, and sometimes paradoxical performances in Bogotá’s public spaces, we must also bring to bear framing perspectives that have evolved within Bogotá’s cultural community.

Since the first publication of Imaginarios Urbanos in 1992, Silva has been one of

Bogotá’s most prominent scholars on urban studies. The majority of his research has revolved around graffiti and other systems of visual communication. In his work on graffiti, Silva categorizes what he calls the seven valences of graffiti (Atmósferas 20-30), each of which are inherent to the semantics and disposition of graffiti. These valences are graffiti’s (1) marginality,

(2) anonymity, (3) spontaneity, (4) composition and location, which Silva calls “escenicidad” referring to its scenic elements, (5) velocity, (6) precariousness, and (7) fugacity. Through these valences, Silva attempts to understand the value of the contributions of graffiti artists to the cultural economy of cities via the urban imaginary. The visual topography of a city is, for Silva, an aesthetic process upon which residents project their desires, fears, and fantasies. These projections of the imagination become an essential element in the process, shaping the social history of the space itself. Thus, the urban imaginary becomes a material part of the visual

topography, of the city itself. The urban imaginary contains all that citizens have encountered when it comes to negotiating the city’s public sphere. It is shaped by the advertisements, the periodicals and current events, the traffic and public transportation systems, the monuments, the architecture. It is also shaped by the homeless and the hawkers, the cafeteros and the business suits. The urban imaginary is the citizens’ frame for negotiating the city itself. It encompasses more than the map of the city, it is also the social history of the city, the culture and I would add the modos de hacer. For Silva, the study of urban imaginaries is distinct from sociology or anthropology. It is the discipline, “… in which various disciplines converge in their epistemological construction, it concerns itself with that which is outside positivist rationality, in order to frame the sentiments, the citizens’ desires, the fantasies of the unexpected that manifest as a promise in a collective manner” (8).28

Since the publication of his first book, Silva’s urban imaginary has been adopted by a wide variety of social science disciplines within Latin American circles, including sociology, economics, cultural anthropology, urban theory, and architecture. García Canclini brought to the notion of the urban imaginary his own well-known theorization of hybridity. In a 2007 interview with Alicia Lindón, García Canclini describes his understanding of the urban imaginary: “The imaginary is not only a symbolic representation of what occurs, it is also the cite of elaboration of dissatisfactions, desires, the search for communication with others” (Lindón 93).29 In exploring the urban imaginary García Canclini reaches for a kind of knowledge of the city, a generalized knowledge of lo urbano that avoids the pitfalls of modernity’s totalizations, but also adds up to something more than postmodern fragmentation. If membership in a community –

cultural citizenship – is predicated on shared social space, and if space is constructed by the urban imaginary, then it follows that cultural citizenship is directly influenced by the urban imaginary of a space. It is an understanding of the socio-cultural phenomena of urbanization that goes beyond quantifiable statistics or individual narratives, giving emphasis “to the cultural, to the symbolic, to the complexity and heterogeneity of the social in the city” (Lindón 91).30 The urban imaginary is not space itself, but rather everything a community of people brings to the space: our bodies and ideas, our histories, our interactions and disruptions, our hopes and desires and fears. After all, urban imaginaries are communal. That is not to say that every individual within a community – and especially within a city – shares the same imaginary of the space.

Rather, the citizens of a city will have shared semiotic languages and overlapping experiences.

These systems of symbols and trajectories that residents reciprocally negotiate constitute the urban imaginary. García Canclini gives the example of the reports from traffic helicopters that advise a city’s residents on the current conditions of transportation systems as one example of a language that nearly all residents will share. In Bogotá, the city’s dwellers will be familiar with the TransMilenio bus system, even if an individual has never actually taken a bus. They are also familiar with the visual traffic signs and lights that guide vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the city.

García Canclini says in his own Imaginarios urbanos, “Cities are not only physical phenomena, a mode of occupying space, of coming together, but they are also places in which expressive phenomena occur that enter into tension with rationalization, with the pretensions of rationalizing social life” (72).31 Graffiti and urban art are among the many expressive phenomena

occurring in urban public space, and as we will see, DjLu’s art is directly aimed at exactly the tensions García Canclini describes. But there are other expressive phenomena that may not be so obvious:

The cities are constructed with houses and parks, streets, highways and traffic

signals. But cities are configured also with images. They are invented and ordered

with plans. But the sense of urban life is imagined by novels, songs and films, the

stories in the press, the radio and television. The city becomes full of

heterogeneous fantasies. The metropolis programmed in order to function,

designed in a grid, overflows and multiplies in individual and collective fictions.

(109).32

Our experience of a city is simultaneously physical and imagined. We experience the physical surroundings through our senses and our own embodiment, but we also project imagined contexts on those surroundings. These contexts are derived from individual social geographies, sourced in the memory of past experiences, previous encounters with space, connections and disconnections with the people we meet therein, as well as our desires or fears of the future.

Despite the apparent breadth of interest in urban imaginaries, the concept has largely escaped the attention of Latin American performance studies scholars. Cultural theorist Anne Huffschmid argues in “From the City to lo urbano: Exploring Cultural Production of Urban Space in Latin

America,” that the urban imaginary has roots in European theory, particularly in Cornelius

Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society (La institución imaginaria de la Sociedad,

1975) and to a lesser extent, Manuel Delgado Ruiz’s exploration of lo urbano in The Public

Animal: Building an Anthropology of Urban Spaces (El animal público: hacia una antropología de los espacios urbanos, 1999). Castoriadis’s work develops the imagination as an integral, even foundational, part of the cultural fabric. Silva argues that from Castoriadis’ we can derive that,

“the imaginary affects the modes of symbolizing that which we know as reality and seeps into all aspects of our social life” (Imaginarios 104).33 Urban imaginaries have received little more than passing mention in performance studies scholarship. Ileana Azor Hernández briefly deploys the concept in her 2011 essay, “Sueños que danzan en el agua. Mestizas y mayas en el teatro de

Conchi León,” as does María Gabriela Aimaretti in her 2013 essay, “Experiencias de teatro socio-cultural en Bolivia: Una tendencia con cincuenta años de camino.” While both of these essays deploy the concept of the urban imaginary, neither theorizes the concept, nor engages with the theory of those who have like Silva or García Canclini.

DjLu’s project expands Bogotá’s urban imaginary by challenging the abundance of the tools of war in Colombia, by disputing neoliberal narratives of progress that often fail to apply to post-colonial emerging economies, and by contesting the marginalization and exploitation of women, minorities, the poor, the elderly, and at least in one instance, animals. The visual topography of the city shapes the urban imaginary, shapes the cultural community, shapes the borders of citizenship, and DjLu challenges Bogotá’s sense of self through his engagement with the citizens of the city and through his embodied interventions into the city’s visual sphere. The thousands of individual art pieces that make up Juegasiempre are not so much finished products as they are an archive that points to a repertoire of embodied practice within Bogotá’s public spaces. Each individual stencil evidences DjLu’s body in motion, mapping his intervention into

Bogotá’s visual landscape and his engagement with its citizens. The broad replication and distribution of the collective project evolves into a narrative of the artist’s intervention on the visual topography.

Studying an urban art project as performance continues a trajectory of broadening our understanding of what constitutes performance, opening new lines of inquiry into how performance engages social activism and community formation. Following Clair Bishop, who in

Artificial Hells calls for, “rethinking the history of twentieth-century art through the lens of theatre rather than painting…or the ready-made” (3), this chapter also reconsiders the way performance studies scholarship has addressed performing the city. Performance studies has been, from its nascence, an interdisciplinary project. Within the last decade numerous studies have been published that bring into the mix a focus on urban studies, especially in relation to performances that take place in urban public places, and in fall 2014, TDR published a special issue “Performing the City.”

Analyzing urban art as performance helps us to conceive the visual topography of a city as a stage – a site for discourse on citizenship, a space to contest who we are as a people and how we treat each other. Urban imaginaries can augment Latin American Performance Studies’ discourse on memory politics – as memory and memorialization has as much to do with our hopes, desires, and fears for the future as it has to do with events past. If we are to understand the urban public spaces and the history of bodies therein, we must begin to reconcile our notion of performance not only as that which is present in the present, but also that which is present in the past. What acts of performance can we continue to witness in the urban public sphere, despite the

fact that we are not present for the liveness of them? Does the lack of liveness in urban art take away from our ability to witness it as performance? Marvin Carlson has theorized the variety of ways in which events, people, or places of the past ghost performances in the present. My assertion here is that these very ghosts sometimes perform for us despite the lack of corporeal bodies acting in the present. The thousands of individual stencils that DjLu has painted in the city of Bogotá constitute a kind of map of the artist’s performance. They are the evidence of the artist’s journey. The repetition of individual stencils, DjLu’s ever present cartouche in the pieces, and the signature style of his works mark them as the project of a single artist. An encounter with one of his pieces will recall in the mind of the observer encounters with other pieces in his body of work, and act as a kind of palimpsest, a residue of an ongoing performance across the city’s visual topography, ghosting the body of the artist and making the performance present.

Becerra’s death sets the stage (Breaking Windows)

In order to clear the way for a shift in urban imaginaries that enabled artists like DjLu,

Bogotá had to abandon the style of enforcement that killed Becerra and that still prevails in much of the United States. There was widespread sympathy for the Becerra’s mother and step-father, which only grew as the police account of the events deteriorated. Images of the smiling young grafitero in front of his cheerful art made the police description of him as a dangerous criminal hard to swallow. The public outcry for a thorough investigation was answered when Colombia’s

Vice-President, Angelino Garzón, dedicated his own security team to the search for witnesses and the Attorney General’s office (Fiscalía General de la Nación) opened a formal investigation.

In an effort to assuage the growing discontent with the way that police handled the case, 91

Bogotá’s city authorities set out to reform police responses to graffiti and urban art. Agreement

482 of 2011 (Acuerdo 482 de 2011), passed by Bogotá’s city council on 26 December of that year, provides a framework for a shift in the legal status of graffiti within the capital district, and formally adopts a more lenient posture toward the art form. The goals of the agreement were first to improve quality of life of Bogotá’s citizens, second, to preserve and protect Bogotá’s urban landscape, and third, to “Support the artistic and cultural urban expression of graffiti and equivalent expressions” (Agreement 482).34 The agreement also lays out broad categories of spaces in which graffiti would be unauthorized, namely:

Graffiti practice is not permitted over any constitutive and complementary

element of the unauthorized public space, as well as in the interior or exterior of

equipments, infrastructure or elements of a public service or general installations,

including public transport, urban furniture, cultural patrimony, trees, gardens and

public roads in general. (Agreement 482).

An agreement of this type is not equivalent to a law in Colombia, but it does require a response from the city administration. Eighteen months later, the office of the Secretary of Culture,

Recreation, and Sport (Secretaría de Cultura, Recreación y Deporte) issued Decree 75 of 2013

(Decreto 75 de 2013) passed on February 22 of that year, which elaborates on Agreement 482 by giving specific examples of unauthorized spaces for graffiti. Included among the examples are private property, government buildings, historic monuments, and so on. However, by naming specific unauthorized spaces, unnamed places became authorized by omission. For example, road pavements, sidewalks, and urban furniture like park benches are explicitly named as

unauthorized locations for graffiti; highway underpasses, retaining walls, and medians are not named in Decree 75 and so became fair game for urban artists.

In this way, Becerra’s death led to legal reforms that opened a legal space for other grafiteros and urban artists to create their works. This legalized space became the stage for a new kind of performance: artists whose work had been created in the shadows of night under the threat of arrest or bodily harm emerged into the light of day. Subversive scrawls of paint that once took seconds to complete blossomed into elaborate murals. The aftermath of Diego Felipe

Becerra’s murder clearly demonstrates the shifting urban imaginary of the citizens of Bogotá.

The actions of the government in response to the controversy acknowledge the cultural contributions of the urban art community to the city as a whole, an acknowledgement that legitimizes the cultural citizenship of the urban artists. These contributions – the widespread graffiti and urban art in the city – have become a part of Bogotá’s urban imaginary. While individual citizens may have a variety of opinions about the value of graffiti and urban art,

Bogotá’s politicians and mainstream media appear to accept the presence of graffiti and urban art as a part of the culture of the city – a part that deserves to be protected, even nurtured. Bogotá’s strategy, motivated by the death of Becerra, flips the framing perspective from one that asks,

“What surfaces are legal?” to one that asks, “What spaces should be illegal?” The move opened up whole categories of paintable surfaces by omission.

Figure 5. Two images of the Simón Bolívar monument in Parque de los periodistas taken by the author in May 2014 and May 2015 respectively

The more lenient posture Bogotá adopted in the aftermath of the shooting of Becerra has not prevented, or even controlled, illegal paintings. Artists still paint on private property and deface historic monuments, and actions have been taken to prevent this behavior. The two photographs in Figure 5 feature the statue of Simón Bolívar located in Journalists Park (Parque de Los Periodistas) at the foot of Candelaria and were taken one year apart in May of 2014 and

May of 2015 respectively. In the first, the base of the monument and the pillars have been covered by graffiti. As a historic monument, this graffiti is banned by Decree 75. In the second photograph, the monument has been restored and cleaned of graffiti and a temporary barricade

has been erected, protecting the monument from future defacement, although the barricade itself has become a canvas for graffiti artists. Nevertheless, Bogotá has become a kind of Mecca for urban artists and urban artists are now able to create their works in the light of day. This more liberal urban imaginary has led to other developments: for example, the temporary wooden walls erected around construction sites in Bogotá frequently have stenciled lettering reading “This space is for your imagination” (“Este espacio es para su imaginación”), rather than the typical

“Post No Bills” signs seen on similar temporary walls in cities like New York.

On 17 March 2015, Colombia’s Attorney General formally charged colonel of the

National Police (Policía Nacional) John Harvy Peña Riveros and subintendents Nelson Giovanny

Tovar Pineda and Fleiber Leandro Zarabanda Payán in the death of Becerra (“Fiscalía”). The alleged crimes included modification of the crime scene, making false statements on public documents, the alteration or destruction of material evidence, and obstruction of justice.

Ballistics revealed that officer Wilmer Antonio Alarcón fired the fatal shot and he was charged with aggravated homicide on 29 August 2015, more than four years after the incident (“Inicia juicio”).

The world of urban art is othered by urban imaginaries that frequently cast the artists as juvenile delinquents trespassing on the property rights of individuals, organizations, government, or the collective “we,” rather than as members of the cultural community. In his Chicago

Tribune review of Steppenwolf’s This is Modern Art (Based on True Events), Chris Jones suggests that urban art is nothing more than a “subversive art and self-actualizing mission.”

Jones openly associates the presence of graffiti with the presence of danger, and claims that

graffiti “never was a victimless crime,” a rhetoric emblematic of the ways in which the neoliberal urban imaginary ubiquitous in the Unites States marginalizes graffiti and urban artists. This is less true in Bogotá than it is in most other cities, largely because of the events surrounding

Becerra’s death and because of the history of thought in Bogotá that stems from Silva’s work, and which has broadly accepted urban art as a contributing part of the cultural community.

In 1982 George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson published an article in the Atlantic

Monthly on what they called the “broken windows theory.” This theory argues that the detritus of misdemeanor activity – the presence of graffiti or broken windows, for example – encourages higher levels of crime. Their suggestion that an increased police focus on misdemeanor crimes will drive out the perpetrators of more serious crimes led to a widespread effort to crackdown on these minor offenses. Graffiti and graffiti writers were targeted by the ensuing crackdowns, most famously in New York City. The large-scale crackdown on misdemeanor crimes, inspired by the broken windows theory, helped to lower crime rates, but it also mythologized the supposedly delinquent status of graffiti writers. It encouraged the public perception that graffiti writers are criminals involved in crimes beyond the vandalism that is part of the graffiti modality. Graffiti writers have often relied on theft to acquire their paint, particularly in New York (Snyder 3), but the links frequently made by the police and the media that graffiti artists are gang members and drug dealers are tenuous. While there are no doubt some street artists involved in crime other than the vandalism that is ubiquitous in the practice, the presumption that street art is a kind of gateway crime is largely unfounded.

I contend that urban art has, by and large, been marginalized and delegitimized even by those who appreciate the contributions urban art has made to cultural communities. This marginalization results in a kind of censorship: when graffiti and urban art are dismissed as vandalism, the perspectives, opinions, and criticisms expressed in works like those of DjLu may be ignored as the work of people who do not conform to the expected behavior of members of the cultural community. This is a critical aspect of citizenship performance: a person’s ability to effect change in a cultural community is predicated to a certain degree on acceptance by members of that community. One must be perceived to belong to a community before one’s voice is registered by other citizens. To categorize the voices of urban artists as voices of

“youth,” as voices that are “criminal,” or at the very least, “delinquent,” is an act of erasure – one that strips the perspectives of the artists of any validity or applicability to the broader communities in which they work. Thus, the marginalization of urban artists delegitimizes their opinions and perspectives.

