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| Restrepo Jose Alejandro Born in 1959 in Bogota, Colombia. Lives and works in Colombia. Viacrucis (Stations of the Cross) is a single channel video made of recent TV news from Colombia. One doesn’t need to look for myth in the past. It reappears from extreme terror and violence. Cuauhtémoc Medina wrote: “Based on this archive, the video Viacrucis (2004) was Restrepo’s way of showing the degree to which the media processes and rebroadcasts public life as a never ending martyrology, in other words, as the result of a demand for events that, in order to be broadcast-worthy, must adopt a specifically Catholic structure. Everything seems to indicate that the condition for televising a painful incident or a mad outburst –that is, for exhibiting an event and making others emotionally responsible for it– consists of assimilating them as “holy.” It is by climbing onto a cross that an unemployed man may earn the right to publicize his social drama, that exemplary vengeance may be delivered to a thief, or that the compassion of a mother whose son has attempted suicide may be expressed. Welcome to the age of gospel reproducibility: the media of countries such as Colombia, far from being a vehicle for information and liberal debate, are a post-colonial altar of hysterical religiosity that sees a symbol in every vulgar, bloody act. Viacrucis compiled aspects of a social theatricalization that sanctions and justifies monstrosity by making it seem vaguely sacred. The aim was not to celebrate the pertinence of the symbols of a religion indoctrinated by colonial violence, but rather to draw attention to an ideological system that exploits these images to impose a degree of political control, not to mention a degree of subjective compensation. Once a story has been filtered through the Catholic imaginary it is no longer technically unbearable: unique and immeasurable suffering is stifled by a re-enactment that dons it externally with a semblance of meaning. Therefore Catholicism is -first and foremost- a technique to capitalize on and commercialize terror by packaging it as sacrifice”. Cuauhtemoc Medina Independent critic and curator based in Mexico City  Download CV |  Viacrucis, 2004 |
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