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(2004-In-progress) |
| Vortex is an
accumulative installation project with a central theme based on the great
Latin American novel The Vortex (La Vorágine) by José Eustasio
Rivera. By attempting to follow the narrative spiral of this literary work, Vortex postulates in its form the delirious currents of fabulous stories when they join the whirlpools of their truthful basis. As the overwhelming information of the original text is revealed, this project approaches La Vorágine making incisions on its bark to extract its essence with cautious dialectical distance –a distance clearly destined to succumb to the somber barbarism of its final closure. The installations in this project address two basic aspects of the novel: •the dense lyrical imaginary of its text •the atrocities committed against the indigenous communities of the Putumayo River The main sources of these inquiries come from The Putumayo Report by Roger Casement (1912), from the essay The Factual Basis of “La Vorágine” by Eduardo Neale-Silva, (1939), and from contemporary writers who have continued these investigations. The Vortex project delights itself with Rivera’s epiphanies while corroborating the testimonials of its characters with the intent to find visions, real or imagined. |
 Vortex (La Vorágine), Earle K. James translation, installation |
