A self-reflected performance piece created by visual artist Vicente Ovalle, July 2017
Ovalle’s performances, consists of a series of acts through the streets of Auckland. His self-imposed constraints on his body provide a graphic metaphor for the crimes of cruelty and kidnaping perpetrated, in his native Colombia, by guerilla rebels and criminal networks.
Based on the words of contemporary theorist Mieke Bal; of what-one-cannot speak, Ovalle seeks to express within the silence of this act the nature of the Colombian underworld and the potent mix of ideological organizations and their remnants, and organized crime where the boundaries between war and crime are fluid.
For Ovalle of-what-cannot-speak takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering – yet still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.
Photography by Alonso Benton.
Why walking on the streets of Auckland?
To bring awareness of crimes committed against humanity. The organised crime groups in Colombia kidnapped 35,000 people in the last 30 years. The organised crime groups in Colombia contributed to killing 400,000 people in the last 60 years. One of the main driving forces behind all this violence were drug trafficking cartels. The need to show the power was more important to those criminals than the lives of all those thousands of people.
My job as a young assistant photographer working for a local newspaper in Bogota in 1987 was to report acts of terrorism. One event I was documenting was a bombing downtown. When I got to the site I was one of the first to arrive. I walked up to the rubble leftover from a car bomb and all I saw was blood everywhere and mutilated bodies. As I was retreating from it all I spotted a wall with a trail of blood. I looked closer and saw human ear slowly dropping down. In that moment I broke down in shock of witnessing the horror. Unfortunately this is one of many stories that keep scaring me 30 years later.
Every horrible act of violence caused by the cartels has destroyed and changed the history of Colombia.
In response to the stigma that some New Zealand media have been spreading, with or without the encouragement to glorify the organised crime of my country. My first intention is to generate questions about the unconscious social acceptance of organised crime in the contemporary dynamics of our society.
Unspeakable. Day 1.
Unspeakable. Day 4.
Unspeakable. Day 7.
Unspeakable. Day 2.
Unspeakable. Day 5.
Unspeakable. Day 8.
Unspeakable. A response.
Unspeakable. Day 3.
Unspeakable. Day 6.
Unspeakable. Burgers.