Barren Land

Abstracting the colonial windows of his native Colombia, artist Pedro Mesa tackles the notion of identity-pastiche, both nationally as well as personally. With his constructions, he is addressing the windows with their bright hues and distinctive shapes, which are not idiosyncratic in their originality, but a derivation or emulation of Spanish architecture and the combination of styles found in the balconies and windows found all over the Mediterranean. There’s a crisis here – a crisis in the very notion of the colonized subject. The colonized can only be that, inasmuch they can recognize their colonizer.

“The snobbism of my generation, the constant hounding for first-world entertainment over our local culture, the desire to belong to another community outside of ours,” says Mesa, “A hapless parallel with the stories behind these windows – there’s no Spanish ‘illustrious ancestor’ to be found, but a recycling of ideas of national unity and periphery.” Confronted with these windows as a mask, a colorful distraction, they open up to a vagueness of Mesa’s place in the world.

“What I ask of myself is to just look through the railings: into a gnawed interior made up by shadows, husked walls that every night put their make-up on and walk the city to sell themselves. Falsehoods that leave no room for the intimate; whiny colors that fake a feast where no music is playing.” says Mesa, “There’s a sadness to my country. A feeling of sterility, of lost opportunities and opportunities dead. Not of albatross, but of limping sparrows and blind condors. A country where a seagull will eat a drowning moth.”