A Colombian Reality told through art!

I went to two art expos today, this piece really caught my eye. I forgot who the artist or the name was, but I loved this because of the meaning behind it. What you are looking at are the legs and feet of Colombian people displaced by violence. On their legs there is a drawing of a map, that map is the map of the journey they had from their place of origin to the place where they ended up due to forced displacement.

Colombia is a country with one of the longest lasting armed conflicts in the world. It is a conflict that has destroyed and taken many lives, unfortunately. This piece was particularly eye catching for me, because even though I live in Colombia I have never seen or been victim of any conflict at all. If someone asks me about Colombia I say: no nothing is happening, everything is ok. But truth is; only 5% of the entire Colombian population (that is of about 44 million people over all) think that way, we live in a bubble, pretty safe we are too comfortable. But the other 95% do see a conflict and it is a part of them, a conflict that may not be obvious and that somehow is slowly vanishing and viewed as something foreign.But just because it happens in places that no one visits doesn’t mean it doesn’t exists, it is after all part of this society, part of Colombia, its past its present and its future.

I appreciate art that is socially conscious, so I thought I’d share and tell you a bit about my country, given that not many know about it.