Janice Rahn is among the very first to think about the culture of graffiti in terms of performance, but she is also among those researchers whom I suggest contribute to the marginalization of urban artists despite her appreciation of the work. In Painting Without

Permission: Hip-Hop Graffiti Subculture Rahn clearly appreciates the cultural contributions of urban artists, and yet her analysis of the artists’ work is limited by her own ideological perspective. Throughout her book, Rahn discusses graffiti writing as a sub-genre of hip-hop – already a marginalized genre among the white majority – even though writing on walls has been a part of human culture for millennia. She begins with a critique of media portrayals of graffiti

writers, “Graffiti and resistance against authority is often oversimplified by mass media, which glosses over the complexities of power structures and individual lives” (Rahn xiv). However,

Rahn’s work falls into the same oversimplification she identifies in the mass media. She interviews a variety of white Canadian graffiti writers, and analyzes them in the context of the black hip-hop tradition, mostly out of New York. For example, she prefaces her interview with the writer GENE with this description: “GENE was Canadian with Filipino ancestry. Nothing about him fit any preconceptions one might have of hip-hop culture or graffiti. He didn’t wear any designer clothes or shoes. He was polite, shy, soft-spoken, articulate and well educated.

GENE graduated with a fine arts degree in painting from Concordia University in Montreal”

(Rahn 26). Even as she acknowledges her own preconceptions about hip-hop and graffiti, Rahn proceeds to analyze a Filipino Canadian’s work as part of the hip-hip tradition, forcing a frame of reference on an artist whose work doesn’t fit.

The writer DSTRBO self-identifies as ‘punk’ rather than hip-hop. “If I am part of any kind of culture, it’s urban culture” (Rahn 41). DSTRBO does identify graffiti as having come out of hip-hop culture, and I wonder if this contributed to Rahn’s universal conflation of the two, although I read DSTRBO’s comments as suggesting that while he was aware of hip-hop, and graffiti certainly developed as part of the hip-hop scene, DSTRBO himself doesn’t identify as belonging to hip-hop culture, as Rahn suggests: “All the participants were aware of hip-hop and defined their position in direct relation to it” (Rahn 138). On their own? Or because she led them through her questioning? It’s hard to know the answer here because the interviews are edited and, for example, DSTRBO’s comment about hip-hop is in a paragraph at the beginning of a

subsection of the book, and Rahn’s question or prompt that led to the comment is not included.

Nowhere does Rahn account for the long history of wall writing that predates the hip-hop movement, nor it’s later offshoots, despite the fact that she cites works such as Reisner’s that explicitly engage with this deep history.

My discussion of Rahn’s work is not meant so much as an excoriation of her work as a researcher – many of her points are cogent as far as I have found – but rather I hope to illustrate that the stigmatization of graffiti artists so prevalent in the media and social consciousness is born out in the fact that traces of this stigma continue to reside in the frameworks in which even well-meaning or benevolent scholars have approached the graffiti and urban art culture. This continues the othering of already disenfranchised artists, artists whose very medium screams against the failure of institutions to provide a voice for the people. Artists who have not only dared to break the law to create their art, but also for whom a cultural community has evolved for which the breaking of laws is, to a certain extent, worthy of acclaim.

Folklorist Sojin Kim’s work is further evidence of the marginalization of urban artists, even by those researchers who are open to the possibility that some urban art is valuable. Kim’s

Chicano Graffiti and Murals: The Neighborhood Art of Peter Quezada examines the work of

Quezada, an artist who refers to his own work as a “graffiti deterrent” or a “substitute for graffiti” (7). Quezada began his career as a buffer – whitewashing walls that had been covered in graffiti. Eventually he began creating his own art over the graffiti, writing anti-gang, anti-drug, and pro-community slogans in gothic calligraphy, as well as painting murals of pop and religious icons. While Kim describes Quezada and those with whom he collaborates in a positive light, she

consistently refers to all other graffiti writers as gang members. While it is certain that many of the taggers were gang members or related to gangs, as Quezada himself testifies, Quezada is almost certainly not the only non-gang member who painted in East L.A in the mid-1990s. Kim quotes Quezada as saying, “The walls that I choose, they’re graffiti-covered and for the most part they’re no man’s walls – retaining walls that are on abandoned property. So the walls that I take are sort of like orphan walls – walls that have been deserted by their real owners, or they actually belong to somebody but they’re not taken care of graffiti-wise” (13). Kim situates Quezada as an artist who is “replacing and discouraging graffiti on walls” (13). Quezada did, in fact, spend a part of his career working with community groups for at-risk youth, so his motives are sincere.

However, Kim’s defense of Quezada’s work – that he is trying to discourage graffiti – ignores the fact that he works in the same medium as those he is trying to discourage, as if to say that the positive messages or benign murals legitimize his art and transform it into something other than graffiti.

The shift in Bogotá’s collective urban imaginary precipitated by the assassination of

Becerra not only opened a space for urban artists within the cultural community, but also increased the value of their cultural contributions, and allows for new artistic communities to be formed, and perhaps most importantly, accepted as more or less full citizens within the cultural community. While the murder of Becerra was the culminating event inspiring a sea change in the legal approach to the regulation of graffiti and other urban art in Bogotá, Silva’s theoretical approach had long before established a foundational framework that broadly accepts and appreciates the contribution of urban artists to the cultural community, in direct opposition to the

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neoliberal urban imaginary underlying much of the theory emanating from the global north. He insists that graffiti is fundamentally an act of resistance. Graffiti has from its inception been in opposition to the hegemonic urban imaginary, and its production therefore must be transgressive.

This partly explains why in Bogotá, even after a significant amount of space was legalized for graffiti and urban art, artists continued to paint on illegal surfaces, continued to deface public monuments and official signs, and continued to challenge even the newly liberalized urban imaginary. Urban art’s unconventional status in Bogotá queers a number of categories under which urban art is frequently theorized, particularly the legal/illegal and art/non-art binaries.

Bogotá’s urban artists occupy a liminal cultural space, and negotiate in-between-ness as they frequently work on both legal and illegal spaces around the city, constructing a new urban imaginary as they transform the visual topography.

With relatively few exceptions, urban art has been studied in terms of its being a kind of text – writing on the wall so to speak – more properly belonging to what Diana Taylor has called the archive, rather than its being studied as a repertoire of performances. As the urban art world evolved from the graffiti scene in New York and Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s to the global phenomena of today’s Banksy, theorization of urban art has remained stagnantly embroiled in the rhetoric of writing. The emphasis by cultural critics and urban theorists on the textuality of urban art overlooks the performance elements of contemporary urban art projects like Juegasiempre. Authors situated in the global north like Joe Austin, Mark Halsey and Alison

Young, Rachel Holmes, and Amardo Rodriguez and Robin Patric Clair all explicitly refer to graffiti and urban art and the process of its making as writing, following the usage of the writers

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themselves. However, an uncritical repetition of common usage as the basis for analysis is perilous. During the explosion of graffiti in Philadelphia and New York City in the 1970s, the graffitists called the work writing and themselves writers. At the time, nearly all the graffiti consisted of words, usually pseudonyms, scrawled across walls and subways in spray paint. Over time, calligraphic embellishment grew and symbols and images began to appear in the work of graffiti artists. The theoretical approach geo-located in the global north that analyzes graffiti as a form of writing has become increasingly insufficient, whether or not the artists and writers in question are still calling themselves writers. It would not be true to say that all theorists have resorted to the outdated language of writing.

Writing in 2007, Sonja Neef made a significant break with earlier analysts by looking specifically at graffiti as a performative, akin to a speech act. While Neef’s work broadens the theoretical frame from which we understand urban art, her work doesn’t significantly focus on the process of creating urban art and the performance that this process becomes once it enters public space. It is the public act of creating the art which is often considered the most significant element of street art by the artists themselves. The paint that is left behind is as much proof of an accomplishment as it is an artistic expression.

While academic analysis and theorization focuses on the works as a form of writing, interviews and documentaries with artists reveal a strong focus on the act of creating the work – the embodied, temporal performance required for its making. Even as they refer to themselves as writers, the artists promote the performative element of urban art more often than they discuss the compositional or aesthetic qualities of individual graffiti tags, stickers, bombs, and pieces.

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The act of creating street art is a performance first in that it is an act done in public, although very often almost entirely out of the public’s vision, yet the residue of that performance is present, that is, the artwork is present, and its very presence brings the act of its creation to the mind of the viewer.

A work of urban art cites its own creation, it recalls the body of the artist, much in the same way that, for example, the Sistine Chapel recalls the body of Michelangelo. One can hardly gaze upon the ceiling of that magnificent chapel for more than a few moments without reflecting upon the difficulty overcome in the creation of the work. Yes, the work belongs to the realm of visual art, but in this case, there is something more than a piece of visual art. A Picasso or a

Monet may be equally astonishing works in their own way, and we might imagine Monet in his garden at Giverny as we gaze upon one of his water lily paintings, but there is a spatial disconnection here if I am looking at one of Monet’s paintings in a museum, and not standing outside in his gardens in the very spot in which he painted it. The Sistine Chapel is different – the original work of art only exists in the very place in which it was created. It is the feat of the body

– the performance that occurred in the space in which we stand to appreciate it – that adds a deeper element to the appreciation of the work. While all art may be understood to a greater or lesser extent as a performance, my contention here is that street art ought to be understood in this way.

Act One: Appropriating Signs

DjLu’s earliest stencils, many of which are still in use today, are what he calls pictograms: simple compositions usually made up of two or more basic icons combined in 103

unusual or paradoxical ways. These icons compose a kind of visual language that guides our behavior in public places. Many restroom signs have a kind of wide-lined stick figures that represent the male and female genders as appropriate. We see these same figures on road signs, pedestrian crossings, “walk” signs (interesting that the don’t walk is usually a hand rather than a crossed-out person). A cigarette with a red line crossing it lets us know that smoking isn’t permitted. A skull and cross bones on a bottle suggests that perhaps this isn’t an appropriate beverage to drink. This visual language surrounds us in our daily lives, and yet it is generally a language that is easily acquired. Rather, it is a language that transcends spoken language by design. Although there is a certain amount of familiarity that might be required, most of these signs are legible to just about anybody, regardless of the languages they speak, and they are common in the vast majority of urban spheres around the world. This is the iconic language that

DjLu appropriates and develops in the pictograms that are the foundation of much of his work.

DjLu’s stenciling journey began with these pictograms. His earliest encounters with the world of street art were painting individual single-layer stencils around the city. The flat stencils themselves are easily concealed in a backpack and painting an individual stencil with a single color takes a matter of seconds. It is possible then, with a single stencil and a can of paint to create a hundred or more individual little paintings. Armed with a small stack of stencils and a few cans of paint, DjLu has on many occasions spent the entire night painting hundreds of pictograms. With the cover of night and an empty street, it was entirely possible to put up a handful of stencils on a single wall before moving on to the next location.

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A person walking in any of today’s modern urban centers cannot help but notice the continual bombardment of signs: billboards, marquees, road signs, etc. Juegasiempre challenges the citizens of Bogotá to think differently, to imagine their city in new contexts, to “read” the cityscape and its semiotics under a more critical light. In her chapter, “City, Art, Politics,” cultural theorist Nelly Richard examines the work of Lotty Rosenfeld, whose critically engaged art in Santiago, Chile was part of a movement of urban “art actions” borrowing the term from

Wolf Vostell:

These art-actions in the city were meant to disturb the rigid urban social order

that, under militarism, had rendered the citizens passive. The art-actions were also

intended to generate disruptive effects in the daily routines and social conventions

of the city. Rosenfeld’s work… actively interrogates the relations among urban

landscape, the social quotidian, and the artistic happening; it inserts itself between

the opposed forces of urban regimentation and critical and aesthetic disorder.

(115).

In Rosenfeld’s 1979 work, Una milla de cruces en el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on the Road), the artist placed white strips of cloth across the white dotted lines of a road, effectively creating crosses at a time when the disappearance of thousands of citizens in the country was an unspoken reality. “Her work sought to provoke an anonymous spectator (virtually anyone) to question the daily teachings that ensure the servility of subjects trapped in a framework of official codes”

(117). Like Una milla de cruces en el pavimento, DjLu’s art gets at the system of meaning making itself – the signs that government uses to control the population. While Rosenfeld’s art 105

directly engaged the structuring signs deployed by the state – she placed white cloth strips directly on the road itself, using the white lines already present as a part of her art – DjLu simply appropriates the system of signification. The generic faceless stenciled human figures that we see on restroom signs, crosswalks, etc., are redeployed. These signs are useful institutions and artists alike in that they are nearly universal; translation becomes unnecessary. In his appropriation of these symbols, DjLu occupies what Richards calls, “the prohibited space of the street” (80), exposing the symbolic language for what it is: a means of control.

Once DjLu has created a stencil, regardless of the size, he almost always reuses it. He has a collection of hundreds of stencils in his condominium in the Chapinero neighborhood just north of Bogotá’s central business district. The smaller pictograms may be used hundreds of times, on their own or incorporated into larger pieces, while the larger stencils are sometimes only used a few times. The pieces he creates thereby continually self-reference his ongoing project. The individual stencils – building blocks of his art – are highly recognizable because they appear so frequently around the city, even as the individual pieces have an individualized impact through unique combinations of figures, background patterns, colors, and pictograms. In our discussion

DjLu cited the influence of Walter Benjamin, noting that, “Many centuries ago reproduction was shitty because everybody was thinking of that aura, and that magic, the artist was a magician.

Today we are no magicians, we are just little, little workers that are working, eh, step by step in order to make another society” (Personal interview). DjLu dismisses out of hand any concern with whether or not he is an artist. Whether or not his dismissal is genuine difficult to discern.

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Figure 6. DjLu's caution sign pictograms. Composite by DjLu. Used under Creative

Commons license.

The pictograms that appear as background decoration, or perhaps provocation, in his larger pieces have also appeared on their own as simple single-layer stencils. For example,

Figure 6 features photographs of six of DjLu’s pictograms printed as stickers in yellow caution- sign diamonds. From left to right they are: an image of a factory with smokestacks emitting pollution in the shape of the Earth’s continents; an image of the Earth with a lit fuse attached like an old fashioned cartoon bomb; an image of a gasoline pump in which the nozzle is shaped like a 107

handgun pointing back at the pump; an image of the symbol of the Euro in which the double horizontal slashes have been replaced with two rifles; an image of an oil well with a hanged man hanging from the pump; an image of a toilet with human legs protruding from the bowl. In traffic signs, the yellow diamond always warns of a danger just ahead. Each of DjLu’s caution pictograms suggest simple warnings: the world is made of factories and smog; the Earth is a ticking time bomb; gasoline is killing us; money is made from guns; drilling for oil is suicide; we are flushing ourselves down the toilet. The pictograms have been reproduced as graphics for shoes, t-shirts, stickers, and tattoos; they have been grouped together, often on a checkerboard design with a unique pictogram in each square, creating a kind of conglomerate effect. DjLu describes his motivation in creating pictograms:

So, eh, I went out in the streets. I started with the pictograms, which is a very ss…

yeah, very, very… it’s a sign language, it’s a very semiotic, eh, eh, project. I love

semiotics, so I understand the big, eh, power of semiotics. Eh, I also, like, eh,

utilize the sign language. I, I, I, I know that the, the importance of signs in society,

in order to organize society, in order to control society in some kind of way. So I

decided to appropriate from that language, the sign language, the symbol

language, sometime the logotype language, which will say something in a very

fast way, like a sign does. (Personal interview)

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Figure 7. DjLu's Piña Granada. Photo by DjLu. Used under Creative Commons license.

A significant number of DjLu’s pictograms contain the tools of war: soldiers, handguns, assault rifles, grenades. He has created at least three variations of a pictogram in which a soldier stands or kneels in a firing position with hearts emerging from the soldier’s rifle. One of the most common individual stencils in DjLu’s body of work is one he calls the Piña Granada, or

Pineapple Grenade. In our discussions DjLu remarked to me that he almost always tries to find a place for the Piña Granada in his larger pieces. Along with the DjLu cartouche and the word

“Juegasiempre,” the Piña Granada is one of the symbols central to the branding of DjLu’s

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ongoing project, helping to identify the artist and his body of work. Tropical fruit is an important industry in the country, and cups of pineapple are for sale at the stands of fruit hawkers that appear on busy street corners in Bogotá. The association between fruit and violence in the

Colombian cultural imagination – underscored by the Piña Granada – goes back at least as far as the banana massacre of 1928, when members of the Unión Sindical de Trabajadores del

Magdalena (Syndicated Union of Workers of the Magdalena) in the town of Ciénaga went on strike against the United Fruit Company after the company refused to meet their demands

(Posada-Carbó 401). General Carlos Cortés Vargas was appointed commander of two army regiments from nearby Santa Marta and Barranquilla. After a brief warning the army opened fire on the striking workers and many were killed. While the events of the strike itself were enough to merit a place in Colombia’s cultural history, their place was cemented permanently when

Gabriel García Márquez depicted a fictional version of the massacre in One Hundred Years of

Solitude (310-2). The exact number of dead is a point of contention among historians, but the number of killed most commonly reported is three thousand.

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Figure 8. One of DjLu's "War Bugs." Photo by the author, April 2014.

DjLu’s War Bugs are another stencil motif he frequently deploys. DjLu has created pictograms with mosquitos, flies, bees, and dragonflies, all of which have rifles or assault rifles as part of the shape of their wings. The War Bugs visually link the presence of guns in the country with the presence of bugs. In a tropical country with coastlines on both the Pacific and

Atlantic, as well as a portion of the Amazon, the plague of bugs is well understood. DjLu has frequently created his own plague of War Bugs by repeating the stencils by the dozens on an individual wall, thereby asserting the pestilence that the guns have brought to the country.

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Figure 9. "Cero maltrato." Photo by DjLu. Used under Creative Commons license.

