Department of Culture (2005 - 2007)
Department of Culture (2005-2007) is a work that takes up the notion of street sales, which are prevailing in Colombian urban markets and are common in many cities around the world. In this kind of sale, proper culture or the appropriated one turns illegal, imitative, and proximate. Culture cheapens in order to be attained, while life appears like subsistence; ultimately culture becomes survival.
This work is comprised of objects inspired by some of the most representative works of Colombian contemporary art. Reconstructed as unauthorized imitations, receiving the full weight of illegality; they are subsurface cultural subsistence. And best of all, it’s sold cheap.
Department of Culture directs our attention to one of the most intimate, as well as generalized, aspects of art, which is its possibility of materialization and therefore the visible product of the commercialization of culture. The copied and altered works that make up representative-representations of the country’s culture allow multiple vies, not only about the art market but the piece itself being a mirror of the fundamental aspect of the phenomenon of culture: it’s the matter of which the world is made.