Daniel Salamanca

¿Adolfo?

Project (Exhibition and public actions)

2022—May

This is a posthumous homage to two important characters in my life. My father, Adolfo Salamanca, a lawyer and professor who died of cancer in 2012 (at the age of 62), and Adolfo Bernal, a well-known conceptual artist from Medellín, who died in 2008 (at the age of 54). Around these unrelated lives, which only link is their name, I explore various themes: illness (cancer more specifically), destiny, politics, and artistic poetry. The project worked in 4 manners, a traditional exhibition as the core part –symbolically emulating the first cell of cancer– and 3 “activations”, everything during the presidential elections of Colombia in a crucial historic moment (2022, first time in history that a left candidate was elected). The first action consisted in throwing from an airplane, thousands of flyers with the message Sin voz Con voto, which referred to the loss of my father's voice for a year (because of lung Cancer), but also to the democratic event of voting. Moreover, this work emulated a previous exercise by Adolfo Bernal, who did this same action, but with the text: “The End”. The second action was a message projected on a digital billboard just before the second round of elections with the copy: Tu voto hará metastasis ("your vote will metastasize"). Is important to note that the etymology of metastasis is “Beyond Stillness”. Finally, after the left candidate Gustavo Petro was elected, I presented a monologue talking about all these themes in a very personal manner and using an expanded idea of silence as the main connector.

> Texto por Erika Sosa

Solo exhibition at Lokkus, Medellín

Works and projects_

Works and projects_