At “Estrategias para la difusión de un seminario paralelo” [Strategies for the Dissemination of a Parallel Seminar], an event that was part of the exhibition Do it / Hágalo usted: versión colombiana [Do It / Do It Yourself: Colombian Version]—at the Banco de la República Luis Ángel Arango Library, Bogotá (1997), curated by the Swiss critic Hans Ulrich Obrist—the Colombian artist Gloria Posada (b. 1967) gave the lecture “Arte participativo y espacio público en Medellín” [Participatory Art and Public Space in Medellín], which was essentially a detailed list of urban art projects in the late twentieth century.
The introduction of the artists involved in those urban art projects, in chronological order, was mainly concerned with discussing the work that was being done in Medellín, but nowhere else in the country, and explaining how this sort of urban project arises out of a close interaction with the “place” in question—in this case, the city.
The introduction began with “the artist who has been most active in organizing urban art projects in public spaces in Medellín”: (i) Adolfo Bernal (1954–2008), a graphic designer whose projects “circulate” with relative ease around the city, because they rely on a wide range of “street” resources, such as posters, sounds, large-scale ephemeral group events, and all manner of signs (bonfires and mirrors) set up on the hills surrounding Medellín that seek to “resignify” certain imaginary concepts on a city-wide scale; (ii) the Grupo Taller de sueños [Dreams Workshop Group], coordinated by Álvaro Posada, installed Personalidades [Personalities] (1995) in the Guayaquil Market Plaza—a rundown space at that time—which consisted of photographs of Benjamín de la Calle (1869–1934) and Melitón Rodríguez (1875–1942) that were taken almost a century earlier in that same “place”; (iii) Víctor Manrique’s work Alumbramiento [Illumination] (1994) installed countless candles on the Guayaquil Bridge, the scene of firing squad executions until the beginning of the twentieth century; (iv) Gloria Posada presented, among other pieces, Los caminos que hemos caminado [The Roads We Have Taken] (1992—a “redrawing” of the pathways used on a daily basis by pedestrians—and Carta al cielo [Letter to Heaven] (1996), an international invitation that consisted of sending a photograph of the sky.
It should be noted that this document is one of the few that include a detailed inventory of the work of Adolfo Bernal. For more information on Bernal, see “Adolfo Bernal 1954–2008: Señales efímeras” [doc. no. 1131647].