Colombia 1971: Revolutionary Art Workers and Student Movement

Clemencia Lucena (Manizales, December 5, 1945 - Cali, July 24, 1983) was a militant of the Revolutionary Independent Labor Movement (MOIR)¹ and was part of its Cultural Front (FC)² together with intellectuals and artists who called themselves Revolutionary art workers (TAR)³. Lucena was committed to a practice where art and culture were understood as tools for political and ideological transformation according to the MOIR’s understanding of Maoist thought. With this in mind, our research, initially focused on Lucena’s trajectory, and was extended to that collective in order to propose a narrative that would allow us to understand such a particular production. A crucial step was the collection of visual sources in public, private, or personal archives, and the recording of oral testimonies that we cross-referenced with widely circulated sources (not restricted to the individual trajectory of an author like Lucena or to a creative language) to reconstruct a visual and creative field, where the performativity of the images contributed to building a scenario of social intervention consistent with the political imagination of the FC⁴.

We hope to distance ourselves from recent historiography concentrating on understanding Clemencia Lucena’s production as an artist and writer: Mariana Garrido⁵ and María Victoria Mahecha⁶ situate her as a political and militant artist isolated from her collectivity, which serves to confer her a privileged place in the history of art with artistic values of uniqueness and genius that her political party opposed as values proper to bourgeois society and art. We value but distance ourselves from the sociological reading of Abelardo Díaz⁷, who bases his review of her work on the understanding of a particular artistic field that displaces the role of the political tactics that this production allows us to envision. María Mercedes Herrera⁸ values her critical production as a contextualized theory of art, while María Sol Barón⁹, Andrea Giunta¹⁰, and, on the other hand, Mónica Eraso, Emilio Tarazona, and Ana María Villate¹¹, value her trajectory from a feminist perspective. In contrast, in this paper, we approach the collective situation that contextualized her production in art, criticism, and politics.

As a record of the curatorial conception of “Clemencia Lucena y los Trabajadores del Arte Revolucionario. Unidad y Combate. Arte agitación y propaganda en el Frente Cultural del MOIR“¹², this article approaches the germinal moment of the MOIR’s FC, which occurred at the same time as the workers’ movement being formed as a new democracy Maoist party. This turn of events was consistent with the political and social background of the Colombian student movement of 1971, in which the localized assimilation of Maoist thought —promoted by the MOIR— characterized agitation and propaganda through art, culture, and visuality as necessary political formation agents for Colombia’s social transformation. In the words of Francisco Mosquera: “this makes the national and democratic revolution that Colombia needs a revolution of a new type, a revolution of a new democracy led by the proletariat”¹³ and prepared, as of 1972, to recognize and organize the social bases as protagonists of art and revolution¹⁴.

We will approach that moment with two graphic productions from 1970 and 1971, in which Lucena participated together with Nirma Zárate and Diego Arango from the platform of Taller 4 Rojo, to understand the FC in its germinal context, characterized by the diversification of the “new lefts” in Colombia in which the student movement stimulated and articulated the expansion of politicized artistic and cultural practices. We will analyze how art and culture were understood as tools of formation and ideological struggle in various political sectors, as well as the particularities with which the MOIR assumed them along with other actions of political militancy¹⁵. This juncture can “describe a context”¹⁶ where cultural practices and the “performative force” of the images¹⁷ could project, mobilize, and question the political imagination of its protagonists and a social context that today functions as a place of memory that can intervene the predominant historical narrative. With this account, we hope to contribute to the emergence of a critical and repressed history in which this collective participates: that of Colombian leftist artistic and political practices.

Revolutionary art workers and the new democracy

Printed in shades of blue, the head of a horse in pain occupies the composition justified in the upper part of a poster. Around it, from bottom to top and left to right, is the caption advertising the event: “I encuentro de los trabajadores del arte revolucionario - bloque sindical independiente de ant. - comisión cultural nal. del moir,” and below that, “Medellín, Oct 30 - 31 Nov 1º 1970” [sic].

The figure is a version of Cabeza de caballo (oil on canvas, 65x92cm), a sketch for Guernica, painted by Pablo Picasso in 1937 and kept in the collection at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, but painted in ochre. The choice of font is of little surprise. Picasso, who declared himself a communist in 1944 and argued that his art had led him to this decision, became a paradigm for many Latin American artists during the 1960s, who saw him as an exemplary figure of the committed artist and considered Guernica an exemplary gesture of artistic autonomy¹⁸. The wounded horse has been interpreted as the representation of the resistant republican Spanish people. Transferred to the local time and space, it is a representation of the Colombian people, victims of the policies of the National Front, a reading in line with MOIR ideology¹⁹. However, the implicit homage to Picasso was not appreciated by some Moirist sectors²⁰, possibly because they found it contradictory that the work of a communist artist and militant of the French Communist Party should call for a meeting of a workers’ organization opposed to the ideas of the Communist International and trade union federations affiliated to the Colombian Communist Party (PCC).

Image 1.

S/T (Poster "I Encounter of Revolutionary Art Workers"). Nirma Zárate and Diego Arango / Taller 4 Rojo and Clemencia Lucena (attributed). Photoserigraphy on paper. 69,5 × 50 cm. 1970.

