La Escuela Del Desencanto

 

La Escuela Del Desencanto (The School of Disenchantment) by Catalina Jaramillo Quijano currently at Museo La Tertulia, Santiago de Cali, Colombia.

This is a beautiful, deeply moving, melancholic work of conceptual art. It consists in a series of related pieces presented in a single room, with a suggested chronology that seemed to me in part fantastical. 

The depth of thought is far greater than my fifteen minute visit could do justice to. To appreciate this fully you would need to make half a dozen views of half an hour, interspersed with a few weeks of meditation and quite a bit background research.

In a word, it is brilliant.

The whole thing sums up very well my very mixed up emotions on leaving Cali. I met Catalina, though at the time I had no idea it was her and she had returned to her home in Bogotá before I learned this. She is every bit as beautiful and and sad as you would expect her to be from seeing this exhibit. That said, there is a current of optimism and humour running through the whole thing. 

My favourite piece is the witches multiplication table, which I strongly urge all primary school arithmetic teachers to study very carefully. I am also intrigued by the final piece "How Will the World End?," but I think I will need to learn a lot more astrophysics than I currently know to be able to appreciate it fully.

I think what makes me saddest of all is that only 200 meters down the road you will find this bar:

And that is characteristic of my mixed emotions about this city. It's not one place, it is a whole catalogue of different societies all living in the same overlapping physical space with hardly any intellectual common ground they all share.

See Simón Bolívar and Fake Revolution.

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