Álvaro Barrios - Christopher Columbus’s Sea

Álvaro Barrios
El Mar De Cristóbal Colón [Christopher Columbus’s Sea]
January 30–June 7, 2020

Álvaro Barrios lends the Caribbean Sea a spatial dimension that had been charted and flattened by Westerners. Inked in blue on the front and in bright red on the back, the silkscreen prints El Mar de Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus’s Sea) enlarge the subdivisions that compose the grid of a nautical chart and quantify the slaughter of native peoples and the exploitation of enslaved African population. The cartographic fiction comes undone. The mapmaker’s victorious, dictatorial grid is blown up to bits.

Álvaro Barrios was born in 1945 in Barranquilla, Colombia, where he lives and works.