Los Incontados: un tríptico (Variación) (The Unaccounted: A Triptych [Variation]) is part of the project Anatomía de la violencia en Colombia (Anatomy of Violence in Colombia), comprising four stage pieces which also lead on to a series of “variations”, of which this installation is one such version. As a pictorial triptych in which three parts articulated by hinges comprise a fourth painting upon closing, the installation is structured into four architectural spaces:

One space devoted to spectator listening.

Behind a display cabinet in the second space are the remainders of a private party, where an automated music band appears, in reference to the “bands of war” which were hugely popular in Colombian schools, whereby schoolchildren would receive music training via military marches. The source of inspiration for the space is a photograph by Jeff Wall entitled A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947 (1990).

The third space moves through a unique carnival held in Guapi, a predominantly African American town in which men dress as women with rubber masks and lash their neighbours with whips in remembrance of slavery.

A jungle makes up the fourth space, in reference to a clandestine party, where the most notorious cocaine drug lord, Pablo E. Escobar, rehearses a delusional speech on the legalisation of the drug, understood as a consumer good inserted within the circulation of capitalism, and a far cry from the sacred harvesting of coca by Indigenous peoples, the victims of this illegal trade.

The installation is at once a footprint and archive, a mix of real and fictitious documents, processed sounds and live music. It takes as its starting point materials, objects and people the transdisciplinary collective Mapa Teatro found during their research and assembly processes, with the remnants of the staging creating a palimpsest laden with temporary, plastic and spatial layers seeking to reflect on the relationships between festivities and violence in Colombia. In the recent history of the country, the perpetrators of such violence (among them guerrillas, drug traffickers and paramilitaries) have used festivities and the vulnerability of bodies as a device to celebrate not only life but also death. Thus, from a micropolitical, poetic and theatrical perspective, distanced from documentalism, Mapa Teatro spotlight the effects of violence on subjectivity and on bodies.