PESCA MILAGROSA

Pesca Milagrosa’ (The miraculous catch of fishes) is what Colombian guerillas call their suddenly erected blockades on motorways. There they choose which of the people stopped will be kidnapped. Carlos Motta (Colombia, b. 1978) took this inhumane roulette game as his point of departure for the collage shown here. The fading photographs are digitally manipulated portraits of disappeared, missing or kidnapped persons from both South and North America. In his work the young and very talented photo artist goes beyond the usual news photos of war, mass executions and victims of violence that we have become accustomed to and all too easily ignore. With this collage of ‘burned heads’ will give a face that sticks in the memory to ‘the poor, the bad and the horrible’. With its many abstract colour fields Pesca Milagrosa (2002) is a enigmatic collage that continues to call up questions.