A Guide for the Afflicted and Defiant

A Guide for the Afflicted and Defiant is a project that rises from affliction, from the sensations of immobility and pre-emptive failure that overburden us when facing dark times (Bertolt Brecht via Hannah Arendt). It is a project about disobedience: it gathers defiant gestures against the body’s impulse to stay in bed, change the channel, or look away from the chaos unravelling on the other side of windows. A group composed of visual artists, circus performers, dancers, journalists, designers, and civil rights organizations revisits the last two years of widespread protests in Colombia, providing a series of resources for hybrid artistic activism which unfolds in the overlapping terrain of the domestic, public, and digital spheres.

At the Art Museum, the audience is invited to immerse themselves in a counter-narrative of the country’s most recent history of violence and social unrest; a background voice underscores the exhibition to elucidate the stigmatization of protest by the country’s government and media, focusing on the subsequent need to overcome the boundaries of pure logic to grasp the possibility of social and political transformation.

Featuring Ana María Montenegro, Rafael Díaz, Mestizo Punkyaso, Alejandro Montoya Fuentes, La Otra Danza, Tania Tapia Jáuregui, and Putamente Poderosas, this interdisciplinary three-fold project is presented in the print page, as a book; in the gallery, as an exhibition; and online. Over the course of the exhibition, collaborators will release additional resources at guiaparalosafligidos.com.

This exhibition is produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.