NN (no name)
I found this mannequin abandoned in a courtyard of an old textile factory in Bogota. It was a mannequin of a child. Made of burlap and plaster, it caught my attention. I took it to my home and kept it for nine years until I decided to bring it out again.
I photographed this mannequin as if I was doing an emotional autopsy, looking closely at the different parts of the body and its different wounds. It was a body that I immediately associated with the mass graves and the massacres, which keep occurring in Colombia. Here was a corpse that presented cuts that could have been done by machete and other cutting instruments. This child’s body became a metaphor of mutilation.
In the long history of Colombia’s violence, massacres keep repeating, accompanied by mutilations of the corpses. These mutilations have been known as cortes or cuts. In the 1950s the cuts took place in the countryside in a war between conservative and liberal peasants. Among the many different cuts there was one named picadillo de tamal (tamal being a national dish and picadillo meaning minced). In this corte the body was cut into small pieces so the identification of the body was erased.
Today the paramilitary forces in the countryside have continued these practices. In some massacres the stomach of the victim is cut open and disemboweled so the body when thrown into the river sinks to the bottom. Other corpses that are thrown into the rivers float and if the vultures do not eat them, the corpse that are rescued are buried under a cross written with the words NN (no name).
—Juan Manuel Echavarría
Born and raised in Medellin, Colombia; resides in Bogotá, Colombia |
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