A Future Buried in the Past.

In the Colombian Caribbean, the phantasmagorical presence of the disappeared Ingenio Central Colombia (Sugarcane Mill Central Colombia 1909-1953) is being unearthed by the elder’s stories and the paintings of a primitivist artist. In the plantation complex César Villa Gutiérrez, the main participant, claims the right to look. In his counter-visuality approach to a tidalectic movement of history, he started a creative archive that reveals the hidden story of the forgotten workers of the Ingenio. Confronting the official story reveals remnants of slavery, Cuban colonisation, and ethnic whitening. Villa’s oeuvre triggered a painting-elicitation that unearths what was buried in the elders’ memories.