Labriego

Abstract

This report aims to describe the research-creation process undertaken for the work “Labriego,” which focused on interpreting the mediating function of the work of Colombian artist Rosemberg Sandoval in relation to structures of power, exclusion, and discourses of marginality. This approach involves an analytical examination of the main characteristics that shape the artist's work, whose production spans from 1980 to the present and is characterized by the use of one's own body and the bodies of others, especially those of homeless people, as artistic material. The project was developed through a critical-interpretive approach articulated with the principles of research-creation and the Situationist theory of dérive. The methodology combined in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork in Cali and Jamundí, and the production of an audiovisual documentary in cinema verité format. The analysis integrated four types of voices: the artist's own discourse; the perspectives of critics, curators, and researchers such as Miguel González, Nayibe Ruiz, Ileana Diéguez, Álvaro Villalobos, and Mario Espinosa; that of a direct collaborator in the assisted performances (Robert Aguiño); and that of people without specialized artistic training (a domestic worker, a doctor, a lawyer, a psychologist, a priest, and passersby) exposed to the work “El Cuarto del Artista” as an interpretive survey exercise. From the intersection of these voices, six analytical categories emerged: interpretation and meaning from the social position of the interpreter; systemic violence and the body as political evidence; displacement and precarity as biographical and artistic material; body reading from non-artistic knowledge; symbolic power; and memory and context as the foundation of the work.