Clandestine massive burials known as ‘fosas comunes’ are common, systematic and concise practices in the violent history in Colombia. On the last decade, it is well known, that these practices, usual by the paramilitary and military, have intensified to such point that society, and particularly art, have seen the need to make them visible. On this sense, art becomes a vehicle which triggers the life conditions, the history and memory that the bones of the disappeared bodies hold, and that these clandestine and systematic burials have tried but been unable to silence.

WE ARE # is staged as a field of trees, planted on fiberglass structures. Their shape is of a human bone called Tibia. The exhibit proposes an installation of a group composed by 30 trees, each 250 cms high. They represent 30 pits (fossa) that have been found throughout the country.

The proposal of WE ARE # has as a base the aesthetic search to disarticulate those silences, those bodies which became numbers. On this sense WE ARE # proposes to germinate, from the same soil under which these bodies have been buried, a seriality that becomes landscape. With this, the work, as a memory device, rescues from oblivion the towns of bone in which the bodies have been converted. The feeling of a peaceful forest, contrasts, collides and at the same time articulates with the resistance to be forgotten, becoming one only landscape whose roots contained in the bones transform the forest of silence into a landscape that contains the lack of control and the excess of the extended practice of disappearance and violent death.

The viewer, by inhabiting and passing through these landscape on which the trees emerge from the bones and the bones contain the trees, enhances an experience which seeks to review the living nature genre and the contemporary definitions of death. On this way, the relationship between the work and the viewer, suggests an opening of what can be represented of the complex and deformed reality of the pit and the limit situation of the victims.