For nearly three decades, the visual storyteller Juan Manuel Echavarría has been bearing witness to Colombia’s long and brutal war – not with apology or ideology, but through photographs, paintings, and installations that hold space for both grief and resilience.
His latest exhibition, No Se Puede Mirar – “One Cannot Look” – is more than a retrospective of over 1,000 works. Installed in the hallowed corridors of the National University of Colombia’s postgraduate humanities building, the exhibition unfolds as a carefully composed act of remembrance. On view through December in a Rogelio Salmona-designed space, it invites viewers into a visual meditation on violence, silence, and the fragility of memory. It is also a reckoning with what Colombia has lost — especially its children.
For years, Echavarría has returned to the country’s most forsaken landscapes: the Montes de María, Urabá, and other rural regions devastated by conflict among guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the state. In Silencios, he photographs blackboards in abandoned schools – some still etched with arithmetic, others marked with faded military codes from when the classrooms were turned into bases of war. A few bear final scribbled notes, like a child’s farewell: “Lo bonito es estar vivo” – “The beautiful thing is to be alive.”
Many of the children who once traced letters on those boards were forced to flee, to fight, or to disappear altogether. In Colombia’s decades-long internal conflict, schools were often among the first casualties — occupied, destroyed, or abandoned as the violence closed in. Echavarría’s lens does not show the children. Instead, it shows what they left behind. The absence is deliberate. It leaves a void the viewer must confront.
“He never sensationalizes suffering,” said Claudia Gaitán, a curator familiar with Echavarría’s work. “There’s dignity in every image. He gives space to those who were never given a voice.”
Nowhere is that more evident than in La guerra que no hemos visto – “The War We Have Not Seen” – a haunting collective project born from painting workshops with former combatants: guerrillas, paramilitaries, wounded soldiers, and demobilized women. Over two years, Echavarría and his team facilitated sessions where participants painted their memories of war – not as artists, but as survivors.
The result is a series of more than 480 small wooden panels, each paired with an oral testimony. One canvas shows a child hiding beneath a bed as armed men burst through the door. Another depicts a mother weeping over an empty crib. The visual language is raw and uneven – but so is memory. What emerges is not just documentation, but catharsis. In some cases, these paintings are confessions. In others, desperate attempts to explain the inexplicable.
“These people didn’t want to become killers,” Echavarría stated in a recent interview with Felipe Martínez of Razón Publica. “Many were just children when they were pulled into the war. The paintings show that — the rupture of innocence, the point of no return.”
That rupture appears again in Testigo – “Witness” – a series of photographs featuring animals: mules, oxen, birds, all staring directly into the camera. In one particularly haunting image used as the exhibition’s poster, the hollow eye of an emaciated mule reflects a ghostly landscape. The animal becomes a silent witness to massacre and displacement. “Colombia was built with corn and mules.” Now, Echavarría suggests, it is the mules who remember what the nation has tried to forget,” claims the artist’s friend, philosopher Fernando González.
What is most striking about No Se Puede Mirar is Echavarría’s refusal to offer closure. There are no grand narratives or easy resolutions. Though peace agreements have been signed, violence persists. Mass graves are still being uncovered. The disappeared remain missing.
REQUIEM OF THE NOMEN NESCIO
In Réquiem NN, Juan Manuel Echavarría and close collaborator Fernando Grisalez, document a haunting ritual of remembrance practiced in Puerto Berrío, a town on the banks of Colombia’s Magdalena River. For decades, the river has carried the mutilated bodies of unnamed victims – NN, from the Latin nomen nescio, “name unknown” – killed in the country’s armed conflict. Instead of letting these bodies vanish into oblivion, local residents have rescued them from the current and given them burial in the town’s cemetery.
Over time, a deeply symbolic tradition has emerged: people adopt these anonymous graves, care for them, repaint the tombstones, offer flowers, and even assign the dead new names—sometimes their own surnames. In return, they ask the NN for miracles: to heal illness, to help a child finish school, to find a job. Through this intimate exchange, the living grant dignity to the unnamed dead, and the dead, in turn, offer a sense of hope. Echavarría’s photographic series captures the slate headstones of these adopted graves as silent witnesses to a unique form of communal atonement.
Even as this exhibition spans a quarter-century of work, it remains open-ended. Silencios continues to grow. Echavarría is still photographing chalkboards, still listening to ex-combatants, still asking how a country begins to rebuild from what it once tried to erase. “This is not about looking at violence as spectacle,” believes the artist. “It’s about seeing — really seeing — what happened, and what continues to happen. And maybe, through art, creating a space where healing can begin.”
In a country where official truths are contested and victims’ voices often drowned by headlines, Echavarría’s work insists on a slower, deeper kind of witnessing – one that honors both pain and endurance.
Corte de Florero: The Botany of Bones
In the series Corte de Florero, Juan Manuel Echavarría confronts one of the most grotesque and little-known expressions of political violence in Colombia’s history: the mutilation of bodies during La Violencia, the civil war between Conservatives and Liberals that devastated the countryside in the mid-20th century. As a child in Medellín, he had heard fragments of these horrors on the radio or in hushed family conversations – terms like “corte de corbata” or “corte de franela,” which referred to brutal disfigurements inflicted on victims.
But it was only later, while researching that bloody chapter in national memory, that he came across the term “corte de florero” – a mutilation so extreme that the victim’s limbs were severed and stuffed into their own torso, as if arranging flowers in a vase. It was this grotesque metaphor, and the trauma embedded in it, that led Echavarría in 1997 to begin working with human bones, reassembling them into delicate floral compositions. In these macabre “flowers,” the artist invites the viewer to reflect on how violence distorts not only the body, but also the symbols through which a society mourns and remembers.
To look away, as the exhibition suggests, is easy. But to look – even with difficulty — is to acknowledge that these stories matter. And perhaps, in doing so, we can begin to imagine a different Colombia.
April 22, 2007 – La Candelaria, Bogotá
“I returned to visit the mausoleum of the NN (unidentified) in Puerto Berrío.
The cemetery reeked of death. I met Wilmer, a former soldier who spent seven years in the mountains.
He told me an astonishing story:
Once, a gravedigger, upon witnessing the despair, sorrow, and overwhelming anguish of a mother whose son had disappeared, decided to assemble a body from the bones of different skeletons and present it to her. In the midst of her pain, she said: “This is my son!”
