On February 20, 1980, Luis Carlos Tovar’s father, Jaime Tovar, was abducted by the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army) in the Caquetá department of Colombia. It is this momentous occasion that haunts the pages of the artist’s Jardín de mi Padre. However, the book does not retell the story of his father’s kidnapping. Instead, it deals with something much more difficult: the lingering imprint of this experience on his family’s life.
Both jarring and affectionate, Jardín de mi Padre delves into the many layers of this complex history through a deeply personal lens. Tovar’s spellbinding approach to his family archive belongs to a handful of local creators who are infusing photography with new uses and readings, moving away from the documentary and photojournalism that has long dominated the portrayal of the Colombian conflict.
In this interview for LensCulture, Valeria Posada-Villada speaks to Tovar about the origins of this photobook, its relationship to his career as well as Colombia’s ongoing reconciliation process.
Valeria Posada-Villada: How did your interest in this painful family memory arise and develop?
Luis Carlos Tovar: I cannot point to a specific moment in time, but I do remember that it was always silently present in my childhood. My father brought back a small suitcase full of flowers, seeds, bones, picón bird feathers and Morpho butterflies when he returned from captivity. He framed the butterflies and subsequently placed them in my room, which I recall looking at for hours. Only later did I find out about its real origin and provenance.
Mom used to say: “Your father brought that from the manigua because the manigua almost devoured him.’” She was both referring to the jungle and the spirit that, for communities such as the Tikuna and Arawak, inhabits the Amazon…
VPV: Did you ever discuss it with your father when growing up?
LCT: As I became older, I was triggered by some of his quirky behaviors and obsessions. He used to say they had to do with what he had experienced in the past and I urged him to write about his experience by gifting him notebooks every year. My attempt was futile. He would occasionally mention something to me but the absence of an image or a clear narrative kept me wondering. I couldn’t help being stirred up by the silent presence of the past.
In my attempt to touch upon this experience, I remember giving him Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Prize speech My Father’s Suitcase as a present. It’s a beautiful speech in which Pamuk speaks about how his dad’s secret inheritance led him to become a writer. After reading it, my father came up to me and said: “If I were to write a memoir, I think I would title it ‘My Son’s Suitcase.’”
VPV: Was he then jokingly handing the task to you?
LCT: I think so, however it took 12 to 15 years to complete this process. We turned the house upside down with my mother trying to find traces of that time, specifically a Polaroid snapshot that the FARC-EP took from my father as a proof of life during his kidnapping. We weren’t able to find it but in the process we stumbled upon a red folder full of newspaper clippings, Ektachrome slides, telegrams, and letters.
The absence of that polaroid snapshot triggered my imagination and marked the beginning of this project. As it grew in me, I went out in search of additional sources in the National Library of Colombia, which I eventually included in the photobook. Jardín de mi Padre is thus the outcome of this archive activation, one in which I make use of free association and speculation to develop my own interpretation of collective and personal memory.
VPV: And why did you decide then that the photobook would be a suitable format to address this memory?
LCT: The idea did not occur overnight; it grew with time. I was initially thinking of it as a film script. However, for various reasons this did not work out and I left the idea aside. Some years later I moved to Europe. My conversations about memory, image and representation through photography with writers and artists such as Joan Fontcuberta and Christian Boltanski led me in this direction once more.
I understood the photobook would be a suitable format for two reasons. Its adaptable structure gave me the freedom to arrange the plot as an interplay of different kinds of images: the cyanotypes that I worked on with my family, the personal and public archives, and the books and natural mementos my father brought back from his time in captivity. And it was via this interplay that I was able to traverse between fiction and reality—metaphor and facts—to give shape to a work that mirrors memory’s own unstable nature.
VPV: What really draws me to Jardín de mi padre is that you create an expanded view of what an archive is. The photobook includes the newspapers and Ektachrome slides you just mentioned but also book excerpts, X-rays, anatomic prints and even insects.
LCT: Indeed, and I felt it was necessary to do so. At the beginning it was not easy to convince my editors. But I stood my ground because I found it essential to have as much creative room to build my narrative as possible. I wanted, for once, to express all that baroqueness that is very much in me, rooted in Colombia, as well as other Latin American countries. A publication full of color, a bricolage of metaphor and contradiction. And, of course, the color also helped me achieve that sense of unity in disparity.
VPV: Now that you bring up the topic of color, I also wanted to talk about the cyanotype technique that makes up the core of your work. You present it in a way that both highlights its historical use in botany and architecture as well its acquired cultural meanings in the west. That is, as a color associated with the virtuous, the otherworldly, but also the melancholic, the ‘devil’s blues’—a quality delightfully described by historian Michel Pastoureau.