In addition to his pictograms and solo pieces, DjLu frequently collaborates with others, particularly fellow Bogotano artists Lesivo and Toxicómano. They painted one their more prominent collaborations, “Cero maltrato” (“Zero Abuse” Figure 9), on Carrera Séptima in response to reports that local animal shelters mistreated the animals in their care (Personal interview). The three artists work together to paint the backgrounds for their triptychs, choosing complimentary colors and defining the borders of their separate pieces. They then work individually on their own sections of the triptych, preserving each artist’s personal style around a unifying theme.

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The visual discourse of a city is always talking – Debord’s society of the spectacle has continued to evolve, and the cityscape has become a pastiche of signs. Citizens are trained to read these signs through the repetition of commercials, through the media, through the necessity of following city laws and watching out for official signage: traffic signs, and street signs, the flashing lights and painted lines on the road that ostensibly govern how we are to behave within the maze of buildings, streets, plazas, and parks. The society of the spectacle produces the means of controlling the population by mass production of signs. By dominating the visual sphere of an urban setting, it controls the ways that we imagine the city, the ways that we construct our own social spaces and histories, the ways that we interact and treat each other, the ways that we form communities and decide who belongs. DjLu’s early pictograms problematize the saturation of signs in the urban visual field. These pictograms typically superimpose two or more recognizable icons in intentionally jarring ways: a pineapple that is also a hand grenade, a fly with assault-rifle wings, an image of the earth with a lit fuse attached, etc. DjLu continues to work with pictograms, incorporating them into his larger pieces as adornment. Juegasiempre as a project seeks to intervene in this always-talking aesthetic of Bogotá’s streets.

Juegasiempre interrupts the visual discourse of a city dominated by corporate interests, institutions, property-owners, and the government. The most magnificent, most viewed, photographed, and represented structures in Bogotá are government buildings, churches, and corporate structures. Each of these is an architectural embodiment of the discourse of power. In the consumer-driven and advertisement-saturated visual landscape of the twenty-first century city, billboards, posters, street signs, and neon lights all attempt to persuade citizens how to live

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and what to want. Juegasiempre competes in this visual landscape in frequency and scale –

DjLu’s individual stencils are reproduced thousands of times across the city and his larger pieces rival billboards in terms of size. Sometimes prominent advertisements in large cities are those that don’t always read as advertisements. The most visible building in Bogotá’s business district is the giant Colpatria building: the tallest building in the commercial district is emblazoned with the name of the corporate enterprise across the top of the building. Visible from virtually anywhere in Bogotá by day, a vibrant display of tens of thousands of color-changing LEDs virtually guarantees that the building gets the most attention at night. This corporate beacon competes night and day with the sun and moon for prominence in the sky.

Like Andreas Huyssen’s urban palimpsest, urban art carries with it a multi-temporal heterogeneity. There is a sense of both past and present legible in urban art like Juegasiempre, as well as a future – most urban art is short lived (especially in the case of chalk art, frequently seen on the Séptima). Individual pieces are in conversation with the specific socially constructed space in which DjLu has painted (or stickered) them. They are in conversation not only with the architecture, but also what Delgado has called lo urbano – the space between the buildings; the negative space of the city through which bodies and birds travel. Individual pieces are also in conversation with the surrounding art and graffiti of innumerable other artists and grafiteros whose works are next to or underneath the new paint. Urban art is a palimpsest in which previous works of art are engaged, augmented, or obscured. Here the multi-temporal heterogeneity of

García Canclini can help us think through the possible layers of meaning on any one wall. The architecture itself may be a palimpsest, augmented over time, replacing previous architecture, or

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perhaps instead may have fallen into disrepair. Over the architectural layer the community of urban artists create their discourse, staking out the surface as a territory. DjLu’s pieces are not, as in the world of visual art, static or lasting things. DjLu and Lesivo were commissioned by the city to paint hundreds of concrete planters that separate the bicycle lane from the pedestrian portion of the Séptima. In 2014 I took pictures of several of the planters, but on my return trip in

2015 I found that they had been repainted by the city. Urban artists often engage with each other’s pieces, even as they are already aware of their own work’s impending erasure, sometimes by other artists, sometimes by property owners, sometimes by government or vigilante buffers.

Artists like DjLu are in conversation with the history of art that has been made on any one surface, and with those pieces that will be painted over his own work in the future. In this way, there can never be any one version of the art. Like urban imaginaries, the individual pieces of Juegasiempre are part of a process and a performance. It is part of the reality of urban art that its time is limited and open to the interpretation and intervention of the citizens who observe it, the artists who may amend or obliterate it, the property owners who may erase it, the authorities who may intercede in its creation (though DjLu is by now a thoroughly experienced practitioner of his trade, he still paints and stickers on technically illegal surfaces). In Bogotá, the specific legal framework is just ambiguous enough, he says, that most police wouldn’t bother trying to arrest an artist or grafitero.

Act Two: Performance and Spectatorship in Juegasiempre

DjLu is not only a visual artist (obvious), but also a performance artist (not so obvious).

The process of how he makes his art includes an engaged audience. Criminologists Mark Halsey 115

and Alison Young concluded after conducting interviews with graffiti writers in Australia, “a great many writers perceive themselves to be engaged primarily in a performance (of an artistic, social, affective kind) – not a crime” (296). For the writers that Halsey and Young interviewed, writing graffiti is a lifestyle, one that demands acquiring the tools of the trade (for many young writers this is a difficult burden, sometimes leading to theft), developing a personal style, spending time planning individual pieces, not to mention the act of going out on the street, scouring the city for walls to paint, and executing the final piece at the mercy of the weather and at risk of discovery by property owners and/or the police.

Writers know that writing graffiti is far from a static or two-dimensional activity

involving simply the application of paint to a surface. Instead, most understand

graffiti writing to be an affective process that does things to writers’ bodies (and

the bodies of onlookers) as much as to the bodies of metal, concrete and plastic,

which typically compose the surfaces of urban worlds. (276-7)

DjLu’s own description of his work as an ongoing project rather reflects this notion that urban art is more akin to a lifestyle than it is a collection of individual paintings. In the introduction to his book Signs for a Better World, DjLu describes some of the issues he hopes to address with Juegasiempre:

It interests me to make evident the conflict in which we participate at every level,

not only those that are understood like war. I worry about problems such as

religious intolerance, political polarization and radicalization, capitalism and

excessive consumption, apathy toward life and submission to the media and

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corporations, dependency on fossil fuels and the cost of the destruction of the

planet and the species that inhabit it. I worry about war as business, social

displacement, and change in the uses of the environment. (DjLu 4).35

Sometimes working on his own, bombing the city with small stencils or stickers, at other times collaborating with others in the urban art community on full-scale murals that evolve over weeks, DjLu’s Juegasiempre project contests the delinquency that has so often been associated with urban art, and engages with the political and social realities of Bogotá. Juegasiempre and the projects of other street artists, compete with commercial and government interests for the attention of Bogotá’s citizens on the city’s visual topography. Each new work of street art is a part of this ongoing discourse, engaging with the architecture, contesting urban imaginaries, and dueling for space with the tags, bombs, stickers, stencils, and paste-ups already there and those that will inevitably appear by other street artists. Huffschmid argues that “polarized urban territorialities and the growing inequalities within (post)modern urbanity never cease to produce their own margins and marginal(ized) spaces, modes of resistance and new models of insurgent citizenship or mobilization” (121). Urban art has evolved into one of these new modes of resistance, and DjLu’s Juegasiempre exemplifies a new model of insurgent citizenship. Without the relaxed legal standing of urban art in Bogotá, DjLu’s art might have remained within the confines of simple single-layer stenciled pictograms. The massive projects he now undertakes, often with as many as three other collaborators, are explicitly performances: they take long periods of time to complete – anywhere from five hours to several weeks – and DjLu and his

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collaborators paint in high-traffic areas such as highway underpasses or along Bogotá’s busy

Carrera Séptima during daylight.

Figure 10. Before and after photograhps of DjLu's "Más no es mejor." Photos by the author, April 2014.

Perched at the edge of Bogotá’s Avenida NQS a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, 26 April 2014, urban artists36 DjLu, Lesivo and I, with one other observer, scanned the three southbound lanes of oncoming traffic, anxious for the moment to cross. A wait that bordered on the absurd in length yielded a small window: the four of us scrambled across the busy and broad highway, hauling buckets, spray paint, rollers and brushes,

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ladders, scrapers, and rolls of pre-cut stencils. DjLu and Lesivo were about to “piece”37 one of the giant concrete supports of the Calle 68 overpass. DjLu’s piece would cover the entire west side of the support, while Lesivo would complete a work begun on the east side, wrapping his piece around to include the thin southern strip of the support as well. Before DjLu would be able to begin painting, at least four layers of paste-up advertisements needed to be scraped off, the most recent for “The Tsars of Ballet” that would be performing at Teatro Colsubsidio that coming week (Figure 10).

The artists’ work begins by rolling wet paint-rollers over the paste-up advertisements, loosening the glue that adheres layer after layer of the large paper ads to the concrete. Once the paper is well-soaked, the scraping begins – lots of scraping. After more than half an hour, all

DjLu had accomplished was to cross the highway and scrape off the ads. Removing the paste-ups revealed a large “throw-up” on top of numerous “tags”.38 These would soon be obliterated as

DjLu’s piece would completely cover the surface of one side of the concrete support. Several layers of white paint were needed to cover the existing graffiti. Once the scraped concrete had dried, DjLu began his piece by establishing the silhouette, one-by-one taping up large one-meter by seventy-centimeter sheets of card stock out of which he has cut his stencils. In the four corners of each card stock stencil DjLu has cut out a small cross – a device DjLu uses to ensure that each stencil lines up precisely with adjacent stencils. This particular piece required eighteen sheets of card stock. Beginning at the lower left-hand corner, DjLu taped up a stencil sheet and spray-painted over the small crosses in green, a color easily covered by the black of the final piece, removed that sheet, and taped up the next. He proceeded around the outline of the piece

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counter-clockwise, carefully aligning each sheet of card stock using the corner crosses from the previous sheet as a guide, painting the corner crosses on the opposite side. Once the outline for the entire piece was established, DjLu filled in the entire outline in white and painted the rest of the concrete column black.

As soon as the white background dried, DjLu began the stencil itself – this piece, eventually titled “Más no es mejor,” (“More is not better”), would be a black-on-white two-layer stencil. He returned to the stencil sheets, taping each up and spraying black paint over the entire cut-out image, deftly laying down the paint in an even layer, fully covering the surface of the concrete while carefully avoiding drips due to over spraying. Sheet by sheet DjLu constructed his image. Lesivo, having finished his own work on the opposite side of the column – a work evidently begun on a previous outing – assisted by filling in some of the small gaps left behind by the stencil using a small brush dipped in black paint. Once he had finished with the stencils,

DjLu continued the process of cleaning up the image, touching up the small gaps and the outline of the image.

The “Más no es mejor” piece layers the BP and Shell Oil trademarks on an image of face wearing a gasmask. The relationship between big oil and air pollution is explicit. Furthermore, the spatial location of the piece, prominently visible to three lanes of generally congested highway, implicates his audience as complicit in the production of toxic fumes, even as it indicts the companies responsible for production of petroleum products. The piece also re-covers the state infrastructure that necessitates the widespread use of these products in less than efficient manners. DjLu thus calls into question the patterns of behavior that produce pollution at the very

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moment of its production. By painting the entire support column, “Más no es mejor” also makes a territorial claim on visual space, as there is an unwritten rule in the urban art community against covering works that take up an entire wall.

In the case DjLu’s “Más no es mejor,” a piece whose creation I witnessed, the entire stenciling process was fully visible to three lanes of heavy highway traffic, in addition to a separate pedestrian bridge that crosses over Avenida NQS just to the south of the Calle 68 overpass. As they worked, scraping, taping stencils, painting with rollers and spray cans

(wearing the necessary face mask as they sprayed), climbing up and down ladders, DjLu and

Lesivo frequently acknowledged their audience. While none of the cars on the highway stopped to watch, many of them honked as they went by, and over the course of the afternoon during which DjLu created this piece, I documented dozens of passers-by on the pedestrian bridge who took time to observe the artist at work, some of whom called out, whistled, or clapped in appreciation. The artists responded in kind with waves and shouts of thanks. On the afternoon I was with them, further engagement was hampered by our location on highway median and the constant noise of the traffic. In our interview, DjLu told me that people frequently talk with him as he paints on the streets, enthusiastic about his work, interested in his methods, and occasionally irate at his ideas or the vandalism they perceive his work to be. He told me that he always stops to engage with his audience, redirecting any questions about interpretation of his art or ideas by asking them for their own interpretations. Somewhat to my surprise, when I asked

DjLu about how he felt about those who were incensed or enraged by his work, he told me he

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thought their responses were great. His work did something to them, it made them think, and that, DjLu insists, was always the point.

For the urban artist, working on a legal space or not, there is always the potential for an audience even, if the artist is attempting to evade that audience. Furthermore, the finished artwork is temporary, and in direct dialogue not only with the architecture, but also with the other street art in the vicinity – the other works it is near, next to, and on top of, and eventually the art that obscures it. As DjLu created his “Más no es mejor” piece, Lesivo was creating his own stencil piece on the reverse side of the support column. A third artist, Crisp, showed up and joined in by stenciling a capybara on one of the other support columns nearby. Finally, the fact that some street artists place themselves at risk of being arrested by the authorities is qualitatively different from the method of production of other art forms.

Like many of the pieces in DjLu’s project, “Más no es major” engages the cultural citizenship of Bogotá by challenging the public’s complacent acceptance of capitalist consumerism. DjLu’s art is particularly critical of notions of United States idealism as related through media, the political and economic pressures levied on Colombia by the United States in its failed war on drugs, and the ever-present influence of US corporations. The paradox of

Colombia’s reliance on United States economic power and simultaneous resentment toward and rejection of United States influence has a long history in Colombia, going back at least as far as

Panama’s secession from Colombia in 1903, which from the Colombian perspective stands as one of the most painful episodes in the country’s history. One of Colombia’s most popular plays,

Jorge Alí Triana’s I Took Panama, lampoons and ridicules the administration and tactics of

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President Theodore Roosevelt, even as it criticizes the weak and inept Colombian parliament of the time. The United States is the largest consumer of Colombia’s cocaine, the proceeds from which have fueled the ongoing civil war from both sides. In addition to the drugs smuggled into the country for consumption, the United States government has spent billions of dollars through

Plan Colombia, significant portions of which have been paid in military aid (Mejía).

Figure 11. DjLu's "Orgullo de calle." Photo by DjLu. Used under Creative Commons license.

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Act Three: Community, Collaboration, and Citizen Engagement in Juegasiempre

DjLu’s piece “Orgullo de calle” (“Street Pride” Figure 11) is a typical example of the kind of work that he creates through his engagement with the residents from the city. The piece was commissioned by the internet café that it decorates. Six large portraits are featured in the foreground with a checkerboard background, a common motif in DjLu’s project. Each of the six portraits are stencils created from photographs DjLu has taken of the people he has met in around

Bogotá and throughout Colombia. In the far-right panel in the photograph the central figure is one of Bogotá’s street musicians. Surrounding the saxophonist and within the squares of the checkerboard are six of DjLu’s pictograms: a “war bug” fly with wings made out of assault rifles; a soldier holding three balloons on strings and each of the balloons is a grenade; a Christ figure on a cross in which the horizontal beam of the cross is an assault rifle; an image of the earth with a bomb fuse attached; the silhouette of a factory emitting smog in the shape of the

Earth’s continents; and finally, a scale in which five small figures with briefcases are outweighed by a single figure in a reclining chair. Above the right shoulder of the saxophonist are DjLu’s signature cartouche and the “Juegasiempre” label. This single artwork is representative of the larger project: everyday Colombian folk are surrounded by a pestilence of guns, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary troops with devastation at their fingertips, controversial religious perspectives, environmental devastation, industrial pollution, and unfair business practices.

DjLu claims that he does not intend to provide an answer to these problems, or even a perspective, rather his aim is to provoke thought in those who encounter his work: “So I just put

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the stone in the path of the people, and if they found it, if they find the stencil in the streets, I hope it’s an invitation to think, to think differently, you know?” The invitation to think differently is more extensive than the description above can capture. The central figures in the other panels of “Orgullo de calle” are a person in a biohazard suit, a bearded man with a raised fist and a speech bubble with the American dollar sign inside (the vertical lines of the dollar sign are replaced by an assault rifle), an accordion-playing street musician. The fifth panel features two large stencils, the first, an indigenous woman with her child, the second a pair of young boys. In each of the panels the central image is backed by the same checkerboard pattern with a variety of pictograms – more guns and grenades, depictions of consumerism, toxic Earths, and accompanying all of the panels: at least one war bug with assault weapons for wings. While

“Orgullo de calle” is unique, the stencils used to create it are recycled from DjLu’s repertoire.

Each of the central stenciled figures on this five-panel wall have appeared elsewhere in Bogotá.

The background patterns and colors change, and which pictograms accompany and frame the figures all seem to be improvised in each piece. Figure 12 features the same saxophonist from the first panel described above, this time swarmed by a collage of the mosquito and wasp variations on the “war bug” and word “siempre” [“always”] in various sizes and colors on a solid light blue background.

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Figure 12. The stenciled saxophonist from "Orgullo de Calle" reused. Photo by DjLu.

Used under Creative Commons license.

