This is one of the texts written by the Colombian artist Johanna Calle (b. 1965) to explain the concerns she sought to address in her work and the profound feelings underpinning each of the creative decisions that guide and inspire her work.
Ever since 1999, when Calle produced Torrencial [Torrential]—the first time she combined drawing and writing—her work has included writing, a decision that reveals her literary sensibility. Her series Efluvios [Emanations] (2002–4) fuses painting and drawing, returning to color after several years of working exclusively with drawing and a monochromatic approach. However, here she uses the techniques she developed in her written drawings, which is where her calligraphic style was born.
Even the text that describes the series came out of that process. The methodology used in Torrencial generated a list of names of abandoned children, linked together to replicate the persistent pattering of raindrops during a torrential downpour. In Efluvios, the use of metaphors relating to loss and fear, whether created with an image of water, or as in “Con el agua hasta el cuello” [With Water Up to One’s Neck], “País inundado en alertas” [Flooded Country on Alert], or “tiempos de tormenta” [Stormy Weather], combine images of seas with no shores where people and possessions are shipwrecked. As Calle explains, in a clear reference to Colombia’s social and political problems, “It is impossible to cross over or to return. The survivors end up lost in a place with no solid ground underfoot.”