SELVA
AT THE VENICE BIENNALE, PANAMA MAKES ITS ENTRY AMONG THE NATIONAL PAVILIONS
The main display of the pavilion is a pictorial, sculptural and sound creation of multimedia artist Isabel De Obaldía
For its first participation in the Biennale of Venice, Panama occupies a space close to the Arsenal, divided in two: on one side, two rooms with images hanging on the walls, on the other, a sort of small shed. It is in this area that the main work of the pavilion is deployed, the one towards which one moves spontaneously from the entrance: the pictorial, sculptural and sound creation by multimedia artist Isabel De Obaldia, born in 1957.
We enter as into a forest, dim despite the colors and the gaps of scarlet sunlight. On three walls, De Obaldía displays very large pastels suggesting, through the interweaving of greens, blues and browns, the opacity of the Darien jungle, which separates Panama from Colombia. Through this jungle, alleged to be impenetrable, increasing number of migrants take the risks despite the dangers.
The artist, who has been there, conjures their traces along the tracks, abandoned objects and all that is endured by these men and women from South America, but sometimes also from Africa or from Asia, trying to reach the United States. To materialize their presence and their pain, De Obaldía suspends glass bodies in the void colored in different shades, from purple to blue and white, mostly headless. Their skins still seem to be caught in the claws of the vegetation or punctured by wounds.
These faceless ghosts are between life and death, but closer to the later. At times we hear whispering voices and also the sounds of the forest, where these dramas that are rarely talked about in Europe are relentlessly repeated. Among the works which have the tragedies of migration as their subject, this one is, through the immediacy of its plastic language, one of the most powerfully evocative of the Biennale.
“Traces: on the body and on the ground”
Panama Pavilion, Venice Biennale. Until November 24.
Philippe Dagen (Venice Italy, special correspondent for LE MONDE)
photographs by Sebastian Icaza