Founded in 1969 during the National Meeting of Independent Trade Unions held in Medellín from September 12 to 14, the MOIR began as a trade union federation to bring together sectors not politically identified with labor federations linked to traditional parties —such as the UTC and the CTC— or close to the Colombian Communist Party (PCC), such as the CSTC²¹. As recalled by Jorge Morales, it initially brought together “liberals, Trotskyists, ELN leaders, artists and democratic personalities, as well as the MOEC dissidence led by Mosquera”²². In fact, Francisco Mosquera —MOIR’s historic leader— had been a militant in the Student and Peasant Workers Movement (MOEC 7 de enero), the first urban political movement to form a guerrilla group in Colombia²³. However, in 1964, he began to move away from the MOEC, questioning its decontextualized assimilation of the Cuban experience and its ignorance of the local social movement. This led him to begin an ideological transition towards Marxism and Maoism²⁴.

After the electoral fraud of 1970 and the National Patriotic Strike of April 26, there were discussions within the MOIR about political tactics to be implemented. This generated ruptures and resulted in a change of direction led by Mosquera concerning the purposes of the movement to form a political party of “new democracy” or, as Fernando Guarín recalls, of “national and democratic revolution”²⁵, a concept found in several of Mosquera’s texts²⁶. The new party was going to be called Partido del Trabajo de Colombia (PTC), but in the end, it kept the name of the original movement, of a workers and trade union nature, as established by the “Cachipay Summit” held between October 12 and 18, 1970.

Understanding the inclination of the MOIR as a “new democracy” party, implies recalling the consequences of the rupture of communist hegemony in movements and parties of the “new left” in Colombia and the world. Towards 1960, the differences between China and Russia were outlined in three considerations: the Soviet policy of coexistence with the capitalist West; the Chinese determination to encourage autonomous revolutions of the Communist International with the emergence of Marxist-Leninist parties in world nations; and the Soviet turn that suspended the actions of insurrection as a preponderant revolutionary strategy, unlike the “prolonged popular struggle” promoted from China and as a prelude to the “new democracy” in each nation²⁷. Mao consolidated the concept of “new democracy” as a state of construction after the triumph of the popular revolution and with articulations between liberal democracy and socialist ideology; a foreshadowing of the Chinese Cultural Revolution initiated in 1966 and which, in other contexts —Colombia, for example— opened the possibility of imagining an anticipated triumph of the revolution through cultural transformation²⁸.

In Colombia, the PC followed Moscow’s orientation, but other movements and parties arose simultaneously, encouraged by China’s disengagement and the triumph of the Cuban revolution as a third autonomous paradigm. The MOIR was one of the organizations that followed the new Maoist orientation and, among them, the only one that unilaterally embraced the democratic struggle as a contextualized expression of the “new democracy.” It left behind the attempt to “combine all forms of struggle” declared in our context by the IX Congress of the PCC²⁹ or to emphasize the armed confrontation as happened in the ML camp³⁰.

The principles postulated by Mao since 1939 were assimilated by the MOIR in its programmatic ideology according to a project of stages where the “new democracy” would constitute the first phase of the revolution for a “semi-feudal and highly underdeveloped” country³¹. Since the conditions of democratic participation for the masses were not given in our context, the MOIR assumed its preparation as a gradual, non-oligarchic cultural transformation, linked to the people, unarmed, and necessary to achieve grassroots participation in electoral struggles that would position the proletariat as the protagonist of the revolution, which resembles an escalated and local assimilation of the “cultural revolution.”

According to Adriana Munévar, this was how the MOIR embraced the attempt to abandon the Soviet internationalist influence as a gesture of national revolutionary affirmation, and embraced grassroots cultural formation as part of “scientific and mass education” to intervene and transform society in the face of a horizon of democratic participation.”³² It is clear then that the MOIR’s cultural structures and strategies emerged simultaneously with its consolidation as a party.

Weeks after the Cachipay Summit, the Bloque Sindical Independiente de Antioquia and the Cultural Commission of the MOIR convened, as recorded on the poster with Picasso’s Cabeza de caballo, the “I Encuentro de los Trabajadores del Arte Revolucionario“ in Medellín from October 30 to November 1³³. Which artists participated in this meeting and who made this piece? Some clues are provided by the poster itself; others include a couple of testimonies from founders of the party and a friend of Lucena. Jorge Villegas, a leftist intellectual and university professor who presented the first version of his emblematic study on oil exploitation³⁴, apparently attended the MOIR’s founding event in 1969, which included several cultural activities. Villegas, a friend of Diego Arango and Nirma Zárate, set up Taller 4 Rojo in downtown Bogota in the mid-1970s, as a place for independent and collective graphic, visual, and intellectual production³⁵. On the other hand, Carmen Escobar, a fine arts student at Universidad de Los Andes at the time and a friend of Lucena, credits her with taking part, with Taller 4 Rojo, in the creative decisions regarding the poster; a poster which, incidentally, did not please Mosquera given the ideological and militant differences with Picasso mentioned above³⁶. Like other silkscreen prints produced between 1970 and 1971 by this group, this print bears the printer’s stamp on the back: “Taller 4 Rojo, Zárate, Arango y Cía.”³⁷

The bond of collegiality and friendship between Lucena and the members of Taller 4 Rojo stimulated a couple of collaborations, until she joined the MOIR at the end of 1971. These coincidences —Villegas’ link to the founding of the MOIR, and the friendships and collaborations of the Arango-Zárate couple with Villegas and Lucena respectively— suggest that the three artists were involved in designing the poster and surmise that they coincided or were interested in that meeting³⁸.

