Antwerp-Bogotá: interpretations of domesticity in Ernesto Volkening

Ernesto Volkening (1908-1983) was a German immigrant who acknowledged in Colombia as a critic and an essayist. Although his work covers many diverse topics, one is of particular interest: the impression that his native Antwerp left on him, and also poetic notes of his life in Bogotá. It is this paper’s objective to discover whether it was possible to find ideas, thoughts and extracts that could be analysed and interpreted from the point of view of ‘the domestic’. In order to achieve this, pertinent writings were selected, the content was analysed, exact sentences were used, and finally this material was compared to the writings of other authors. His dialectics and poetry argue that the city can be understood as belonging to ‘the domestic’. Volkening’s theories are extremely valid, and topics that deserve further consideration include: the city, territory, today’s idea of ‘the domestic’.