DjLu’s checkerboard background evokes a game of chess or checkers – both head-to- head games of strategy and tactics. The playfulness of the gameboard is reinforced by the

“Juegasiempre” tag ever present in his larger pieces, but there are also strong elements of contention within the black and white square: there are always two opposing players in a game of chess or checkers, and each is a game of opposition and contention, analogous to war. Also, chess maintains a presence in the public sphere in Bogotá on the Séptima, much like in New

York City’s Washington Square Park, there are always games of chess being played on the

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street, often with large crowds of onlookers. The squares of the board also offer boundaries, separation for each of DjLu’s pictograms, each of which becomes a piece of the board, individual warriors in the game of semiotics DjLu has set up.

DjLu’s chessboards of pictograms are found around Bogotá in numerous variations, never the same pictograms, never in the same place on the checkerboards. But each of these game boards provokes similar questions. How do these pieces or pictograms contend with one another? With themselves? How do the individual elements of the pictograms, sometimes contradictory or paradoxical, struggle for ideological dominance or control? Are these the questions DjLu wants us to ask? My answer to this question (not his) is yes. DjLu provokes his audience to “think differently,” regardless of the perspective or politics of the reader. In this way, any question raised is the right question.

The central figures in each of the panels are much larger than the pictograms that surround them. The people are foregrounded against a chessboard – a war of symbols – just as the people on the streets of Bogotá, or any urban setting, are surrounded by a war of symbols, a society of the spectacle in which social relationships are mediated by images, as Debord would have it. Yet DjLu doesn’t deny or lament the spectacle and its dominance; rather he chooses to speak back to Debord’s spectacle in the spectacle’s own language, appropriating the symbols it has developed to undermine society’s message. The layering of meaning within DjLu’s work can be read as both literal and figurative. In the literal sense, the pieces are made up of literal layers, single-color layers of paint laid down one on top of the other to create images. Within these layers of paint, DjLu’s audience can dig for meaning. The central figures dominate. They are

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surrounded by pictograms. The pictograms each pose their own individual questions. At the top of each of the panels in the piece are DjLu’s most ubiquitous pictograms: the war bugs.

In the curated art world of museums and galleries, visibility comes at a cost, generally composed of experience, talent, and sometimes belonging to the right circles. Belonging and participation are flip sides of the citizenship coin. Without one, the other is necessarily absent. It was the feeling of being on the outside looking into the smaller, more elite circles of the traditional art world that provided DjLu with the motivation to take his art out onto the streets.

The visibility which is so difficult to achieve or acquire in the museums and galleries comes at essentially no cost in the streets. For an urban artist, the streets offer an even playing ground, a wide-open canvas virtually guaranteed to attract eyeballs. DjLu’s casual rejection of the pursuit of financial gain through his art is to some degree suspect since he is otherwise gainfully employed teaching in the fine arts. His is a double life in which he pursues his art project across

Bogotá, without fear, without the pressure of needing substantial recognition to support his project.

The circles of artists that speak in codes in the “traditional” art world certainly exist in the world of art on the streets. Many graffiti artists and street artists band together in crews – a term sometimes reserved more specifically for graffiti artists, but DjLu is has a close circle of collaborators. His work is found in close proximity to, in conversation with the work of artists like Toxicomano, Lesivo, Crisp, and others. But these groups, these circles of artists do not hold the keys to unopened doors. Gallery exhibitions are not the prize. In urban art, you are not waiting for a gallery invitation. The invitation has already arrived in the form of blank walls, or

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over-painted walls, neglected walls, spaces or places or aesthetic niches begging to be re-done, replaced. In this way, a concern for belonging, for inclusion within a community, for the rights of outsiders to participate within a community, is foundational to his move from a traditional trajectory within the fine art community to the non-traditional community of urban artists.

Conclusion

Understood through the lens of the urban imaginary, Juegasiempre becomes as transgressive citizenship performance, one that challenges both what it means to be a citizen of the city and the patterns of behavior that characterize Bogotano citizenship. No longer is visual recognition the claim to fame for street artists, many have also broken successfully into the mainstream art world and have created versions of their work for galleries by replicating their street art style on canvases or other media. While this may be the case, it continues to be an exception to the rule. DjLu, for example, has created t-shirts, stickers, and even shoes that are available on the commercial marketplace, but recognition of his work continues to come from his visibility in Bogotá, and through photographs of his work that he uploads to Flickr, where he has attracted 4,100 followers.

Bogotá has become a mecca for street artists since 2011, when the mayor of the city designated certain of the city’s walls as legal spaces for street artists. This of course directly challenges street art’s status as a counter-cultural voice. It is an act of assimilation by the state- legalizing, legitimizing, and thereby exercising a new element of control over the work that is being created. The city quickly earned a reputation for its liberal stance and street artists from around the world flocked to Colombia to get in on the action. Meanwhile, the locals have taken 129

advantage of the fact that it is now possible to create massive works in the public eye, occasionally even posting videos of themselves creating works, and in those cases street art has become explicitly a performance, and some artists like DjLu have crossed over into more commercial ventures, marketing everything from buttons to shoes.

Despite new commercial opportunities, the growing acceptance/ legalization/ commodification of urban art has not yet co-opted the counter-cultural narrative. In most cases, the most prevalent type of street art continues to be graffiti tags, and while tags can occasionally contain political messages, the principle message of taggers continues to be the simplest message: “I am here.” Graffiti and street art is dominated by artists from marginalized sectors of society, though DjLu is not, and continues to be a voice and a representation for these populations within the urban topography. The visual landscape in public urban spaces is predominantly controlled by government or religious interests and corporate branding, and as such the visual landscape has become a mouthpiece for powerful and wealthy institutions which leaves no room for response. Street art repertoires seek to interrupt this visual field, contesting the narratives of powerful interests by super-imposing performed discourses over the urban topography. In this way, street art continues to maintain its position as witness to and for urban counter-cultures even as the form itself evolves and integrates into the global cultural marketplace.

26 “Parecía que el joven iba a dispararle” 27 “¿por qué si el joven le iba a disparar estaba de espaldas?, ¿por qué si supuestamente estaban robando no capturaron a los otros dos jóvenes, sobre todo cuando uno de ellos fue hasta la clínica

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y estuvo frente a frente a la policía?, ¿por qué no se ha sabido nada de los pasajeros del supuesto bus que intentaron robar?” 28 “…en el que convergen varias disciplinas en su construcción epistemológica, se ocupa de lo que está por fuera de marco de la racionalidad positiva, para enmarcar los sentimientos, los deseos ciudadanos, las fantasías de lo inesperado que se manifiestan como promesa de manera colectiva.” 29 “El imaginario no sólo es representación simbólica de lo que ocurre, sino también es el lugar de elaboración de insatisfacciones, deseos, búsqueda de comunicación con los otros.” 30 “a lo cultural, a lo simbólico, a la complejidad y la heterogeneidad de lo social en la ciudad.” 31 “Las ciudades no son sólo un fenómeno físico, un modo de ocupar el espacio, de aglomerarse, sino también lugares donde ocurren fenómenos expresivos que entran en tensión con la racionalización, con las pretensiones de racionalizar la vida social.” 32 “Las ciudades se construyen con casas y parques, calles, autopistas y señales de tránsito. Pero las ciudades se configuran también con imágenes. Pueden ser las de los planos que las inventan y las ordenan. Pero también imaginan el sentido de la vida urbana las novelas, canciones y películas, los relatos de la prensa, la radio y televisión. La ciudad se vuelve densa al cargarse con fantasías heterogéneas. La urbe programada para funcionar, diseñada en cuadrícula, se desborda y se multiplica en ficciones individuales y colectivas.” 33 “Lo imaginario afecta los modos de simbolizar de aquello que conocemos como realidad y esta actividad se cuela en todas las instancias de nuestra vida social.” 34 Agreement 482 is published in both English and Spanish on the website for the Secretaría de Cultura, Recreación y Deporte. www.culturarecreacionydeporte.gov.co. 35 Me interesa evidenciar el conflicto del que somos participes a todo nivel, no solamente entendido como la guerra. Me preocupan problemáticas como la intolerancia religiosa, la polarización y radicalización política, el capitalismo y consumo desmedido, la apatía ante la vida y la sumisión ante los medios y las grandes corporaciones, la dependencia de los combustibles fósiles a costa de la destrucción del planeta y de las especies que en él habitamos. Me preocupa la guerra como negocio, el desplazamiento social y el cambio en los usos de la tierra. 36 Definitions and usage of “street art”, “graffiti”, and “urban art” vary. For the purpose of clarity and consistency, I will be using “street art” to refer to all works of art created in public space, and “graffiti” to refer to that subset of street art that consists entirely of calligraphic lettering. I refer to those who create street art as “street artists” and those who work in graffiti as “writers”, following the usage of artists and writers themselves. I will define other related terms as they arise, following the common usage of the artists, as I have encountered them. 37 A “piece” is short for “masterpiece”, and is the term used to refer to large-scale works, particularly those that require a substantial amount of time to create. 38 A “throw-up” is a mid- or large-sized work of graffiti, in which the writer sprays a single-color background, often not entirely filled in, followed by a quick outline of two or three bubble letters in a second color. “Tags” are graffiti works that are entirely made up of the letters, numbers, and symbol, usually painted in a single color. Tags are almost always pseudonyms, but within the street art culture, street artists and graffiti writers131 are always referred to by the tag rather than their proper names.

Chapter 4. Presences and Dissensus on Carrera Séptima

“Historic centers interest me. In Colombia, they are centers of forgetting.” -Photographer Juan Cristóbol Cobo, quoted in Correal.

In the first two chapters of this dissertation I examined citizenship performances created by artists and politicians. This chapter focuses not on the citizenship performances of a particular group but on those legible in a singular cultural space – Bogotá’s Carrera Séptima (Seventh

Avenue), referred to simply as the Séptima by the locals. Building on Diana Taylor’s notion of presencing and Jacques Rancière’s theorization of dissensus, this chapter argues that the annual

Workers’ Day march held on the first of May on the Séptima presences the lives, struggles, and histories of Colombia’s working class, allowing marchers and spectators alike to participate in the affect that emanates from the violent past, including abuses of human and labor rights, along with the kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations that permeate Colombian cultural history. In so doing, the Workers’ Day march remaps Colombian cultural citizenship on the Séptima and thereby exemplifies citizenship performance: it challenges dominant notions of who belongs to the cultural community by staking claims for laborers and victims of the conflict, and it contests notions of how the community behaves collectively by resisting histories of violence, by highlighting the abuses of the government and corporate institutions, and by embodying and proclaiming alternative modes of public moral comportment.

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The Workers’ Day March is framed by multiple constituents, each of which produces multiple readings. The authorities, the labor unions and syndicates, the bystanders, each bring varying perspectives. Despite the day on which it occurs, the march is more than a call for the political recognition of the labor movement and workers’ rights. It is also a call to arms and a call to peace. The event directly contests the history of violence that has engulfed Colombia for more than half a century, a history that began with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and whose bloodiest single event was the storming of the Palace of Justice, both of which occurred on the Séptima. The avenue is reconfigured and re-signified by bodies and signs during the march. The Workers’ Day march is framed, both literally and figuratively, on the one hand by the authorities – the heavy police presence throughout the march, the shoulder to shoulder wall of riot-gear bodies that protects and immunizes government buildings and churches – and on the other hand by the marchers themselves, whose signs and chants emphasize the violence and oppression perpetrated by the government and paramilitary organizations. Both perspectives underscore the perceived threat of violence, and the fear that the citizens involved in the march present a threat to state and religious institutions and vice-versa. As the march approaches the

Plaza de Bolívar, the police presence becomes more pronounced. Barricades and police with protective shields and helmets seclude the new Palace of Justice and other important government buildings, while off the main march route armored vehicles wait in anticipation of any violent demonstration. The militarized presence of the police controls the flow of bodies. Especially near the Plaza de Bolívar, numerous side streets are closed off altogether, hedging in the volatile mass of bodies, preventing escape should anything untoward occur.

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This chapter builds on my earlier chapters on the political and aesthetic performances staged in public spaces by Antanas Mockus and Mapa Teatro and the intervention into the visual discourse of Bogotá made by urban artists like DjLu by investigating how citizens negotiate the behavioral and architectural histories of one of Bogotá’s most important cultural spaces. It considers how the aesthetic performances in the Workers’ Day march echo or ghost events, performances, and modos de hacer of the past. I contextualize the citizenship performances of the Workers’ Day march within the history of the Séptima itself, the modos de hacer of its inhabitants, the architecture, and the cultural and symbolic resonances that shape contemporary performances along the avenue. Like Mapa Teatro’s Witness to the Ruins and DjLu’s

Juegasiempre, the Workers’ Day march challenges the urban social imaginary of Bogotá’s residents by reframing the cultural and political history of the city.

This chapter relies significantly on my own experience of Bogotá as a temporary resident and spectator of the Workers’ Day march, and therefore contains passages of first-person narrative. If I were to reframe the argument of this chapter from a supposedly objective third- person perspective, I would risk undermining one of the central premises of the chapter: any experience or interpretation of the various performances that take place in an urban public setting are predicated on the spectator’s unique perspective. My experience of the Séptima is framed by my own spatial imaginary: my knowledge of the space and its history; my ability to decode cultural signifiers; my ability to negotiate social encounters; and finally, my own mood or emotional state that I bring with me into the space. Moreover, my direct experience of the

Séptima is limited to the period I was physically present in the space in April and May of 2014

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and 2015, and my own individual vantage point: my physical position relative to the events observed limited what I saw. During the Workers’ Day march documented below, there were elements I could carefully examine, just as there were certain groups, banners, and signs that I was unable to clearly read, or which I may have altogether missed. There is an additional indirect experience of the space that evolved through research: articles, documents, photos and videos, discussions with others, and my own ruminations about the space each in turn contribute to my spatial imaginary of the Séptima.

During my first research trip to Bogotá in May of 2014, I had various inclinations about what I wanted to research, and more than a handful of ideas about what modes of analysis I might pursue. But one piece of advice lingered in the back of my mind (I do not recall the source of this advice, but hearty thanks is due to whomever gave it me): unexpected discoveries are often the best part of field research. Bolstered by that thought, I was determined to experience the city on its own terms; to let the city guide me toward its own unexpected discoveries, rather than to limit myself to those libraries, archives, museums, and theatres I had presumed would bear fruit prior to my arrival. What better way to avoid some of the pitfalls of my own pre- conceived notions than to allow the city itself to guide my footsteps? As I left my hotel in the mornings, I had a general idea of what I wanted to accomplish during the day: visit the Museum of Gold, followed by a trip to the library, for example, being sure to photograph compelling works of street art along the way, and exploring any detour that might seem worthwhile. Thus, I found myself repeatedly drawn up the Avenida Jiménez de Quesada toward the Séptima, as it was the location of the Museum of Gold, the best route to the library, the location of Mapa

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Teatro’s casa, as well as a good place to find street food, to see street performances of music, the routine of a Michael Jackson impersonator, the social satire of a transgender performer, and to browse the wares of hawkers and vendors of all sorts.

My travels on the Séptima were guided by the architecture, pointed by the topography of the city, but also led by the modos de hacer of its inhabitants: the flow of bodies through public space that swept me repeatedly, perhaps inevitably, back to the Séptima, this fascinating, turgid, effervescent, heterogenous, and paradoxical avenue almost universally acknowledged as one of

Bogotá’s most important cultural spaces. The flows that directed my path may have begun with enticements of the senses like music, dancing, or the calls of vendors; or with enticements of the mind, like the historic, religious, and artistic attractions that pepper the avenue. But eventually, through repetition and familiarity, I began to set out with purpose. My journey up and down the

Séptima came to be a daily practice. Through this repetition I became familiar with the routines of the space. Interactions with the various inhabitants of the space – at first labored and occasionally ineffective – in time became habitual and entirely efficient. I learned, for example, exactly how to order a coffee from a local vendor who grinds coffee beans by hand and makes espresso with an antique steam contraption built into his cart. He asks each customer how they like their coffee and then steams the espresso, watering it down to the perfect color, adding milk or syrup made from raw cane sugar to achieve his result. He operates with a set of metal pitchers, mixing them as needed to preserve every drop of coffee, milk, and syrup, serving each customer a customized beverage, while avoiding the need to rinse or wash his pitchers. There is an

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efficiency in his practice, one born of a lifetime of making coffee that allows him to produce a cup exactly to his customers’ tastes.

Another man I encountered frequently on the Séptima takes wagers on a game played with guinea pigs. The guinea pigs sit side by side along an invisible starting line, waiting

(usually) for his command. Some twenty or thirty feet away are a variety of colored bowls turned upside-down, with numbers written on top. Each bowl has a small guinea pig door cut out and the proprietor places a bit of food under each one. He calls out to the crowds, always substantial around his area even on the Séptima’s off-hours, raising his carnival barker voice above the din, daring onlookers to place wagers on which of the bowls a guinea pig will choose, who place their bets directly on one of the bowls. Once the old man has enticed enough bets, he gives the word and exactly one guinea pig will race down and dive under one of the dozen or so bowls. The prize goes to the person who wagered on the bowl the guinea pig has chosen.

It against this backdrop of the quotidian and the carnivalesque that the Workers’ Day march takes place. Rather than looking at the Workers’ Day march on the Séptima as a merely political or sociological event, I endeavor to understand it as a citizenship performance – an event that engages the discourse of Colombian citizenship at a variety of levels. There are the posters of the missing and the dead from the long civil war, but there is also drumming, traditional Colombian dancing and costumes, a very long Colombian flag held aloft by enthusiastic marchers, alongside the visibility of the labor movements and political candidates.

