UN-mapping Territory
by Oscar Murillo
Recently the mundanity of global air travel has come to fascinate me. Websites such as Plane Finder, at their base level, track the minutiae of global travel. Geographical location, speed, altitude — all of these details are meticulously recorded and displayed in real time. But the amalgamation of these journeys becomes a marker for historical and contemporary issues. Some of these are obvious to see. Europe, North America and Asia — the centres of the world’s trade and tourism — are hidden behind thousands of plane icons, slowly swarming over these continents like flies on a carcass. Other areas are more visible; besides the extreme North and South, Africa has few flight paths over it. Others take a more discerning eye to pick out. As old trade routes falter, others emerge. There are now direct flights from the United Kingdom to Colombia — something unimaginable a decade ago. Recently, BA flights from London to Baku have ceased, an almost definite result of the recent drop in world oil prices that has similarly slashed the value of the Manat.
Travel has always been central to my practice — for both practical and ideological reasons. Early paintings, although they emerged from a devoted and particular studio practice, are also bound up within issues of migration and globalisation. ‘Yoga’, ‘coconut water’, ‘chorizo’ — these words have morphed in meaning from one geographical context to another. These cultural tropes become products and symbols of lifestyle as they move overseas. In many ways, these words have taken their own journeys, and so the paintings become liminal spaces, in-between one state and the other, in which to contemplate these changes.
Colombia sits on the equator. It is an imaginary line; the map is not the territory. Nevertheless, this line carves the globe in two, creating a global north and south whose effects seem impossible to escape. The migration of my family and I from Colombia to the United Kingdom has become an important point of reference in my works. This was perhaps most potently addressed in A Mercantile Novel (2014), during which 13 workers from the Colombina factory travelled from my village of La Paila, Colombia, to New York City. For three months, not only did these people work on a factory line as part of the project; they got to see and experience the United States in the flesh. Of course, they had experienced the country before — in movies, television shows, products, and a steady stream of media that had created a collective consciousness about New York, the United States, and the values that they stood for. It was this cultural hegemony that struck me most in talking to them, a soft power that coerced foreign citizens from thousands of miles away. Even upon entering the United States, the city that had etched itself into their minds could not be shaken. Pictures were taken at the Statue of Liberty — the ultimate symbol of the American dream; souvenirs were bought for loved ones back home.
Most of the workers from La Paila had generations of family who had worked at Colombina before them. My mother had worked in this factory, and her parents before her. It is impossible to think about Colombina — a candy company reliant on Tulua Valley’s abundant sugar cane — without acknowledging the historical slave trade that are its foundations. It is a culture that still permeates the working environment today. Hard power has, over time, become soft as well. Employees do not speak to their employers; they are segregated from one another in the workplace. Such segregation creates boundaries of authority that echo the master-slave relationship. When brought together in New York, this schism in relations represented a moment of equal opportunity for the workers. I have no doubt that upon returning to La Paila, things returned to their (un)natural order.
Plane Finder also serves as a map of global disorder. The skies over Ukraine, Syria and Iraq are virtually empty, save for a few flights that stray in to these airspaces. But these maps cannot begin to quantify the experiences that are born from these warzones. The distressing experience of a family losing a loved one, the deceased body loaded in the cargo hold of a Boeing 757.
Plane Finder illustrates that upon take-off, flight J222 should cruise north-eastward, crossing Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Iran and finally arriving in Baku on an uphill diagonal. Nevertheless, as cruising altitude was achieved the aircraft sped further and further over the Mediterranean Sea, passing the north-eastern tip of Cyprus before reaching the middle of Turkey. While cruising above the town of Tepekoy in the Mersin province, a right turn directed the aircraft north-east, through northern Turkey and towards Azerbaijan.
Awareness of a deceased body in the cargo compartment, and the rightward turn of this midnight flight opened up an imaginary abstract landscape. It is this rightward turn that shed light on my understanding of dead matter, the void and dark abstract space.
My series of works revolving around black canvas, first conceived of and shown in Bogota, quantify the information gathered through my investigations into radical negativity: ivory-black oil paint, applied in layers and then burnished, evokes a heavy materiality, like time compressed into a fossilised state. These works have absorbed the detritus of a failed millennium. There is nothing left, all has collapsed. A void clears the way for new possibilities.
My initial proposal for the Sydney Biennale — black wall — meandering — did not adequately address these concerns or raise new possibilities. Actions that followed should not be taken as retaliation against the Biennale, which I see as an important vessel for dialogue in the region. But the instinctive destruction, somewhere above the East China Sea, of my British passport was the act of a subject unresolved, always in transition.
Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, Colombia) is fine artist who works predominantly within the traditions of painting and performance, with a specific interest in notions of community and culture. Murillo lives and works in London and is a participant in the 20th Biennale of Sydney (18 March — 5 June 2015). See https://www.biennaleofsydney.com.au/20bos/artists/oscar-murillo/
