“Violence” by Alejandro Obregón

A reconfiguration of the sensitive from the period of violence in Colombia

Abstract

This article presents a series of reflections on Alejandro Obregón's painting “Violence” and the ways in which it gives part to the partless left by the period of La Violencia in Colombia, which between 1946 and 1964 claimed the lives of 200,000 people, of whom an estimated 11,363 were women. For this purpose, we take as an analytical framework the philosophy developed by Jacques Rancière, which some authors call philosophy of emancipation, through which a reading can be made on the forms of distribution of the sensitive that exist around the period of bipartisan violence experienced by the country, which, in addition, is considered the precedent to understand the later forms of violence that developed in the national territory. Thus, it is inferred that Obregón's painting configures a sensitive device that allows us to recognize the police narratives of the years of La Violencia and gives rise to a political distribution that makes visible and audible the women who died in those years, whose postponed mourning is preserved in the work to challenge the viewer and denude other possible worlds.