There are demands for rights – human rights, workers’ rights, rights of the planet, rights of the disappeared and the victimized, rights of the ostracized and marginalized, rights of the dead to

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justice, and victims’ families to vengeance. Perhaps most powerful right of all: the right of the government to permit the march to occur, to control it, shape its course, limit its boundaries and visibility, and frame the performances therein.

My analysis in this chapter engages with Ranciere’s notion of dissensus and Taylor’s neologism presencing, which she derives from the Spanish verb presenciar, to explore the ways in which the Workers´ Day march on the Séptima contests Colombian cultural citizenship. In their introduction, the editors of Communities of Sense, "recognize a contingent and nonessential manner of being-together in a community whose coherence is no more than a fiction or a potentiality. Such a concept of community acknowledges politics to contain a sensuous or aesthetic aspect that is irreducible to ideology and idealization" (2). The essays, "aim to reconsider and reopen the problem of community and collectivity as a crucial aporia of the historical avant-garde that has reemerged today, as contemporary artistic practices engage with the realities of globalization" (2). The editors of this volume, Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen,

Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormich, are right that community is “irreducible to ideology and idealization,” and that it has become a “crucial aporia” for scholars to consider, but community is certainly more than a fiction or potentiality: it is a bond that grows not out of identity or ideology, but out of shared social space. While it may not be precisely the case that the Workers’ Day march constitutes an artistic practice, it is certainly an aesthetic practice and an embodied community practice. As such, it exemplifies what Rancière has referred to as dissensus. Rancière’s defines dissensus as, “an organization of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of

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the given imposing its obviousness on all. It means that every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a regime of perception and signification” (Emancipated 48-9). He provides an alternative definition of the concept in his book Dissensus: “A dissensus is not a conflict of interests, opinions or values; it is a division inserted in ‘common sense’: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given” (77). While there is a visibly coherent community among the marchers themselves, it is difficult to reconcile the marchers and the national police with their riot gear as belonging to the same community.

Rancière’s dissensus enables us to understand the existence of a social link between the two groups while their shared social space on the Séptima provides a physical link, despite their opposing regimes of perception and signification.

Dissensus challenges the formation of cultural citizenship on ideological grounds. It implores us to think about communities as fundamentally heterogenous. The police lining the

Séptima and the people who march on Workers’ Day are one community, even if on this one day they are opposed to one another. The opposition of the police and the marchers is not limited to past experiences, rather, the tension was palpable on the street. The presence of riot gear and armored vehicles demonstrate that violence was expected by the government. Marchers wearing bandanas across their faces to conceal their identities demonstrates a fear of possible reprisals.

Rancière argues in Dissensus that “the rights of men” has shifted to mean “the rights of citizens” (70). This shift enables the continued marginalization of those peoples not formally citizens of a national community. Additionally, this marginalization in practice extends to those persons not recognized as members of the national communal fabric, people who are non-

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citizens in a cultural sense even if they are formally citizens in the political sense, including racial minorities, indigenous peoples, those on the LGBTQ spectrum, etc. Most importantly for

Colombia, we can also see that this includes persons cast by the state and/or media as outside of the national community, regardless of class, race, ethnicity, or formal legal status. In Colombia, the guerrilla groups FARC and ELN are both characterized as “revolutionary,” or anti-state. A revolt against state forces becomes a revolt against the national community. If we follow

Rancière’s logic, the guerrilla groups are not citizens in the informal sense, and thereby not included in those deserving of human rights. This same line of argument applies also to the labor movement in Colombia, whose agendas frequently conflict with those of the neoliberal central government. The labor groups may then be cast, like the guerrillas, as anti-state, providing a false justification for ongoing assassinations of labor leaders. Whose voices and lives are heard and represented? Among those whose lives have been lost, whose are being remembered? And whose are forgotten? Among those who are living today, whose voices are being heard? And whose are ignored, drowned out, or dismissed? What traditions are practiced and celebrated?

Which ones are appropriated, commercialized, or erased?

Taylor’s notion of presencing enables an understanding of how citizenship performances like the Workers’ Day march on the Séptima can help to reverse the marginalization of these groups and assert their membership in the cultural community. In Villa Grimaldi, Taylor discusses her experience of a tour she took in 2006 of Chile’s Villa Grimaldi, a camp where four- thousand five-hundred people were tortured, and two-hundred twenty-six people were

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disappeared. Her tour guide, Matta, began the tour describing the victims using impersonal third- person pronouns, but eventually began to use the first-person plural. She remarks:

He has survived to tell. Being in place with him communicates a very different

sense of the crimes than looking down on the model. Walking through Villa

Grimaldi with Matta brings the past up close, past as actually not past. Now. Here.

And in many parts of the world, as we speak. I can’t think past that, rooted as I

am to place suddenly restored as practice. I too am part of this scenario now; I

don’t need to lock myself up in the cell to be doing. I presenciar; I presence (as

active verb). Embodied cognition, neuroscientists call this, but we in theatre have

always understood it as mimesis and empathy – we learn and absorb by mirroring

other people. I participate not in the events but in his transmission of the affect

emanating from the events. (1.1)

The Oxford Spanish Dictionary translates presenciar as, “to witness; to be present at, to attend.” Taylor’s shift here, in retranslating presenciar as “presence,” not only makes the English noun into an active verb, but imbues it with layered meaning. To “presence,” as Taylor is using it, is not only to bear witness to past events and to participate in the affect emanating from them, but to bring them into the present. The “past as actually not past,” but rather present. Here. Now.

To presence is to share and participate in the embodied cognition of past events, issues, and interests. The ghosts of these past events present along the Séptima – Gaitán’s assassination, the storming of the Palace of Justice, also the music and dancing, the street art, and vendors – the ghosts of these events are not mere reflections or wisps of images in the backs of our minds, they

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are the spirit of these events, the emanations of affect that live embodied in the citizens who have experienced them, carried with the people in their social imaginaries. The Workers’ Day march asserts the presence of the labor movement in Colombia. It builds a consciousness within the cultural citizenship of Colombia, reifying the demand for human rights, especially in cases where corporate or government interests have overlooked or obscured the rights of individuals and marginalized communities in favor of presumed economic development or stability.

The Workers’ Day march provides an opportunity for the working class to respond to the power brokers of Colombia, and within the march there are performances of national identity, traditions, and goals: several groups of marchers carry Colombian flags – one of them long enough to be held up by fifty people or so – staking claims to national identity; one group dances the Sanjuanero dance, perhaps the most recognizable of Colombian traditional dances, with the women in ruffled off-the-shoulder blouses and wide skirts striped in the red, yellow, and blue of

Colombia’s flag, while the men dance in plain dress shirts with white trousers, red bandanas, and wide-brimmed vueltiao hats; nearly all of the groups marching carry banners and placards that outline the goals of the groups. Even as the Workers’ Day march allows a subset of Colombia’s citizens to contest cultural citizenship, the power brokers of Colombia refuse to let the demonstrations go unchecked. During the march, the Séptima is highly controlled. The avenue itself is lined with National Police in full riot gear containing the crowds squeezed in and stretched the length of the march. The route of the march is clearly defined and access to the

Plaza de Bolívar – the final destination – is tightly hemmed in on all sides. Barricades are erected the night before the march allowing access to the Plaza only from the north on the Séptima. All

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other routes of entry or exit are closed, protected not only by the police and barricades, but also by armored military vehicles with artillery already trained on the crowds. Should the march descend into violence there will be no means of escape.

In his essay, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood unpacks Michel de Certeau’s aphorism in The Practice of

Everyday Life, “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across” (129), and suggests that it, “points to transgressive travel between two different domains of knowledge: one official, objective, and abstract – ‘the map’; the other one practical, embodied, and popular – ‘the story’” (369).

Conquergood relates this latter form of knowledge to Foucault’s “subjugated knowledges,” which Foucault relegates to the bottom of the epistemic totem pole. Conquergood argues, “What gets squeezed out by this epistemic violence is the whole realm of complex, finely nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured, improvised, coexperienced, covert – all the more deeply meaningful because of its refusal to be spelled out” (370). Part of my aim in this chapter is not simply to map out the history of the Séptima, but to uncover some portion of

Foucault’s subjugated knowledges that lurk underneath the march on the 1st of May, the complex, finely nuanced meaning that Conquergood argues gets pushed to the side. How does this event, taking place along one of Colombia’s richest cultural corridors, illuminate Colombian cultural citizenship? How can this march help us understand who the Colombians perceive themselves to be and how they behave together? Conquergood echoes this question, pointing out that the kinds of questions raised by practical, embodied knowledge are the questions of

“‘knowing how,’ and ‘knowing who’” (370). What then is the relationship between the bodies on

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guard – the national police – and the bodies-in-motion – the marchers? What symbols are being deployed, appropriated, or renegotiated?

Jill Dolan’s “Rehearsing Democracy” argues that practicing participatory democracy should be the centerpiece of arts education. If this is the case, understanding the modalities of public participation from a performance studies perspective becomes crucial. How can we create a participatory art without understanding how regular citizens participate? In what ways are these modalities encouraged, coerced, shaped, limited, or denied by government policy or police action? How do citizens accept or challenge government policies and police actions? How does the social imaginary of the citizens limit their responses? The Workers’ Day march exemplifies one of the modes by which Colombian citizens participate in the political and social economies of the country, and demonstrates the confrontational stances that have characterized all sides of the civil conflict.

The Séptima: Bogotá’s behavioral vortex of cultural citizenship

The Séptima is one of Bogotá’s main North-South thoroughfares. It is an avenue that carries a social history that began before the arrival of the Spanish. The Séptima was once as an indigenous road, known as the Camino de la Sal (Salt Road) by the Spanish as there were salt mines in nearby Usuquén and Nemocón. The two colonial nuclei of Bogotá were the Plaza de

San Francisco (now the Parque de Santander) and the Plaza Mayor (now the Plaza de Bolívar).

The Séptima began as the road connecting these two points in the city in 1538 and 1539

(“Historia de la Carrera Séptima”). It extended north of the Plaza de San Francisco by the end of

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the sixteenth century and continued to be a central avenue as it grew and extended along with the city. Today the Séptima links the centers of government and commercial power.

The avenue has been the site of momentous events in the cultural history of Colombia.

Among the most significant events in Colombia’s violent history took place on the corner of the

Séptima and 14th Street (Calle 14) on 9 April, 1948. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a populist leader in

Colombia, a former mayor of Bogotá, as well as former Labor Minister and Education Minister, was assassinated as he stepped out of his office. In the period just prior to his death, Gaitán had firmly established himself as the popular leader of the Liberal Party and likely would have won the next presidential election. His death set off the Bogotazo, a weeks-long riot that killed more than three thousand people, destroyed hundreds of buildings, and quickly spread to other cities across the country. Even as the violence spread throughout the country, the Séptima was its epicenter. There are widely circulated photographs of the burning hulls of the streetcars that for sixty years had provided the principle form of transportation along the Séptima. After the

Bogotazo, the streetcars never returned. The Bogotazo was the beginning of a ten-year ultra- violent period of Colombia’s history, known simply as La Violencia (The Violence), during which more than two-hundred thousand people were killed by the more conservative estimates; others suggest the number was closer to three-hundred thousand. As with so much of Colombia’s history, there are disputes over who was responsible for the assassination itself.

With the demise of the streetcars, the Séptima began to transform into a pedestrian avenue. The section of the Séptima leading north from the Plaza de Bolívar, now closed to vehicles for some twenty blocks, connects the center of institutional power with Bogotá’s

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business district. Today it is home to a wide variety of street performers, vendors, food carts selling fruit cups, arepas, obleas, and all sorts of meats, government buildings, the Museum of

Art and the Museum of Gold, churches, markets, shops, and theatres. It is the site of the annual procession of Corpus Christi and funeral processions for Colombia’s celebrities and politicians, carnivals, student protests, and the weekly ciclovía or “cycleway,” in which more than one- hundred and twenty kilometers of roadways are closed to motor vehicles for the use of bicycles every Sunday from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. From the official founding of the city, to the tragic assault on the Supreme Court at Plaza de Bolívar, to the assassination of

Gaitan, to the bombings that have frequented the Séptima from the government center all the way up to the neighborhood of Chapinero miles to the north, the Séptima has become what

Roach has called a behavioral vortex, a lived space marked by histories of violence, power, commerce, and leisure that attracts Bogotano citizens and visitors alike with the riches of its cultural fabric.

In considering this space, I respond to Massey’s call in For Space to reconsider how we conceptualize space by examining the interplay between the architecture, the social and political history of the space, and the repertoires of quotidian performances that have evolved in parallel with these histories. I take account of the space itself, the lived, relational, and heterogenous space that Massey uncovers. While her work does not completely theorize this space, she uncovers the ways in which contemporary theorization of space has proven inadequate, arguing that Western philosophy has relegated the theory of space to a position subservient to time.

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Space, she argues, is rarely considered as anything more than a snapshot of time; a photograph, a map:

What is needed, I think, is to uproot ‘space’ from that constellation of concepts in

which it has so unquestioningly so often been embedded (stasis; closure;

representation) and to settle it among another set of ideas (heterogeneity;

relationality; coevalness… liveliness indeed) where it releases a more challenging

political landscape. (13)

What follows then considers the citizenship performances of the residents of Bogotá along one of the most prominent shared social spaces in Colombia’s capital. While it might be argued that the Plaza de Bolívar is the most important cultural space in the city, it isn’t trafficked by everyday citizens of Bogotá to the degree that the Séptima is. In the evenings, and especially on the weekends, the Séptima is packed with people. Some travel along the Séptima to get to and from work. Some come to find quick street food, fresh fruit, a cup of coffee or tinto on their lunch hours. Others walk the Séptima to enjoy the street performances or barter with buskers.

The Workers’ Day march on the Séptima demonstrates that the labor movement is imbricated in the history of violence in the country – not just the violence of the cartels and guerrillas, but also of the government (regardless of the party in power), multinational corporations, and paramilitaries – and illuminates some of the ways in which these institutions have mutually devolved into corruption.

I examine the march in 2014 as it marked the beginning an important turning point in

Colombia’s political history: the political struggle over a peace deal. President Santos had

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initiated peace talks with the FARC guerrillas. These talks, taking place in Cuba, unleashed a torrent of political debates in Colombia. The rebels wanted a means to engage in the political discourse of the country by being allowed to form a political party with guaranteed representation in the congress and to be granted immunity from prosecution for those actions carried out by FARC rebels deemed not to be war crimes. In exchange for disarming and submitting to prosecution for war crimes, the FARC leaders demanded that government officials also be subject to prosecution for their alleged crimes by the special court. This demand was, and still is, particularly problematic for those conservative members of the government who had supported the formation of paramilitaries in the 1990s. Of note is the vulnerability of the anti- peace leader Álvaro Uribe Vélez. Uribe, is a former president of Colombia (2002-2010) and still a major force in the Democratic Center (Centro Democratico) party, whose platform has been militaristic opposition to FARC and ELN and against bilateral ceasefires, including the current peace deal with FARC. He is currently under investigation by Colombia’s Supreme Court for allegedly having organized several massacres executed by the paramilitary AUC. One of the former commanders with the AUC, Pablo Hernan Sierra, alias “Alberto Guerrero,” has claimed that Uribe, “was our commander. He never fired a gun; but he led, he contributed, he was our man at the top…. The massacres, the disappearances, the creation of an [AUC] group: he is responsible” (De Rivas). Since Uribe’s protégé, Iván Duque Marquez, won the 2018 presidential election, the peace deal with FARC rebels has begun to unravel. As Colombian struggles to find a resolution to the civil conflict, citizenship performances like the Workers’ Day march are

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prime grounds for contesting and renegotiating what the cultural fabric will look like going forward.

Workers’ Day March 2014: Presencing institutional violence

It’s May 1st, 2014. I’ve been in Bogotá less than a week and I’ve already become familiar with the Séptima, walking the avenue on my way to the Plaza de Bolívar, visiting the Museo del

Oro (Gold Museum) and the casa of Mapa Teatro. There had been some mention in the news of a march along the Séptima marking the International Workers’ Day. At first, I was uninterested in going to the march, but early morning sounds of drums and festivities getting under way drew me out of my hotel room and out onto Avenida Jiménez. A few blocks to the west crowds were gathering along the Séptima. My interest piqued by the commotion, I joined the trickle of bodies flowing toward the Séptima. The presence of police carrying riot gear and a truck parked at the intersection displaying pictures of the dead and disappeared from Colombia’s long civil war convinced me that the march might be an important event in shaping my own thinking about how the people of Bogotá resist histories of violence in the city. The truck and the police manifested the tension present in much of Colombian culture. One is an overt display of resistance and remembrance, the other an embodiment of the state’s coercion and control of Colombian citizens. I returned to my hotel, gathered up my camera and notebook and prepared to be out for the day.

Standing in the middle of the Séptima looking north from Avenida Jiménez a few minutes later that morning, I was immediately struck by the heavy police presence along the

Séptima. The police lined both sides of the street, an officer every six to eight feet standing on 149

the edge of the sidewalk as far as the eye could see. As the march had yet to make it this far south, some of the police had yet to put down the face shields on their riot helmets. Even as the overwhelming presence of the police signaled the potentiality of a violent outbreak in the coming hours – a potential that didn’t materialize in the two years I was present at the march – the individual officers’ posture was relaxed. Riot helmets had yet to be donned and riot shields rested casually on the concrete sidewalk. Here and there the officers gathered in small clumps, chatting aimlessly while casting a wary eye on passers-by. A scattered mix of pedestrians ambled down the middle of the Séptima, and I with them, flowing to the north, upstream as it were, toward the beginning of the parade and the wave of bodies that were heading our way. I met the front wave of the parade at Calle 18 (18th Street).

