In the 80's Jorge Barón, an important Colombian TV presenter, media personality and businessman decided to give Bogotá city a boulevard imitating Hollywood's Hall of Fame. With this, he intended to keep alive in people's memory some Colombian public figures - symbols of identity - by printing their names in the center of some stars placed in one of the main sidewalks of the city. It's been almost 30 years since its inauguration and nowadays, with the pass of time, the boulevard has become almost completely forgotten.
Ignored by the pedestrians and hidden by the new constructions, the stars that at some point were a reason of proudness for the honored artist and the local community, today are only a proof of transitoriness. They are the attempt of simulating something that us, Colombians, understand as beautiful and glamorous but that isn't inherent to us. Decadence has seized the place leaving fragments of an unfinished attempt of shaping identity. In this imperfect copy -clumsy reflection of a reality that doesn't belong to us- the resemblance makes evident the inversion of reality: the pretended glamour is showed through decadence, memory is forgotten; it turns to be the perfect negative of a foreign positive.
Through this work, made in collaboration with Carlos Monroy (Hago Luego Existo group), we intend to rescue the memory. Seeking a medium that allowed us to enhance the idea of negative, reflection and oblivion by avoiding the faking of reality, we decided to use 'frottage'. This not very popular -almost obsolete- medium allowed us to go past the stars one more time, not ignoring them but making evident their failed attempt of being a copy, resulting as a parody of paradigms and fragments of identity. All of this is made visible by the dirt that has gather through time in the stars as the subtle proof of a forgotten history.
As part of this project a performance is going to take place in the following months. We are going to clean and polish the remaining stars, gathering people's attention by delivering a red-carpet worth seeing show.
The frottage and performance video are going to be exhibited together with some press releases and video clips of the inauguration of the boulevard in 1986 (found while making the pertinent research) at the Sala de Proyectos of Universidad de los Andes in august of 2009.
More about 'El Show de las Estrellas':
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