LCT: Well, I chose the cyanotype because it felt like the perfect metaphor. I understood this once I accompanied my father to a phototherapy session he had been receiving to deal with his kidney failure. Curiously enough, phototherapy uses the same UV radiation needed to make cyanotypes. The high exposure to UV rays calms the pain of blood poisoning.
This technique, moreover, connects with the concept of the manigua that my mother once mentioned to me. If you go to the Putumayo y Caquetá departments of Colombia, the Tikuna and Huitoto indigenous communities, for example, do not differentiate between green and blue. For them, the jungle is blue! I must give credit to Wade Davis’ book One River for bringing this to my attention.Sometimes, as an artist, you make certain decisions based on your intuition only to understand later how they connect to a bigger story.
VPV: And it’s also a technique that, in my eyes, captures memory’s elusive character…
LCT: In a way, I think that it allows me to connect with this past and engage with it creatively instead of presenting it as a mere recollection of facts. As Fontcuberta explains in the text that features in Jardín de mi Padre: “If history focuses on the description of the past, memory focuses on the meaning we give to that past in the present.” And cyanotypes allowed me to achieve that in both aesthetic and narrative terms.
VPV: Are there any artists that you’d say your work is in dialog with? You have mentioned Doris Salcedo, an artist that has also addressed the disruptive traces of the armed conflict in Colombia’s day-to-day, in the same vein as Oscar Muñoz and Juan Manuel Echavarría, other local artists working with photography
LCT: Well, this is a hard question to answer. I think that like them, I also seek to reframe the troubling legacy of our conflict and create art as a gesture of resistance to violence. Because we grew up in the thick of it, our generation at first tried to avoid the topic. However with time, the conflict’s unresolved character compelled us as artists to go beyond, to confront its legacy. An approach I have also seen in the work of other Chilean and Mexican artists living in Paris who are seeking to address the collective wounds which are part of their family history.
VPV: I met Alejandro Castillejo, one of Colombia’s Truth Commissioners, this year while visiting Documenta 15. He oversaw the production of the testimonial volume When birds did not sing, which includes a curated selection of photography projects on the armed conflict by photographer and editor Santiago E. Jaramillo. It was a pleasant surprise to find a selection of Jardín de mi Padre included in it. How did this collaboration come to be?
LCT: It was a surprise for me too. Thanks to this invitation, Jardín de mi Padre is now part of an official Truth and Reconciliation initiative. Truth Commissioner Castillejo—and supporting researchers like Jaramillo—had the difficult task of developing a multimedia project around an astonishing 14,000 written, audio and visual testimonies. So the fact they reached out to me touched me deeply. This inclusion feels like the natural end of a process that began nearly two decades ago.
The printed version of this volume features a selection of images from Jardín de mi Padre alongside the written testimonies of other victims’ and family members. It’s quite a volume, around 515 pages, and this is only one of the 14 volumes the Truth Commission has published. That is why it is now focusing on sharing its work through outreach programming, such as talks and exhibitions. I look forward to supporting this initiative by organizing ritual readings of this volume in my future exhibitions with the help of Castillejo himself.
VPV: Do you have any future plans for Jardín de mi Padre?
LCT: Since Jardín de mi Padre was published in 2020 amid the pandemic, it was not possible to exhibit the work. Gladly the chance arose some months ago, when La Graineterie Art Centre invited me to present a selection of my work in their space. We are presently working with curator María Santoyo to install a show entitled Contre-Souvenir. The exhibition will present Jardín’s original size cyanotypes as well as two other series of expanded photography: Frictions, result of a collaboration with Fondation Fiminco in 2021 and Manigua, a collaboration with Fondation des Artistes in 2022.
They stem from Jardín’s storyline, but they dwell deeper on the relationship between memory and image-making. Frictions focuses on the newspaper archives I found when carrying out research for the photobook. Manigua—still in development—focuses on the microorganisms that are decomposing the Ektachrome slides of my family archive. Through these series, I am going beyond the narrative, wishing to simultaneously ponder on the intimate, historic and symbolic construction of memory. As Santoyo so thoughtfully described Contre-Souvenir “speaks of the archive as an accident, of the collection as a failed story, as an unsuccessful proof of existence that appeals to memory’s metamorphic character.’’
Editor’s note: Contre-Souvenir will open on January 21, 2023 at La Graineterie Art Centre in Houilles, France and will run until March 11, 2023.
Jardín de mi Padre
by Luis Carlos Tovar
Publisher: Editorial RM / Musée de l’Elysée
ISBN: 9788417975371