Dozens of individual groups participate in the annual Workers’ Day March. Some represent the major labor unions in Colombia, and some march for local syndicates. Nearly all the groups in the event wear identifying hats or t-shirts, enhancing their visibility and giving strength to the power of their claims. Some of the syndicates advertised their own specific agendas, whether those were broad platforms for human rights, or specific grievances against the government or the companies for whom they work. Each of the labor groups that march in the parade carry a large banner in front, and most have a single leader with a megaphone calling out various chants. All of them repeat the cry “Presente! Presente! Presente!” This presencing of the unions is polyvocal, and repeated; thrice-behaved behavior, so to speak.

A large banner stretched across the Séptima at Calle 18 read, “Nicolás Neira/ 11 Oct

1989 – 1 Mayo 2005/ 9 years of impunity is not justice/ lying is not truth/ crumbs are not

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reparation/ assassinated by the National Police.”39 The spot where the banner hung was the very location at which in 2005, Nicolás Neira received multiple blows to the head at the hands of the

Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios de la Policía (Mobil Anti-disturbance Squadron of the Police), a division of the National Police, during the Workers’ Day march. Neira was fifteen years old. The police used tear gas and had kicked and hit marchers with batons to disperse the crowd. The officers claimed that Neira had been wounded in a stampede and that they weren’t present at the time to witness it but rather arrived on the scene after his injuries. Eyewitnesses contradicted the police account and claimed that Neira was among those attacked by police with batons, who continued to beat Neira even after he had lost consciousness; they never administered first aid nor called for an ambulance (“Por homicidio”). Fellow marchers put Neira in a taxi and took him to the nearest medical clinic. That clinic, the Centro de Atención Médica Inmediata de

Perseverancia (or CAMI), was unable to treat Neira’s severe head trauma and transported Neira to Clínica Saludcoop where he died five days later, on 6 May 2005. Nicolás Neira’s portrait on the banner over the Séptima didn’t only memorialize a youth lost to endemic violence and call for justice: it framed the performance of the march itself and highlighted the potential violence of the event. Neira died as a result of violence in the very march in which we all were participating: the marchers, the onlookers, and the police alike.

Like Diego Felipe Becerra’s death a few years later, the loss of a teenage boy at the hands of the police catalyzed the community. There are numerous parallels between the death of Diego

Felipe Becerra, discussed in the previous chapter, and that of Nicolás Neira. Both were teenage boys killed by the police. In both cases, the police made initial statements that attempted to place

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the blame on the boys, and in both cases those statements turned out to be patently false. Yet

Neira’s death didn’t lead to a change in the laws in the way that Becerra’s did. Instead, Nicolás

Neira became an icon of the fight against police brutality. The banner is a heavy reminder that the exercise of the right to free speech and peaceful assembly has been met with violence in the past. Those who march in favor of workers’ rights do so at their own peril.

Contesting Cultural Citizenship: Who belongs?

Cultural citizenship is predicated on shared social space and is governed by a social imaginary that defines who belongs to a cultural community and how that community behaves together collectively. Through their participation in the annual Workers’ Day march, each of the syndicates and unions claims membership in the Colombian cultural community, and through the quantity of workers present and marching each asserts a measure of cultural currency. The workers from UTRACUN, the Union de Trabajadores de Cundinamarca (Workers Union of

Cundinamarca) numbered in the hundreds, and represented at least five local syndicates, carrying a large banner in front of the group, as well as dozens of smaller placards with UTRACUN spelled out in large vertical block letters. Cundinamarca is one of Colombia’s departments (the equivalent of a state) in central Colombia surrounding the city of Bogotá. Bogotá is officially the capital of Cundinamarca, although it is not technically a part of the department. Bogotá is an autonomous capital district, much like Washington D.C. in the United States. Among the

UTRACUN syndicates represented were the Sindicato de Trabajadores Flores Del Río

(Syndicate of River Flower Workers, or SINTRARIO), the Sindicato de Intalpel, SINTRA

ELIOT, and the Asociación Nacional Sindical de Trabajadores de la Industria de Vigilancia y 152

Seguridad Privada (the National Syndicated Association of Workers of the Private Surveillance and Security Industry, or ANASTRIVISEP). Each of the UTRACUN marchers wore a red hat and a white t-shirt featuring the Cundinamarca coat of arms and the word “Presente.” The identical costuming of the UTRACUN marchers enhanced the visibility of the union’s strength in numbers, while the Cundinamarca coat of arms served as a reminder that these workers are local to the Bogotano community, even as the separate syndicates represented underscore the diversity of the union.

The National Organization of Victims and Families of the Genocide Against the Patriotic

Union (Coordinación de Víctimas y Familiares del Genocidio Contra la Unión Patriótica) distinguished themselves with several different placards, all in green type on yellow background.

One read, “11 of October/ National day for the dignity of the victims of the Genocide Against the

Patriotic Union.”40 Another read, “I am a survivor of the Genocide Against the Patriotic

Union.”41 In addition to the placards, the members also carried a long flag of yellow and green, the colors of the Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica, or UP). Founded in 1985 following peace negotiations between the government of then President Belisario Betancur and the FARC, the UP was a left-wing political party that promoted a peaceful transition through guerrilla demobilization and political engagement, much like the current peace agreement. The government entered a peace deal known as the Uribe Agreements42 that purported to open

Colombia’s political system to the UP and protect the safety of its members. The assassination of members of M-19 in the siege at the Palace of Justice in November of 1985 proved to members of FARC that political security would be unlikely (Gomez-Suarez, 640). The UP constituted a

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threat to a wide range of political and social actors in Colombia, including the conservative political parties, paramilitaries, narco-traffickers and others. The rise of the UP, and its small success in the polls was met with brutal force. Some five thousand members of the UP were assassinated in the latter half of the 1980s, including two presidential candidates, eleven mayors, some seventy local councilors, and twenty-one other lawmakers. The Uribe Agreements were in some sense a trap: enticing politicians with connections to FARC to out themselves, exposing them as targets for assassination. The members of the former UP marched in resistance to the genocide, presencing it in their resistance, continuing to assure that the episode is not lost in the contemporary consciousness. The genocide against the UP reminds us that peace processes are fraught, something not lost on many in the ongoing negotiations for peace with FARC, where already the government has failed to hold up its end of the bargain.

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Figure 13. Sanitation workers with Colombian flag, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author.

While the strength and concerns of the unions and syndicates were presenced by the numbers of workers marching, some of the groups made explicitly patriotic claims through their use of the Colombian national flag and its three primary colors. For example, a group of sanitation workers carried an elongated Colombian flag (Figure 13). The country’s flag is three horizontal bars of yellow, blue, and red. As there are no symbols or other design elements, the design may be extended horizontally indefinitely. The flag the sanitation workers carried is perhaps four feet wide and extends nearly an entire block long, held aloft by the edges by some fifty or so workers. The sanitation workers were dressed casually, and only a few of them wore matching white hats. They had no placards or chants. Their only claim was made by the flag itself: that they belong, that they are citizens of the nation. The flag also presenced the nation

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itself and the patriotism of its citizens, especially the citizens of the working class. Despite disputes with corporations or government policy, despite human rights abuses, institutional corruption, and a half-century of violent civil conflict between the state, guerrillas, paramilitaries, and narco-traffickers, these workers are proud of their country. The very people whose job it is to haul away the refuse of the country stake a powerful claim to patriotism.

Another expression of overt patriotism came from a small group dancing the Sanjuanero folk dance, complete with traditional costuming. The wide skirts of the women and the plain shirts of the men are typically solid bright colors, limited that day to the red, yellow, and blue of

Colombia’s flag. There were only five couples dancing, and their performance was somewhat obscured by the banners, flags, and pennants surrounding them on all sides. Nevertheless, onlookers gathered around to watch the dancers. The performance stood out as one of the few elements of the march that had no explicit tie to Colombia’s labor movement, other than the fact that the Sanjuanero is popular in rural Colombia and might be considered a cultural element more typical of the working class and farmers than of the political elite. Nevertheless, the

Sanjuanero’s presence in the Workers’ Day march linked the labor movement with the traditional cultural heritage of the country.

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Figure 14. Drummers dancing, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author.

In contrast to the Colombian flag held aloft by the sanitation workers and the red, yellow, and blue costumes of the Sanjuanero dancers, some groups in the Workers’ Day march represented the countercultural and even revolutionary elements within Colombia’s cultural fabric. Take for example a group of some dozen drummers playing together (Figure 14). The drummers were costumed in black and grey with red accents, and with patterned cut-outs in the sleeves of their black shirts. They marched in step with their own rhythm incorporating choreographed dance moves here and there. Most of the drummers were female, and nearly all of them, including the men, had long hair and dark eyeliner. The drummers interjected energy and exuberance to the march, a counterpoint to the repeated call-and-response chants of the unions and syndicates that had gone before. Moreover, the dark clothing and youthful modern feel of the

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drummers contrasted with the bright colors and folksy traditional mood of the Sanjuanero dancers, exemplifying dissensus within the participants of the march and Colombia’s evolving cultural heritage. Spectators crowded around the drummers, who brought to the march a festive mood, and like the Sanjuanero dancers, they participated in the march without identifying a specific union, party, or issue of political or social import.

Figure 15. Man with Communist flag, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author.

The Revolutionary Communist Group (Grupo Comunista Revolucionario) wore black and red like the drummers, but their demands, like their name, were explicitly revolutionary. A large gap of nearly half a block opened between the Revolutionary Communist Group and the

Confederación General del Trabajo (General Work Confederation, or CGT) who marched in front of them. In the middle of this gap a man dressed in jeans, a red shirt, with a red hat and red

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bandana covering his face, waved a large red flag (Figure 15). The flag bore the hammer and sickle symbol in the upper left corner, and in the center the profiles Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Some hundred or so feet behind the flag bearer members of the Revolutionary Communist Group marched with a large banner with a yellow background and the image of a woman with a red scarf over her head and shoulders raising her fist. The banner read, “What humanity needs:

Revolution and the new synthesis of communism/ Revolutionary Communist Group.”43 The members of the Revolutionary Communist Group wore t-shirts, some red and some black, with matching hats. Most of the members wore bandanas of various colors across their faces. As I stepped out into the street to get a clear picture of their banner one of the men strode toward me, his gaze aside and his hat pulled low over his eyes. When he was close enough that his face was no longer in the camera’s frame, he demanded that I stop filming, a demand I promptly followed.

The t-shirts they wore featured an image of the earth with a comet-like tail breaking through a set of chains. They read: “The proletariat cannot lose more than their chains. In exchange, they have a world to win. Revolution! Nothing less!”44 Behind the banner some of those marching wore

Colombian flags over their shoulders, one waved a white flag with Che Guevara’s image, and others carried small handwritten signs, one of which featured Lenin’s profile and read, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.”45

One of the banners held aloft by participants in the Workers’ Day march bore the pictures of “Los Mártires de Chicago,” or “The Chicago Martyrs,” referring to the Haymarket Affair, a foundational event in the organization of the labor movement. These martyrs are evoked in the same way that the dead and disappeared from Colombia’s own war are brought up. It seems to

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me there is a kind of claim being made… I am surrounded by the faces of the dead, and those who march to find justice for themselves call on the histories of the past, the faces of those who have been lost in the battle. It is not the voices of the lost that we hear, but the voices of those who would speak for them. Below the picture of the fallen martyrs, the banner quoted August

Spies:

The Martyrs of Chicago

If you believe that hanging us will smother the labor movement, the movements

in which the millions of oppressed, millions that suffer scarcity and misery await

salvation, if this is your opinion, then hang us. You will only burn out a spark, but

there and yonder, behind and forward the flames will rise. It is an underground

fire and no one will be able to put it out. August Spies.46

August Spies was one of the eight martyrs of the Haymarket Affair that took place in May 1886.

More than four-hundred thousand workers marched for the eight-hour workday on the first of

May, 1886. In the following days numerous strikes, marches, and other gatherings continued throughout the country. On the third of May, following a rally of the 6,000 members of the

Lumber Shovers’ Union at which Spies was scheduled to speak, there was a confrontation between the union members and scabs who had broken strike lines at the McCormick Harvester plant. Police fired into the crowd of union lumbermen, ultimately killing four of them. Spies printed a circular calling at the office of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, which he edited, calling for a rally the next day (Foner 29). Around three thousand turned out at Haymarket the next day to protest the police brutality. After a peaceful protest, the meeting had dwindled to a few hundred

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protesters when 180 police officers arrived and surrounded the remaining protesters. A bomb was thrown toward the police, killing one instantly, and the police opened fire on the crowd

(Foner 30). The response by the mayor and police was swift and brutal. Although hundreds were arrested, only eight “martyrs” went to trial: Albert R. Parsons, August Spies, Samuel J. Fielden,

Michael Schwab, Adolph Fisher, George Engel, Louis Lingg, and Oscar Neeb. According to historian Philip Foner:

It was largely due to the militant spirit and organizing genius of the eight men

brought to trial for the Haymarket tragedy that Chicago was the outstanding labor

center in the country, and had made the greatest contribution to the eight-hour

movement. It was for their leadership, not their anarchist ideas, that they were

hated by Chicago employers. (31)

Foner goes on to argue that not one of the eight men indicted for the murder of a police officer could have been in position to have thrown the bomb. In fact, most of them were not at the

Haymarket rally (31). Nevertheless, the eight men were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in a trial that was presided over by a prejudiced judge that sat an obviously biased jury

(34). Spies, Parson, Engels, and Fisher hung for the crime. Lingg committed suicide before the execution day. Neeb was given fifteen years’ hard labor. The Governor reduced the sentences of

Fielden and Schwab to life imprisonment. Six years later on June 25, 1883, the tide of public sentiment had shifted and the Haymarket Martyr Memorial was erected in Chicago’s Waldheim

Cemetery. The next day Governor John Peter Altgeld issued a pardon for Fielden, Schwab, and

Neeb.

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While the history of May Day festivities can be traced back at least as far as ancient

Rome, the Haymarket tragedy resolutely linked the first of May with the international labor movement. The fight for labor rights has been characterized as a fight for the oppressed against the oppressors, and as such, histories of violence are foundational to the struggle. The Chicago martyrs’ and their fight continues to be evoked and presenced in the parade on Bogotá’s Séptima.

This evocation and presencing establishes a kind of transnational imagined community. The social space that these workers and organizers share is not in this case a physical space, but an imagined one.

Efforts to organize public celebrations in Colombia on the first of May began in 1914 when the Unión Obrera (Workers’ Union) petitioned the government to allow a celebration, which the government denied (Espinoza 71-2). Núbia Fernanda Espinosa Moreno argues that a workers’ strike on 16 March 1919 catalyzed the labor movement, and the first public celebration of Workers’ Day took place May 1st of that year (66). The government of Mario Fidel Súarez had decreed that military uniforms would be imported, dealing a blow to the textile and tailors of

Colombia. Local workers organized a strike in protest and the government responded with violence, leaving at least three participants dead (75). As a result, the government rescinded the decree and four days later more than one thousand people attended the funerals, marching from the intersection of Carrera 8 and Calle 26 to the Presbyterian cemetery (77). Espinosa argues that the small and scattered celebrations that began in 1919 grew year-by-year and finally coalesced into a truly public celebration of the holiday by 1926, although she notes that the government prohibited the celebrations in the following three years (66). In 2014, the Colombian police

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recorded eighty-three marches in Colombia, with as many as 46,200 participants (El Tiempo “La

Policía”), and in 2018, there were seven marches in Bogotá alone (El Tiempo “Marchas”).

Contesting Cultural Citizenship: How do we behave collectively?

If we follow Rancière’s argument that human rights have degraded into citizenship rights, by claiming citizenship in the Colombian cultural community through their deployment of the

Colombian flag, traditional dance, or even countercultural or revolutionary iconography – examples of cultural citizenship through Rancière’s dissensus – the laborers marching on

Workers’ Day establish the right to challenge their treatment at the hands of their employers and government agencies. Indeed, of the many issues raised by the various unions and syndicates that marched on Workers’ Day, most were demands for the protection or expansion of the rights of laborers, or of human rights more generally. One of the many groups of marchers representing the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (Central Union of Workers, or CUT) carried a banner that read, “Against capitalist world exploitation! Long live the international revolutionary 1st of

May!”47 Another group of CUT marchers carried a banner that read, “We are the/ PRESENT/ and the future of the fight for workers’ rights.”48 The word “present” (“presente”) took up nearly the entire banner, with the rest in small type above and below. I realized when I saw this banner that I had missed the double meaning of the word “present” repeated so oft in the march: the chant not only acknowledged the presence of the members, but also demanded that the issues be addressed in the present moment. “Presente” is a call to action with immediacy.

Another group of some twenty or thirty workers from the recycling industry who followed behind the long Colombian flag mentioned above held up a large red banner that read, 163

“Public and private businesses hope to rob the work of recyclers. We are on war footing… for a permanent profession and against capitalist exploitation/ Present… Present…Present.”49 Behind this large banner, the recyclers hold aloft a wave of smaller white banners with an image of a tree at the center reading, “Cooperative Association of the Recyclers of Bogotá”50

Figure 16. Coca-Cola Workers, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author.

