Edition 2024
2023 CURATORIAL RESEARCH GRANT
VAMPIRES FEAR NO LOOKING GLASS
EL GRUPO DE CALI, VAMPIRISM AND TROPICAL GOTH
Ever Astudillo (1948-2015), Eduardo Carvajal (1949), Fernell Franco (1942-2006), Lina Hincapié (1977), Karen Lamassonne (1954), Carlos Mayolo (1945-2007), Ana María Millán and Monica Restrepo (1975; 1982), Oscar Muñoz (1951), Luis Ospina (1949-2019) and María Isabel Rueda (1972).
The exhibition is centered on the visual culture around El Grupo de Cali, active in the 1970s and 1980s in Cali, Colombia, and revered as an astonishingly creative gang that took an alternative look at the social and urban fabric, particularly in contexts of marginality.
Originally composed by writer Andrés Caicedo and filmmakers Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, it gathered significant counter-cultural momentum through its approach to film, notably with the critical documentary Agarrando Pueblo.
El Grupo de Cali extended to a wider network of young artists who underwent rich training and experiences in the same period, somewhat naive decades that harbored the entrenchment of all the major drug cartels in the country. Exhibiting their works together for the first time allows
a unique approach to this wider creative nebula, one of the most exquisite driving forces of the final quarter of the last century in Latin America. We aim, through the presentation of various media, to generate an image of the interweaving of their processes—photography being the central pivot underlying all their visual languages. The visitor is sucked into the myth of Caliwood, a term which has settled in the minds of younger underground generations, and which is fuelled by ideas around vampirism, the gothic and terror, staged in violent, tropical environments. Vampirism is a mode of group interaction in which everyone is a source and sucker of energy. Tropical Goth—a dark, skeptical, cynical, even monstrous perspective on life, is derived from these artists’ disruptive analyses of the conflictual social and cultural structures of the conservative, provincial city of Cali and Colombia more broadly.
Furthermore, the project links this cultural movement to three young contemporary Colombian artists whose work from the 21st century relates to this avant-garde force of the late 20th century.
Andrés Matute Echeverri – María Wills Londoño
The exhibition is centered on the visual culture around El Grupo de Cali, active in the 1970s and 1980s in Cali, Colombia, and revered as an astonishingly creative gang that took an alternative look at the social and urban fabric, particularly in contexts of marginality.
Originally composed by writer Andrés Caicedo and filmmakers Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo, it gathered significant counter-cultural momentum through its approach to film, notably with the critical documentary Agarrando Pueblo.
El Grupo de Cali extended to a wider network of young artists who underwent rich training and experiences in the same period, somewhat naive decades that harbored the entrenchment of all the major drug cartels in the country. Exhibiting their works together for the first time allows
a unique approach to this wider creative nebula, one of the most exquisite driving forces of the final quarter of the last century in Latin America. We aim, through the presentation of various media, to generate an image of the interweaving of their processes—photography being the central pivot underlying all their visual languages. The visitor is sucked into the myth of Caliwood, a term which has settled in the minds of younger underground generations, and which is fuelled by ideas around vampirism, the gothic and terror, staged in violent, tropical environments. Vampirism is a mode of group interaction in which everyone is a source and sucker of energy. Tropical Goth—a dark, skeptical, cynical, even monstrous perspective on life, is derived from these artists’ disruptive analyses of the conflictual social and cultural structures of the conservative, provincial city of Cali and Colombia more broadly.
Furthermore, the project links this cultural movement to three young contemporary Colombian artists whose work from the 21st century relates to this avant-garde force of the late 20th century.
Andrés Matute Echeverri – María Wills Londoño
Curators: Andrés Matute Echeverri and María Wills Londoño.
Winners of the 2023 Rencontres d’Arles curatorial research fellowship.
The Rencontres d’Arles curatorial research fellowship receives the generous support of Jean-François Dubos.
About the exhibition
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