Luis Carlos Tovar

On 20 February 1980, Jaime Tovar was abducted by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC) and forced to wander for months through the tropical rainforest of the Colombian Amazonia. His son Luis Carlos, the author of this book, was just a few months old at the time. The guerilla fighters sent a Polaroid snapshot of their captive to his family as a proof that he was still alive. This project starts from the search for that uncertain photograph, but it reflects a process of rediscovery that transcends the event in itself. It is a poetic exercise that speaks of our finitude and contingent nature that explores the legacy of the past as our only mode of survival. The absence of the fetish photograph catalyzes a performative visual essay that draws on the mechanisms of appropriation and collage, removing the practice of documentary and autobiographical photography from its conventional framework.