Tania Candiani

This body of work is the result of a residency undertaken in Honda, Tolima, for several weeks between June and August 2013. Located on the banks of the Magdalena River, Honda is one of the oldest cities in Colombia, and for many years it served as the country’s most important river port. During the nineteenth century, Honda experienced enormous commercial development, but its strategic importance deteriorated with the construction of highways and the decline of river navigation in the previous century. Today, the city precariously survives on fishing, trade and tourism.
Candiani worked simultaneously on various fronts during her stay in Honda, ultimately producing a series of pieces that appeal to different senses. These works expose the distinct anachronism characterizing different aspects of daily life in a city fallen on hard times. But instead of viewing this as a problem, Candiani suggests that, perhaps, it will be in this slower time that its possibilities for survival will take root – survival as a society in an increasingly frenetic and dehumanized future.
In the artist’s words, “Today, at a moment when many of us artists are trying to find links between science and art, nature and culture once again assume a role as the two standards that lend aesthetic proposals their intensity. In an age dominated by the appropriation of nature, we know that it is art that must resist, in its discourses, the possible normalization and standardization of other social productions. Reactivating those moments of intense dynamism between science and art can only leave us with questions that depart from superficial layers or simple empirical observations in order to act as generators of creativity and promoters of new aesthetic experience”.