Artist Statement
“Macondo: Journeys in García Márquez’s Colombia” is a documentary photo project that explores the people and places that inspired the work of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
García Márquez was born and raised in Aracataca, a small town on Colombia's Caribbean coast. For his writing, he drew from his childhood, his hometown, and the people and places nestled along Colombia's coastal region, weaving them into a masterwork he titled "One Hundred Years of Solitude." The novel captivated the world and set the standard for the literary genre of magical realism, which has been a potent international force in literature, film, and art ever since.
The setting and centerpiece of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is the fictional town of Macondo. With its surreal charm, it represents the uniqueness of Colombia: eccentric and eclectic, timeless and earthy, a place where truth and fiction, myth and reality merge. But how has the magical fiction of Macondo survived in the real town of Aracataca? And how does the book's potent mix of dark imagery and playful musing interact with the Colombia of today, both real and imagined?
With "Macondo: Journeys in García Márquez’s Colombia," I am trying to explore those questions, delving into concepts of truth and fiction, myth and reality, to discover how they co-exist and recombine to create and convey a complete sense of identity and place. García Márquez has himself said, "Macondo is not a place but a state of mind that allows one to see what they want, and see it how they want." I have paired this concept of Macondo with the art critic Franz Roh's uniquely visual definition of magical realism as that which "faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself" to create a space of photographic freedom in which to explore ideas of imagination, myth, and reality in the context of contemporary Colombian identity.
García Márquez has consistently said that his characters and images, although embellished, are based on real people and events and that every town along the Colombian coast contains an aspect of Macondo. With this in mind, I have set out to discover for myself what survives of Macondo in today's Colombia. What I've found is a vibrant, real-life retelling of an epic fiction that itself was a reinvention of real places and a living people.
I hope that these images will help complicate the current, bipolar vision of Colombia as either a nostalgic tropical paradise or a debased, violent hell; and that this project will become part of a fantastical dialogue between a culture and the art it inspires, a collaboration ¬among different interpretations of people and places both real and imagined.
Medium: Color negative, 6x6, Medium Format