While these groups of workers from the CUT and the Cooperative Association of the

Recyclers of Bogotá made generic demands – against capitalist exploitation or for the rights of workers – some groups made more specific claims against their employers or addressed individual issues. For example, workers representing British American Tobacco

(ASOTRACIGA) carried a banner that read in part, “The managers of British American Tobacco harass, pester, and take bread away from their workers who are their greatest asset.”51Several

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syndicates of Coca-Cola factory workers marched together, each carrying a large banner (Figure

16). The first read, “Say no to Coca-Cola for the illegal retention of salaries and abuses against its workers. SINTRAINDEGA52 and SINALTRAPACOL53 Present – Present – Present.”54

Another read, “Against the exploitation and firings and for direct recruitment at Coca-Cola.

ASONALTRAINDEGA55 national directive. Present – Present – Present.”56 The Coca-Cola workers from SINTRAINDEGA and SINALTRAPACOL wore blue jackets and many of them carried noise-making horns in the yellow, blue, and red of Colombia’s flag, while the members of ASONALTRAINDEGA sported red T-shirts, a color strongly associated with Coca-Cola even as it conjures the primary colors of the flag. The strength of these three groups’ claims lies in their cumulative effect: whether their claims are well-founded is less important here than is the perception within Colombia’s working class that multinational corporations have a history of exploitation. By marching together, the allegations of the three syndicates of Coca-Cola workers were presenced through the affect the signs and banners purvey to those who observe them.

ANEBRE, the Asociación Nacional de Empleados del Banco de la República (National

Association of Employees of the Bank of the Republic) is another of the syndicates associated with the CUT. Their banner read, “Supportive and combative in the fights of the workers/

Presente!!! Presente!!! Presente!!!”57 They too wave a Colombian flag, and two individuals marching with them had Colombian flags wrapped around them like cloaks. One group was led by two stilt-walkers carrying a banner with a large photograph of a previous Workers’ Day march. At the center of the photo the workers carry aloft a large Colombian flag. Around the photograph, the banner reads, “First of May Workers March/ Against the usury of the bankers,

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high financial costs and the exploitation of workers. We all march for life!”58 The two stilt- walkers are dressed in full clown-outfits, with long purple pants covering the stilts, oversized shirts in a lighter shade of purple, yellow vests, and very tall green hats with red trim. They both wear clown makeup: white faces with red lips and exaggerated eyes. As clown scholar Barnaby

King notes in his recent work, Clowning as Social Performance in Colombia: Ridicule and

Resistance, clowns are unusually common in Colombian street performance, and are frequently employed by businesses and institutions as advertisers. King argues that for Bogotanos clowns are romanticized in the media as, “historically and culturally significant landmarks in the cityscape: familiar and stable symbols of innocence in a lawless urban jungle” (66). Within the

Workers’ Day march itself, the two clowns on stilts were the first sign of levity.

While there were other syndicates and unions who, like the tobacco, soda factory, and banking workers, publicized complaints against the corporations for whom they worked, other groups raised human rights concerns like health, education, and pension reforms. For example, the Colombian Organization of Pensioners (Organización Colombiana de Pensionados, or OCP) carried several placards: the first reads, “We demand the effective negotiation of the rights of pensioners;”59 the second, “Against pension and tax reforms;”60 the third, “In defense of the average premium,”61 a system that guarantees pensioners a baseline pension. Workers from the

District Association of Educators (Asociación Distrital de Educadores), carried a banner that read, “We defend public education/ not bargaining agreements, nor scholarship concessions/

District Association of Educators/ Present!”62 They were followed by the Colombian Federation of Educators (Federación Colombiana de Educadores, or FECODE), holding aloft placards with

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“FECODE” printed vertically in black, orange, and white. Another large group of mostly women marched wearing casual clothing with no placards or signs identifying their syndicate or union.

The banner they carried at the front of the group read simply, “Raise general salaries/ Heath/

Education/ Community”63. A few small groups of CUT and CGT workers marched with signs criticizing the ongoing health care reform movement. The Colombian legislature eventually passed the Statutory Health Law 1751 on 16 February 2015, the object of which was, “… to guarantee the fundamental right of healthcare, and to establish and regulate the mechanisms of protection” (Ley estatutaria no. 1751).64 However, the means by which the law would be implemented were not a part of the legislation, and there were significant fears that the neoliberal administration of president Santos would seek to privatize the health industry, favoring the healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies over the welfare of working class

Colombians.

While some of the unions and syndicates at the Workers’ Day march chose to raise grievances against the corporations for whom they worked and others chose to campaign for human rights issues, as 2014 was an election year in Colombia, still others chose to support specific political parties or campaigns. The grocery workers in SINTRAIMAGRA carried a banner supporting Aída Avella for Vice President in the 2014 elections. Avella is a prominent leftist politician in Bogotá having served as president of the Patriotic Union party between 1991 and 1996, during which time she served as a Bogotá city councilor. She was campaigning with

Clara Lopez for President in the 2014 presidential elections, part of an alliance between the

Patriotic Union party and Alternative Democratic Pole party (Polo Democrático Alternativo).

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This was the first time in the march that I had noticed a banner campaigning for a politician in the upcoming presidential elections. In the groups of marchers that were to follow, there were hundreds more placards, banners, and signs endorsing the Lopez and Avella ticket.

A large group from the Colombian Socialist Network (Red Socialista de Colombia), marched with a banner that was handwritten in marker on white fabric, reading, “For the

National Constituent Assembly/ Popular Mobilization.”65 Behind the large socialist banner, the group carried several identical smaller banners printed with a coin-like design featuring the profile of a bearded man with glasses in the center and the words “Immediate Liberty/ Francisco

Toloza”66 written above and below the profile. Francisco Toloza was Head of International

Relations for Patriotic March (Marcha Patriótica), a leftist, anticapitalist political movement in

Colombia founded in 2012. Patriotic March had been advocating for a negotiated peace agreement when Toloza was arrested on 4 January 2014. Justice for Colombia, a British organization that documents human rights abuses in Colombia put out a statement in response to

Toloza’s arrest:

We consider his arrest as further evidence of a government strategy to persecute

and discredit the Patriotic March… Since its establishment in 2012 members of

the Patriotic March have routinely been subjected to arrest, disappearances,

assassination and death threats. At least 25 members of the Patriotic March were

killed during 2013, and in not a single case has anyone been brought to justice.

Toloza was a well-known academic who advocated for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Like Neira, he had become a symbol of the government oppression of leftist leaders. He

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had been arrested on charges of aggravated rebellion and was being investigated for his ties to

FARC. A judge ordered eventually ordered his release for lack of evidence, but not until after

Toloza had spent months in a maximum-security prison. Patriotic March movement had achieved a measure of success in 2014, as hundreds of thousands of supporters turned out for events. The targeting of leftist political organizers and union leaders is common practice by conservative government officials – who use their positions of power to link their opponents to

FARC and ELN, often without evidence, labeling anyone in a leadership position on the left a terrorist supporter – and by the paramilitary Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia

(Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, or AGC) who threaten, kidnap, and assassinate leftist leaders regularly. Justice for Colombia reported on 6 February 2018 that the AGC delivered a pamphlet to the main office for Central Union of Workers (CUT) in Valle del Cauca. The pamphlet contained death threats to the leaders of the CUT as well as Patriotic March, the

Colombian Communist Party, and named more than a dozen officials to be targeted. The threats are not hollow: according to Justice for Colombia, more than one-hundred and seventy social leaders were assassinated in 2017 alone, while the Office of the United Nations High

Commissioner for Human Rights reported one-hundred and five human rights defenders killed in the same year.

The members of the Patriotic March were followed by another political organization: the

National Association of Displaced Colombians (Asociación Nacional de Desplazados

Colombianos, of ANDESCOL). The Norwegian Refugee Council Internal Displacement

Monitoring Center’s 2015 Global Overview, published on the website of the United Nations

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High Commission for Refugees, lists 6,044,200 internally displaced persons in Colombia, second in the world only to Syria. The refugee crisis in Colombia lacks representation in the media because of the slow accumulation of refugees. Unlike countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria, or more recently, the Rohingya people fleeing the

Rakhine province of Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh, where the refugee crises have been or continue to be acute with tens of thousands of new refugees on a sometimes-daily basis,

Colombia’s number of refugees has grown at a glacial pace. But it has continued to grow for decades, with no apparent end in sight. Certain politicians and political movements call for solutions to the crisis of internally displaced victims of the conflict in Colombia, such as the

Patriotic March, but no significant practical solutions have emerged.

The Socialist Party of Workers (Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores, or PST) waved a sea of red flags: half of the flags had the PST logo in white: “pst” in lower-case block letters next to a raised fist, and half of the flags had a hammer-and-sickle in white centered in the red flag.

Behind the red flags the members of the PST dressed in red t-shirts carried two large red banners with white block lettering. The first large banner featured a black-and-white portrait of a woman and read, “Carolina Garzón/ Student activist and militant of the PST/ Disappeared.”67 This was followed by another reading, “Help the Syrian people under Assad/ PST.”68 A group of marchers in yellow t-shirts carried a banner that read, “Against Santos and the Free Trade Agreements/

Democratic Pole.”69 Behind this, and surrounded by a sea of yellow flags with the Democratic

Pole logo, the marchers carried another large banner: the official banner for Clara Lopez’s presidential campaign, with her slogan, “Colombia for a better way.”70

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There were, of course, many other syndicates and unions present in the Workers’ Day march in 2014. Among them were the Syndicate of Workers of British American Tobacco

(Sindicato de Trabajadores de British American Tobacco, or SINTRABAT), and the National

Syndicate of Protabaco Workers (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Protabaco, or

SINTRAPROTABACO), both affiliated with the Syndicated Union of the Tobacco Industry

(Unión Sindical de la Industri Tabacalera, or USITAB), workers in the textile industry

(SINTRATEXTIL), the grocery industry (SINTRAIMAGRA), and the meat industry

(SINTRACARNE), and several syndicates associated with the General Work Confederation

(Confederación General del Trabajo, or CGT), among them the National Syndicate of Workers of Supermarkets and Olimpica Drug Stores (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Supertiendas y Droguerías Olímpica, or SINTRAOLÍMPICA), whose banner reads, “Only the people can save the people,”71 and the Syndicate of Workers of the National Press (Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Imprenta Nacional, or SINTRAIMPRENAL), who have their own small marching band, although the music is almost entirely drowned by the constant blare of noisemakers and bullhorns.

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Figure 17. Disguised Man, 1 May 2014. Photo by the author.

Near the front of the march among the Coca-Cola syndicates and CUT placards, I noticed a man in a peculiar costume: he wore a black top hat, a plain gray vest over an oversized blue button up shirt, an obviously fake white beard and mustache, and despite the balmy weather typical of Bogotá in May, he wore thick black gloves (. He carried a cane-handle umbrella, and on the front of his hat he had a small white card that read “1st of May Workers’ Day”.72 Safety pinned to his vest he had a larger white sign that read, “This Workers’ Day I come to collect my pension but they don’t give it to me because I’m not old enough. Too fucking bad.”73 For the life of me, I struggled to make out what kind of statement the costume is intended to make. Perhaps he was satirizing the welfare state, ridiculing the very laborers amongst whom he walks? As I continued to watch this strange character, I realized his gait is part of the performance. He leaned

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on his umbrella cane deliberately, as if he required its aid. The small part of his face I could see looked younger to me, but it’s impossible to guess at his real age. The ill-fitting costume suggested that it was not his usual attire. His path meandered not among the onlookers of the parade, but through the marchers. Was this performance a kind of counter performance? Was this character directing a critical performance at those who are marching? His path would certainly suggest this might be the case. I wondered if he had walked by me because of my camera. Had he noticed that I am filming the parade? How had my camera marked me as a spectator in this day’s events? How had my whiteness marked me? As I observed this man, I was conscious of the fact that there are aspects of Colombian culture that will forever elude me because of my position as an outsider, just as there may be aspects that reveal themselves for exactly the same reason. As the man continued by me I realized he had a third sign on his back: “1st of May I celebrate, but without work. But it is work to be without work.”74 As he continued on his way, I marked the neutral expression on his face. His costume and signs are performance enough. I’m not the only one who had taken notice of this strange character in the crowd. Several people, marchers and spectators alike, made their way toward this man and read what he had written and seemed to wonder at the truth and motive behind this peculiar performance.

Workers’ Day March 2015: Embodied resistance

I returned to the Workers’ Day march one year later. The groups marching and the issues and interests they raised did not differ significantly from what I had experienced in 2014, yet I include this brief account as a coda because of how some of its prominent symbols connect to the images I analyzed earlier in this chapter and in chapter three. At the very fore of the march, I met 173

a fascinating elderly gentleman who identifies himself as General Sant Dua. He dressed in full formal military regalia, a costume that clearly alludes to the dictators and military strongmen familiar to most of Latin America without belonging specifically to one country or another. I later learned that he is a recognized institution on the Séptima and at the 2015 march he posed for pictures and posted handbills along the avenue around Santander Park. DjLu photographed

General Sant Dua and created a large-scale stencil that he has used in several of his pieces. While the man himself never spoke as I watched him, the text of the handbill is pure propaganda, lauding the efforts of FARC, referring to the guerrillas’ leader as “the most honorable

Timochenko” and excoriating President Santos’ efforts toward a peace treaty – efforts that have since proven fruitful. He posed for pictures with a smile, but made no reply when I asked his name or for permission to publish the photo. Instead, he held up his stack of handbills and proceeded to paste them up, pausing here and there for photographs with several other spectators along his way. In a brief interview by the Colombian government’s Secretariat of Social

Integration (Secretaría de Integración Social) published on their website, General Sant Dua says of himself, “I am a Saint but not of a church; I speak, write and dance. I help construct peace.

Yes! And if that is crazy, then that is what I am.”

General Sant Dua’s performance confounds any simple analysis. He claims to desire peace, even as he aligns himself with armed revolutionaries and costumes himself in military attire. His handbill is one of political propaganda, while his attitude and demeanor more resemble that of a theme park mascot. His character a known presence on the Séptima, especially around the Parque Santander where I first encountered him. The Santander Park (Parque

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Santander) is one of the more traversed parks on the Séptima, situated between the pedestrian avenue and the famous Museum of Gold (Muséo del Oro) – one of the most popular museums in

Bogotá and by far the most spectacular. The sheer weight of gold present in the museum is enough to take one’s breath away, never mind the fact that all of it has been shaped into coins and sculptures, necklaces, earrings, armor, headpieces, and hairpins, nearly all of which are historic artifacts from Colombia’s indigenous populations, and some of which are more than one thousand years old. As one of the most frequently visited tourist sites, Park Santander attracts vendors and street performers like General Sant Dua, who refers to himself as the “true angel of peace” in his handbill.

The 2015 march, marking the tenth anniversary of Neira’s death, was awash in images of the young man and exhortations not to forget. The repetition of his likeness on banners and posters, the sound of his name called over megaphones mythologized the young man. He was no longer an individual, but had come to represent the class of individuals lost in the long bloody war. Many of those who have been lost have their own portraits on banners or posters along the

Séptima, but Neira is a kind of touchstone. It contrasts sharply with the bandanas covering the faces of some who march in the parade, particularly those who openly espouse the Marxist leanings strongly associated with the FARC and ELN guerrillas. Many of the leaders of these leftist groups mask their identities as well, especially their leaders.

Conclusion

The Workers’ Day march presents an opportunity for those who are a community via shared imagined space – those who fight for workers’ rights – to come together in a shared 175

physical space. Moreover, by marching on the Séptima, the workers and their organizers claim that the struggle for labor rights must be a struggle by and for all Colombians. To march in the parade is to self-identify as belonging to the group of people who fight, if only to make their voices heard. Their march on the Séptima may not be observed by many non-marching citizens of Bogotá, but many lives will be directly impacted by the road closures or by the personnel hired as security or those hired to clean after the march is over. Furthermore, the day itself is a national holiday for Colombians, and many people are off from work, even if they don’t participate, and some of those who will avoid participation out of objection or indifference to the cause will have some part of the day’s events recounted in the evening’s local news.

Against a backdrop of militarized police in formation, there is a palpable framing of the march by the citizens themselves. This is a time for the reappearance of the disappeared. This is a moment of lament for the tragedy that has unfolded throughout the country. Signs and banners call for the remembrance of those who have been lost. Here and there, posted on fences, mounted on placards, and hung from street signs and trees, photographs of the missing and disappeared are on full display. Each of the photographs is a call to remember. Many carry the stories of those who were disappeared, a kind of testimony to the lives that have been lost. These signs and photographs of the disappeared differ from the types of headshots used in Argentina’s Plaza de

Mayo. The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo carried black and white headshots of children they had lost, wearing their white scarves, and the uniformity of form in the headshots had a cumulative effect – each of the disappeared in Argentina had suffered from a similar fate. The culprit was always the same. Even the methods of the disappearances became well-known. Late at night

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agents of Argentina’s military junta would arrive in an olive-green Ford Falcon, force their victims into the car, and take them to be threatened, tortured, mutilated, and killed. Usually the victims were never to be seen again. Disappeared. Argentine psychologist and playwright

Eduardo “Tato” Pavlovsky has been quoted as saying, “Whenever a falcon drove by or slowed down, we all know that there would be kidnappings, disappearances, torture or murder… It was the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile” (Robert 12). They were all victims of the military junta during the Dirty War. Not so in Colombia. The civil war in Colombia has been too long. Too many actors have been involved, and there is not a clear line of us vs. them. The politics of the war are messy, and the signs that hang from the lampposts along the Séptima reflect the convolution of the war. In Colombia, because there is no clearly identifiable pattern of disappearance, each person has an individual story. Yes, there are many who share similar fates, but the signs on the Séptima often seek to place blame or valorize the victim of the violence. The reminder of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo was even more palpable when, parked at the staging area for the 2015 Workers’ Day march, I recognized an olive-green Ford Falcon.

