Huaca
Germán Botero
Black Granite Absolut Brasil, Granite Sierra Chica, agua. 10.4 x 7.2 x 0.55 mt.
1999-2019
The name “huaca”, from quechua wak’a, concerns our Andean culture, the place where the symbolic exchange between life and death was performed. There, with their everyday and ritual objects, the pre-Hispanic inhabitants continued this other existence, understood as a continuum, a permanent conversation between life and death. In its more frequent definition, “huaca” specifically alludes to the monumental pyramid structures that represent one of the characteristic features of the central Andean region.
This sculpture refers to the dislocation caused by the absence of funeral ceremonies, a characteristic that applies to many of the detained-disappeared, and the break that this absence generates, not only of emotional ties to our loved ones, but also in relation to the cosmos. Therefore, the sculpture works as a ritual space that connotes our relationship with the earth to which we belong, and includes the presence of water as an element of life.
Germán Botero (1946, Frenso, Tolima, Colombia)
Painter, sculptor and architect, Germán Botero was born in Frenso, Tolima in 1946. He He graduated as an architect at the National University of Colombia in Medellín and was associate professor at the Faculty of Arts of the National University of Colombia. His early sculptural work made around the mid-1970s is inscribed within the modernist current that dominated the Colombian sculpture scene from the postwar period until the eighties. In the mid-1970s Botero began to build with linear elements forming aerial cubes of wood or anodized aluminum. In 1976 his work Torre de metal deserved the First Prize in Sculpture XXVI Salón National Visual Arts. In Medellín his most important works are located in the El Tesoro Building and in the Camino Real Shopping Center.
In 1999 he won the International Memory Park Competition, Buenos Aires, Argentina and in 2003 the 200 years Contest of the University of Antioquia,
sponsored by the Mayor’s Office of Medellín, Colombia. He currently lives and works in Bogotá.
