Reconstrucción en Lápiz Azul de 'Naviero', Último Paradero: 28, 6-89, el 27 de abril de 1976 (Reconstruction in Blue Pencil of ‘Naviero,’ Last Seen: 28th street 6-89, April 27, 1976), 2023, blue colored pencil on paper, 22 x 29 in.
On April 27, 1976, the small Bogotá-based gallery Galería Sandiego closed the doors of a three-week exhibition titled “Siluetas Infantiles.” Today, the street corner where the gallery stood is occupied by the IBIS hotel shopping center, sharing an intersection with el Museo Nacional de Colombia (previously a 19th-century prison known as el panóptico). A combination of myth and family archive (newspaper clippings, photos, and ephemera,) assures the existence of such a space in the history of Bogotá’s urban development, situated on Calle 28 N #6-89; and marks this site as that of the last known whereabouts of a 48 x 64 cm drawing in brown sepia pencil titled Naviero, said thereafter to have disappeared into the labyrinth of Bogotá’s private urban chaos.
In 2023 I reconstruct a 1:1 scale of the lost drawing which my father remembers sitting for as a ten-year-old boy. The exercise of reconstruction is framed by notions of translation, a practice I have engaged in all my life, both formally and informally. As described by theorist Gayatri Spivak, translation can be said to constitute the most intimate act of reading. Thus, through the use of family archive: a photo of a photo of a drawing, I practice the most intimate act of seeing: the embodied translating from eye to hand of a lost portrait of my father, which first passed through the eye and hand of my grandmother forty-seven years ago. This act of redrawing implies a choreography which was last performed in 1976, and invites an embodied knowing of my grandmother through our mutual and deeply personal relationship with the craft of draftsmanship. Where during her life my (lack of) speaking proficiency in Spanish made the kind of mentorship relationship I longed for impossible, embodied redrawing allows us to meet at a place beyond the thresholds that had always separated us: The United States and Colombia, English and Spanish, North and South.