The communication tactics of the Colombian government in the context of a chronic armed conflict have taken the social media channels to mansplaining ideology on a contemporary massive media level. Founded in 2018, this ready-made video art piece shows the rhetoric of the patriarchal discourse of the so-called “low intensity” war. Here, the army is celebrating Mother’s Day by using soldiers to make fanatical affective statements about the role of women in society using a religious heroic language very much symptomatic of a fascist regime. This cinematographic production makes direct quotations of the spectacular education of American action movies embodied by the military themselves.

 

The Colombian official Army is the biggest (and only legal) armed group in the country. For almost two decades, the Army has been investigated for committing systematic crimes against humanity. Journalistic findings in 2008 that the security forces had extrajudicially executed dozens of young men from Soacha, a poor neighborhood near the capital Bogotá, forced the government to deny and then to finally acknowledge that the Army may be responsible. Besides the title, subtitles and the disclaimer, neither the sound nor the video have been edited whatsoever.

 

Andrés Felipe Uribe Cárdenas was born in Bogotá, 1982 and currently lives and studies in Berlin. His studies include Bildhauerei Diplom and Meisterschüler in KHB, in Berlin, and a Fine Arts BA from UJTL, Colombia. His work focuses on borderline conceptualism, poetry, multimedia povera and postsituationism. He has deliberately turned off more than one hundred television screens within the international public space during his career. He’s had solo shows in Bogotá, Cali, Colombia, Los Angeles, USA, and Berlin U-Bahn Moritzplatz. Grants include the DAAD Masters Studium Grant 2019, IDARTES Publishing grant 2018, and the Ministry of Culture Creation Grant 2016.