Este sitio presenta el retrato del antiguo Pueblo Escultor que emerge de los estudios de David Dellenback en el valle de San Agustín y el Macizo Colombiano. Durante los primeros siete...
Impossible Guide “Guía Imposible”
Violeta Ospina, Diana Salas y Andrea Sánchez
If our bibliographical tour may include curiosities, and if this book so qualifies, then I would welcome the reader to take a look at a book at once curious and humorous, but still serious and profound, and into the bargain, unique: the Impossible Guide to the Sculptures from San Agustín in Bogotá.
The three “intrepid explorers” who are the book’s authors—Violeta Ospina, Diana Salas and Andrea Sánchez, under the name of “The Analogs”—take us along on expeditions of discovery through their territory searching for Pueblo Escultor statues. However, the territory in question isn´t the Alto Magdalena highlands, but rather the inner-worlds of Bogotá, and the archaeological pieces they discover are the replicas that today can be found dispersed throughout Colombia’s capital city.
So it is that from the beginning our authors put their cards, dealt from an alternative deck, on the table, and in doing so they formulate valid questions for “normal” archaeology as well: Why are statues found erected in places to which they don’t belong? What sense did they hold for the people who placed them there, and how do those people explain these “scenes” they have constructed? What did these pieces originally express, and what expression do they take on when erected in ways and in places to which they do not pertain?
The three “intrepid explorers” who are the book’s authors—Violeta Ospina, Diana Salas and Andrea Sánchez, under the name of “The Analogs”—take us along on expeditions of discovery through their territory searching for Pueblo Escultor statues. However, the territory in question isn´t the Alto Magdalena highlands, but rather the inner-worlds of Bogotá, and the archaeological pieces they discover are the replicas that today can be found dispersed throughout Colombia’s capital city.
So it is that from the beginning our authors put their cards, dealt from an alternative deck, on the table, and in doing so they formulate valid questions for “normal” archaeology as well: Why are statues found erected in places to which they don’t belong? What sense did they hold for the people who placed them there, and how do those people explain these “scenes” they have constructed? What did these pieces originally express, and what expression do they take on when erected in ways and in places to which they do not pertain?
The book’s virtues are due in part to having been created under the guidance of the country’s institutionality of Art, and not that of Archaeology, which has never shown much appetite for humor and irony. Our archaeological models tend to be ruled by their data and their ambition, to the exclusion of any alternative or wider vision. Not so this volume.
The three explorers dress, in the accompanying photos, like caricatures of the “intrepid archaeologists” of the 19th and 20th centuries, while they observe and comment on the statues that they find encrusted in shopping centers and on the margins of unassuming parks and greenways. In this way they pose their ironical (and critical) eye on the actions of such past actors, and at the same time upon those of today, authors of the continuity allowed many of these proceedings and practices.
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The prologue of the Impossible Guide, in a commentary that at the same time seems to refer to the archaeological parks in San Agustín and Isnos, tells us that this book “…proposes a tour through a museum, almost all outdoors in the open air, with which few are familiar and which we can use to establish an alternative, non-traditional link to our national culture.”
The inclusion of several statues on exhibit in the Gold Museum, which are authentically ancient and certainly not replicas, illustrates the fact that their presence in Bogotá, a product of tomb-sacking and robbery, is equally (if not more) questionable and impertinent than the existence of all the replicas dotting Cundinamarca’s capital. As we are told, “The presence of replicas in the capital is an appropriation of the forms, but by no means the original sense, of the statuary.”
With the laughter and the penetrating irony, with the eminently useful map and the photos of disguised expeditionaries, this Guide constitutes a jewel of the Pueblo Escultor bibliography.
The three explorers dress, in the accompanying photos, like caricatures of the “intrepid archaeologists” of the 19th and 20th centuries, while they observe and comment on the statues that they find encrusted in shopping centers and on the margins of unassuming parks and greenways. In this way they pose their ironical (and critical) eye on the actions of such past actors, and at the same time upon those of today, authors of the continuity allowed many of these proceedings and practices.
The inclusion of several statues on exhibit in the Gold Museum, which are authentically ancient and certainly not replicas, illustrates the fact that their presence in Bogotá, a product of tomb-sacking and robbery, is equally (if not more) questionable and impertinent than the existence of all the replicas dotting Cundinamarca’s capital. As we are told, “The presence of replicas in the capital is an appropriation of the forms, but by no means the original sense, of the statuary.”
With the laughter and the penetrating irony, with the eminently useful map and the photos of disguised expeditionaries, this Guide constitutes a jewel of the Pueblo Escultor bibliography.
Conozca las imágenes de las centenares de esculturas en piedra elaboradas
por el antiguo Pueblo Escultor del Macizo Colombiano, organizadas
geográficamente y presentadas individualmente, con lujo de detalles...
Un vistazo a las publicaciones sobre el Pueblo Escultor—antiguos escultores
en piedra del Macizo Colombiano— elaboradas por los investigadores David
Dellenback y Martha Gil...
En diciembre de 1913 el etnólogo alemán Konrad Preuss, quien al momento era el Director del Museo Etnológico de
Berlín, llegó a San Agustín con los dos propósitos ...
Descubra el mundo del Pueblo Escultor a través de un paseo por los
diversos estudios llevados a cabo durante los últimos dos siglos.
Periódicamente se presenta otro de los libros esenciales que indagan en el
cosmos de los antiguos escultores...
Encuentre noticias del Pueblo Escultor, diferentes causas de repatriación y documentación que consideramos importante compartir con nuestros lectores y visitantes.