While the police and marchers each construct a mode of signification for the march,

Colombia’s civil war provides a third frame for understanding the event. The unions and left- leaning political groups each have their representation, but it is the representation of the citizens themselves that feels dominant. For some of the marching groups there are specific causes or political agendas at play. For others, the Workers’ Day march is a chance to presence marginalized opposition groups. Judging from the perspective of the march alone, one might

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think President Juan Manuel Santos was a notorious dictator, rather than a democratically elected president.

Debord argues in Society of the Spectacle, “The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (4 – n.p.). Debord’s spectacle then is susceptible to renegotiation or challenges by the people. If citizens become conscious of the images that mediate the social relations amongst themselves, they may alter them. This doesn’t challenge the spectacle itself, as any new or amended images are always already a part of the mediation of social relations, and therefore a part of the spectacle; but the deployment of images and symbols may challenge the nature, direction, or purpose of the spectacle. In the spectacle of the Workers’ Day march, images of the dead, disappeared, and unjustly incarcerated victims of the civil conflict infuse the march with a funereal tone, tempered by the jubilant presencing of those who live free and continue to struggle for workers’ rights and human rights through the ubiquitous chant “Presente, presente, presente.” The oft repeated chant is overlayed by trademarks of the multinational corporations the workers claim have denied or oppressed the rights of employees, Coca-Cola perhaps the most prominent among them.

The banners lining the streets presence those who have been disappeared, just as they presence the injustices committed by the government in the long civil conflict. The banners held by the marchers and the repeated calls of “Presente… presente…presente” presence the unions and syndicates, including those members who do not march, just as they presence the injustices of corporate interests with their claims of low wages, lack of benefits, and abuse of workers. The

National Police lining the road in their riot helmets and shields presence the authority and power

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of the government, even as their presence implies the existence of a known threat to said authority and power. The Colombian flags presence the patrimony of the country and the spirit and pride of its citizens, just as they presence the dissensus palpable in the march. The general public is presenced by the spectators, as well as by the vendors selling water or tinto and by the photographers and journalists documenting the scene.

All of these presences come together in the dissensus of shared physical space that allows communities to be formed with heterogeneous ideological and identity formations. Social spaces like the Séptima become mythologized in a community, carrying within their walls and pavements more than can be captured on any map. They carry the contestations that become legible with familiarity and reverberate in the aesthetic performances of artists, in the performances of marchers and protesters, in the institutional performances of the police and military, in the commercial performances of businesses and venders, and in the myriad quotidian performances of the citizens whose lives and journeys have brought them to this space – including not only those who walk the street in passing on journeys to other locations in the city, but also those for whom the street itself has become a destination. Roads and avenues are a means of transit and are not often thought of as a destination. The Séptima is more than just a road: it has become a social gathering place. But for everyday citizens of Bogotá, it is also still just a road, one that many traverse in their daily lives, with little or no interest in the street itself, nor in the performances that occur on the street daily, nor for the histories of behavior and modos de hacer that are found nowhere else in the world. Many of those who walk on the Séptima do so to get to their jobs, to get the shopping done, to find a quick bite to eat. But the Séptima is also

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an opportunity, a chance to find something new, rare, wonderful; something unexpected; something mundane.

39 “Nicolas Neira/ 11 Oct 1989 – 1 Mayo 2005/ 9 años de impunidad no es justicia/ mentira no es verdad/ migajas no es reparación/ asesinado x la policia nal” 40 “11 de octubre/ Día Nacional por la Dignidad de las Víctimas del Genocidio Contra la Unión Patriótica.” 41 “Soy sobreviviente del Genocidio Contra la Unión Patriótica.” 42 The Uribe Agreements were signed by the government and members of the FARC at Casa Verde in the city of La Uribe on 23 March 1984. 43 “Lo que la humanidad necesita: Revolución y la nueva síntesis del comunismo/ Grupo Comunista Revolucionario.” 44 “Los proletarios no tienen que perder más que sus cadenas. Tienen en cambio, un mundo que ganar. ¡Revolución! ¡Nada menos!” 45 “Si no eres parte de la solución eres parte del problema.” 46 “Los Mártires de Chicago/ Si Ud. Cree que ahorcándonos puede eliminar el Movimiento Obrero, el movimiento del cual millones de pisoteados, millones que trabajan duramente y pasan necesidades y misaras esperan la salvación, si esa es su opinión… ¡entonces ahórquenos! Así aplastará una chispa, pero allá y acullá: detrás de usted y frente a usted ya a sus costados, en todas partes se encienden llamas. Es un fuego subterráneo. Y usted no podrá apagarlo. August Spies.” 47 “¡Contra la Explotación Mundial Capitalista! ¡Viva el 1º de Mayo Internacionalista y Revolucionario!” 48 “Somos el/ PRESENTE/ y el futuro de la lucha por los derechos de los trabajadores” 49 “Empresas publicas y privadas pretenden robarse el trabajo de los recicladores/ Estamos en pie de lucha… por la permanencia en el oficio y contra la explotación capitalista/ Recicladores popular de Bogotá/ Presente… Presente… Presente” 50 “Asociación Cooperativa de Recicladores de Bogotá” 51 “Los gerentes de la British American Tobacco persiguen, acosan y quitan el pan a sus trabajadores que son su mayor activo.” 52 Sindicato nacional de trabajadores de la industria de gaseosas; National Syndicate of Workers of the Soda Industry 53 Sindicato nacional de trabajadores de la empresa Panamco Colombia; National Syndicate of Workers of the Panamco Colombia company 54 “Dile no a Coca-Cola por la retención ilegal de salarios y atropellos a sus trabajadores. SINTRAINDEGA y SINALTRAPACOL. Presente – Presente – Presente.” 55 Asociación Nacional de Trabajadores de la empresa Industria Nacional de Gaseosas; National Association of Workers of the National Soda Industry

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56 “Contra la explotación y los despidos y por la contratación directa en Coca-Cola. ASONALTRAINDEGA directiva nacional. Presente – Presente – Presente.” 57 “Solidaria y combativa en las luchas de los trabajadores/ Presente!!! Presente!!! Presente!!!” 58 “Primero de Mayo Trabajadores a Marchar/ Contra la usura de los banqueros, altos costos financieros y la explotación de los trabajadores. ¡Vamos todos a marchar por la vida!” 59 “Exigimos negociación efectiva de los derechos de los pensionados” 60 “Contra las reformas pensión al y tributaria” 61 “En defensa de la prima media” 62 “Defendamos la educación pública/ no a los convenios ni a las concesiones escolares/ Asociación Distrital de Educadores/ !Presente¡” 63 “Alza general de salarios/ Salud/ Educación/ Pueblo” 64 “… garantizar el derecho fundamental a la salud, regularlo y establecer sus mecanismos de protección.” 65 “Por la asamblea nacional constituyente/ Movilización Popular.” 66 “Libertad Inmediata/ Francisco Toloza” 67 “Carolina Garzón/ Activista estudiantil y militante del PST/ Desaparecida.” 68 “Apoyo al pueblo Syrio abajo al Assad/ PST” 69 “Contra Santos y los TLC/ Polo Democrático.” 70 “Colombia por un buen camino.” 71 “Solo el pueblo salva el pueblo” 72 “1º de Mayo Día del Trabajo” 73 “Hoy dia del trabajo vengo a cobrar mi pención [sic] pero no me la dan porque aún no tengo la edad. Que vaina carajo.” 74 “1º de Mayo lo celebro, pero sin trabajo. Pero si es trabajo estar sin trabajo.”

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Chapter 5. The Final Frontier

Space is more than what we can draw on a map or something we can photograph. Our experience of space is haunted by the cultural imaginaries that we carry with us in the same way that Marvin Carlson has argued that a theatrical performance is haunted by previous productions of the same play, previous performances by the same players, and previous performances in the same space or by the same director or company. We come to a public space with an incalculable abundance of images and expectations of the space itself and those people we may or may not encounter, including, of course, those spaces with which we have no previous experience. Mapa

Teatro and Antanas Mockus have exploited the haunted nature of public spaces to contest and realign the modos de hacer of the people who inhabit these spaces, and to assert the cultural citizenship of marginalized communities. In so doing, they also demonstrate that modos de hacer are essential elements of social spaces. Abderhalden’s modos de hacer and Mockus’ cultura ciudadana both illuminate the notion that social spaces cannot be understood or valued on the physical topography alone; the human patterns of behavior that evolve in any given space become a part of the space itself and its value should be reckoned accordingly. DjLu encounters public spaces with the intent to disrupt the visual topographic of cities and invigorate our urban and cultural imaginaries. Activists like those who marched on Workers’ Day illuminate the oppression of corporate policy and challenge the unbalanced adjudication of the law by authorities, even as they celebrate the progress made by the labor movement and demonstrate 182

pride in their nation and the communities to which they belong. In so doing, the Workers’ Day marchers also presence themselves and their histories along one of Bogotá’s most important cultural corridors.

Each of the performances considered herein challenges forms of violence emanating from the civil conflict in Colombia. El Cartucho was a neighborhood flooded with refugees who had fled from the devastation leveled on rural areas of Colombia by the ongoing war. In choosing to gentrify the neighborhood by replacing it with a park, the government committed an institutional violence against an already marginalized community. Mapa Teatro’s Proyecto C’undua documented this violence, re-mapping the neighborhood while recording the modos de hacer of some of its residents. DjLu’s Juegasiempre likewise re-maps the city by intervening into the visual topography of the city, challenging the cultural imaginaries of Bogotá’s citizenry with pictograms and compositions that remind them of the violence imposed not only by the conflict itself, but also by neoliberal economic policy and the military industrial complex. The Workers’

Day March remaps the Séptima by presencing the lives and struggles of working-class citizens in

Colombia, as well as physical acts of violence like those against Nicolás Neira.

In thinking about Doreen Massey’s criticism that Western philosophy has historically theorized space as reducible to the supposedly more important concept of time, perhaps it is time for those of us in the humanities to catch up with the advances in physics from the first half of the twentieth century. Since the work of Einstein and others, physicists have known that space and time are not two separate entities, but rather two elements of one four dimensional spacetime continuum. Just as space and time are indivisible in physics, they may also be conceived as

183

indivisible in critical theory in the humanities. Community is necessarily defined in part by a shared social space and this space is in turn constructed by the cultural imaginaries of those who encounter it. In producing this dissertation my intent has been to work toward a cohesive theory of cultural citizenship. I postulate that performance in shared social space is a foundational element in the development of cultural communities. The experiences and emotional states of those who encounter a social space inflect the nature of any community predicated on that space.

Citizenship in the political sense is nothing more than a special subset of citizenship in the cultural sense. While national citizenship and the rights and responsibilities accorded thereof are encoded into laws, those laws are amendable, and changes to those laws are only likely to follow from changes in the cultural imaginary of members of that society. It is therefore the cultural imaginaries shaped by citizenship performances of community members that define the community and the spaces they share.

There are opportunities to extend each of the three chapters in this dissertation for a book-length project. Many of Mapa Teatro’s productions might be considered citizenship performances, particularly their production of Los Incontados: un tríptico (The Unaccounted: A

Triptych), which deconstructs the dichotomy between celebration and violence by revealing their intertwining histories in a montage of three parties in three distinct spaces, each of which is infused with violence by the three opposing factions in Colombia’s civil conflict: the state, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces. The third chapter might be extended by researching the broader networks of artists and social economies in which DjLu participates, such as the stores and websites where he markets his designs, urban art festivals and gatherings, and collaborative

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murals. My chapter on the Séptima could be extended to include a broader history of the

Workers’ Day marches in Bogotá and around Colombia, as well as a deeper history of the march on the Séptima, all of which requires deeper research into periodical archives not available in the

United States.

There is, of course, more that can be done to excavate the types of citizenship performance aimed at confronting violence in Colombia. For example, I have not analyzed performances staged by the government or elected officials, such as political rallies, public festivals, or celebrations of national holidays. Each of these may offer further insight into how official narratives of conflict and peace play out in public discourse. My analysis in this dissertation has been limited to considerations of citizenship performance in public space. I have argued that cultural citizenship is based on shared social space: real, virtual, or imagined. More work should be done on considering the various types of citizenship performance deployed in imagined and virtual spaces, i.e. membership in communities like “victims of the conflict,”

“displaced persons,” as well as online communities like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, or Flickr.

The digital age has illuminated the notion that the space we share need not be a physical space for us to acknowledge ourselves as belonging to a community. Communities may also be formed on virtual spaces (the online community, the Facebook community, etc.) as well as imagined spaces. Imagined communities include nations (see Benedict Anderson), ethnicities, or other identity formations. The LGBTQIAA+ community, for example, does not in its entirety share a physical space, but we may nonetheless understand it as a community through imagined space.

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Additionally, this dissertation has implications for the study of aesthetic practice within spaces with histories of state violence, such as the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City, Chile’s Villa Grimaldi, former Nazi concentration camps,

Tiananmen Square, the Berlin wall, the wall separating Palestinian and Israeli territories in the

West Bank, or the United States/Mexico border. Performances, protests, marches, installations, museums and tours in such spaces have been analyzed in terms of memory and memorialization, witnessing and testimony, embodiment and representation. Future studies might consider how citizenship performances in these spaces not only contend with the ghosts of the violent past, but also inscribe voices of marginalized communities and alternative social behaviors within cultural imaginaries. We may also consider how works of art, photographs, and online content work to alter or destabilize hegemonic spatial imaginaries embedded in sites of past violence. Tiananmen

Square, for example, conjures in my own imagination photographic images of a lone protester facing a line of tanks as well as Ai Weiwei extending his middle finger. These images exemplify the ways in which violent events may be overwritten – though not obliterated – by performances of protest and resistance, and thereby build a palimpsest that remaps the social imaginary.

Colombia’s political culture has shifted dramatically since I began work on this dissertation in 2014. Former President Juan Manuel Santos announced a successfully negotiated a peace agreement with FARC on 24 August 2016, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace

Prize. Despite the accolades, signing the agreement was only one step in an ongoing process fraught with obstacles, obstinance, and obfuscation. The government attempted to ratify the agreement by popular vote through a referendum, but the vote narrowly failed after a contentious

186

campaign with 49.8% of the vote. Former right-wing president Alvaro Uribe’s political machine argued strongly against the peace agreement, sometimes deploying disinformation about the nature of the agreement to win votes. One of the principle lines of argument against the agreement was that the FARC guerrillas would evade prosecution for their crimes. In fact, the agreement allowed for reduced sentences except for those accused of committing war crimes.

The agreement also called for the prosecution of government officials who had themselves been party to war crimes. Uribe’s potential (and now real) prosecution betrays a conflict of interest in his campaign against the agreement. Nevertheless, the agreement failed in the popular vote.

President Santos’ administration was then forced to send the agreement to Congress for ratification, defying the direct vote of the people. Both houses of Colombia’s Congress ratified the agreement at the end of November 2016, and Santos began the process of implementation.

Nevertheless, the contentious nature of the agreement and its ratification plagued Santos for the remainder of his term and Alvaro Uribe’s protégée Ivan Duque successfully won the presidential election campaigning on promises to change the peace agreement. Although Duque won the election, his party was unable to piece together a ruling coalition without sacrificing his promise to discard the peace plan (Casey and Rios Escobar, Faiola, Segura and Stein).

Under Duque’s administration, the government has failed to hold up a number of promises made in the treaty. Services for job training and reintegration of demobilized members of FARC have largely failed to materialize even as the guerrillas successfully emerged from the jungle and handed their weapons over to UN peacekeepers. Funds from FARC that were earmarked under the treaty for victim reparations disappeared in the hands of the government.

187

Multiple ministeries claimed to have no knowledge of where the money went. Meanwhile, some high-ranking members of FARC, including their leader, Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, a.k.a.

“Timochenko,” have submitted to the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for

Peace, or JEP), while others have been melting back into the forest. According to Adriaan

Alsema’s article in Colombia Reports, FARC commanders Hernan Dario Velasquez, a.k.a. “El

Paisa,” commander of the “Teofilo Forero” unit, “Romaña,” who led FARC’s 53rd Front, and “El

Zarco,” a former top military chief of FARC, have all disappeared from reintegration programs.

At least one FARC front never disarmed in the first place. Territory over which FARC had control was never adequately occupied by government forces after the guerrilla´s disarmament, leaving a power vacuum that cast large swathes of the country into lawlessness, particularly in the department of Cauca.

Duque’s administration agreed to peace talks with the ELN to have taken place in

Havana, Cuba. However, the administration´s efforts were half-hearted at best, as they repeatedly changed the conditions for the talks to take place and demanded that the ELN unilaterally disarm prior to the talks. These conditions have led many to believe that the Duque administration was disingenuous in its desire to negotiate with ELN in good faith. On 17 January 2019, a car bomb was detonated by ELN member José Aldemar Rojas Rodríguez at the General Santander

National Police Academy, killing twenty-two and injuring more than sixty others. Meanwhile, assassinations of social leaders by paramilitaries continue at an alarming rate. The failure of the government to fully uphold the peace agreement with FARC, the breakdown in negotiations with

188

ELN, and ongoing violent actions by paramilitaries all throw into question whether the

Colombian nation has achieved a state of peace.

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