Abstract

This paper proposes a philosophical approach to José Alejandro Restrepo’s art installation, Musa paradisíaca. My reading intends to emphasize how each of the three stages of the most recent installation of the work in FLORA represents a destabilization of our conceptions of archive, memory, and history, respectively. By doing so, I argue, Musa gives birth to a series of grammars that allow to inscribe as unforgettable the kind of violence the work attempts to denounce. Thus, the work inaugurates a form of remembrance that is able to preserve both the kind of forgetfulness that pervades the history of violence in Colombia, together with the way in which this erasure constitutes, paradoxically, a stubborn form of survival. I am interested in exploring the political significance of this form of remembrance, and to inquire how Musa, in its multiple repetitions, from 1996 to the present, somehow performs the kind of displacements that it, in turn, is each time seeking to denounce. How, therefore, in its own inaugural forms of representation, the work is capable of insisting both on the irresolvable character of what it denounces, as well as on the di culties that surround the very act of rendering this denunciation audible.