DESMINAR (DEMINING), 2024, is an immersive artwork by Mexican artist Tania Candiani, curated by Gabriela Rangel. It directly reacts to its site, Bogotá’s Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria. This “space of art and memory,” opened by Doris Salcedo in 2018, is a “counter-monument” to decades of armed conflict in Colombia. The floor of the space is made out of arms melted down after being given up by FARC-EP guerrillas following the signing of the 2016 peace agreement with the Colombian government. Salcedo worked with women who’d survived sexual abuse during the years of fighting to hand-beat the molten metal.
The title Desminar holds particular significance in Colombia, a country deeply scarred by antipersonnel mines (APMs). After six decades of conflict, the country had the second-highest number of APM victims globally, following Afghanistan. Desminar therefore suggests a healing process after decades of civil war.The work is unique in that it engages with Fragmentos’s floor as a living territory, almost like an epidermis. Candiani has repurposed a real mine detector into a participatory sculpture that viewers can use to scan and record the floor, generating audiovisual data that is projected in an adjoining space.
This transformative process is not just a technological operation but a profound reimagining of the materials.
Using a specially developed artificial intelligence program, the apparatus translates the captured stimuli into sound while projecting magnified images of the floor in a monumentally scaled video installation. The video, generated in real time as visitors move the mine detector around, metaphorically gives voice to the unspeakable, advocating for truth, memory, justice, and reconciliation. Sound, long a pivotal element in Candiani’s artistic practice, assumes a distinct role in the installation, inviting the audience to reflect on the enduring impact of both violence and the collective practices meant to heal its wounds—imperfections, uneven surfaces, and protuberances. Little by little, the machine isolates, frames, and catalogues every portion of the floor. And every time it returns to an area it has already scanned, the program’s understanding sharpens and it recognizes new details.
Candiani has employed this mine detector before, in her hometown of Mexico City, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, and here in Bogotá video recordings from these activations, reread by the AI to generate new audio, are displayed whenever the device is not being used for real-time interactions with Fragmentos. The “Three Cultures” are the main periods of Mexican history reflected by the buildings in the square: Mesoamerican, Spanish colonial, and the independent modern nation. The square itself has been marked by violence throughout its history, from colonial times to the massacre of the so-called Tlatelolco student movement that took place there in 1968. This is the intimate reason why these two places’ sound and visual recordings blend. At the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Candiani used the deminer on three different surfaces: the volcanic stone of the Aztec pyramid converted into the Catholic church, quarry stone, and marble. Even in this case, the machine’s algorithm continues to learn. As the projection continues, it reviews what was recorded and processes the repertoire again. This reprocessing accounts for the little squares and coordinates that appear on these images, as in a navigation system.
Wi-Fi network, macro lens, iPhone 12, machine learning algorithm, Open CV,
custom terrain synth, transformed metal detector, metal base, six studio monitors,
HD projector, artist book in display case. Installation view, Fragmentos, Espacio de
Arte y Memoria, Bogotá. Photo: Juan Fernando Castro.
Desminar records and projects the annihilating matter of Fragmentos’s floor and the different surfaces that make up the brutal history connected to the Tres Culturas pavement as interpreted by an artificial intelligence program. This transformative process is not just a technological operation, but a profound reimagining of the materials. The three types of stones examined in Mexico City, for instance, decompose their stable form and return to a magmatic state of fusion. This transformative revisitation of elements that keep a silent memory of human life also shows the brightness and shadows encompassing cities such as Bogotá and Mexico City, suspended between their colonial past and their present as capitals ravaged by violence.
Eugenio Viola is the artistic director at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO).