Image 2.

Nirma Zárate and Diego Arango. Photography: published in El Tiempo February 2, 1973, p13A. "A center for engraving: 4 Rojo".

Image 3.

Clemencia Lucena, ca. 1971. Photography: Diego Arango.

Although we are not sure if the meeting was held as planned, several artists and intellectuals who were close to the FC remember the graphic piece, probably the manifesto where the concept of “Revolutionary art workers” appeared for the first time³⁹. On the other hand, one of the few published sources that explicitly address the TAR concept is Mayra Parra’s study on militant theater, specifically in her mention of the Revolutionary Art Workers’ Theater Brigade (BTTAR)⁴⁰, made up by Jairo Aníbal Niño when he left Universidad Nacional and who later created the Pequeño Teatro⁴¹. Niño’s departure from Universidad Nacional, the creation of MOIR as a party, its “cultural commission” and the emergence of BTTAR integrated a process of political organization and self-representation of artists linked to MOIR, especially if we take into account its call for Medellín, where Niño’s experience of popular theater unfolded⁴².

The poster announces a “MOIR National Cultural Commission”⁴³ which anticipates what was openly understood as the Cultural Front after its consolidation as a party. This is recorded in the testimonies of Carmen Escobar and Nelly Rojas, Felipe Arango and Gustavo Martínez, Jorge Gamboa, Álvaro Arcos and Eduardo Cárdenas when they recurrently referred to the “Frente Cultural” rather than to the “Comisión Cultural”⁴⁴ in the meetings we had. Meanwhile, Mayra Parra⁴⁵ and Eduardo Cárdenas⁴⁶ refer to the BTTAR as members of the Cultural Front.

“Frente” or Front was a self-determined term not exclusive to the MOIR. Other movements and parties also used it, including the Common Front for Art and Literature (FRECAL)⁴⁷ linked to the PC-ML, in which art played an instrumental role without the theoretical and investigative density sought by MOIR⁴⁸. However, this use of the expression “Frente” reveals a crucial issue for this research: the central role of artists and intellectuals in the Moirist political project that closely followed the postulates set forth in 1942 by Mao Tse Tung at the Yenan Forum⁴⁹, a roadmap of various Maoist aesthetic and artistic currents throughout Latin America⁵⁰.

During the 1970s, it was common for artists and intellectuals to identify with and commit themselves to the social change led by various political sectors and mass organizations. Political parties of the old and new Colombian left understood the role that culture and art would play in their objectives⁵¹. As a new democracy party, the MOIR’s first task was to educate the masses and conduct grassroots work to seize power by electoral means, where art and culture were a key ideological tool:

Such a link with politics, the study of Marxist-Leninist and above all Maoist theory, implied that many organizations in the MOIR’s cultural field defined themselves as revolutionary art workers and displaced the use of “artists.”

Colombia, febrero de 1971. Artistic practices and the student movement

According to the history of MOEC and the origin of organizations merged in MOIR, students were determinant in the growth of the new party, as well as the role of artistic practices in these youth niches⁵³. The consolidation of the MOIR coincided with the student movement of the second semester of 1970 and repressed in the first semester of 1971, as recorded in the Colombia, febrero de 1971 poster designed by Zarate and Arango in Taller 4 Rojo with the participation of Lucena⁵⁴. The piece, of a testimonial and counter-informative nature, was a photo serigraph including headlines, images, and notes from different newspapers to generate a critical mass of dispersed information about the acts of state repression; it was conceived in the midst of the student movement and in parallel to other artistic practices linked to the movement.

Its composition revolves around two photographs. The first, center-justified in the upper section, presents a student demonstration whose vanguard is confronted by a group of police officers covered with shields who subdue some of the young people as they fall to the ground. The other, justified in the lower section, includes President Misael Pastrana smiling, dressed as a cowboy with a cartridge belt and a revolver, and on the right, there is a group with the Universidad de Los Andes President, Mario Laserna. Also appearing are Maruja Hernandez, former President Mariano Ospina Perez and Bertha Hernandez in front of a dastardly mule. The caption highlights that Ospina is wearing a Mexican hat and Laserna a Mexican guerrilla costume with a rifle and cartridges.

The news items included are from February and March 1971, when the student movement was at its most intense and most widely covered by the media. One depicts students killed and wounded during police repression in the February 26, 1971 mobilization in Cali (left above). Others describe events related to the vigorous student movement at Universidad de Los Andes which, as we will see below, led to the incorporation of several students into the MOIR and included the participation of some from the school of architecture which ran the fine arts program. On the lower left-hand side, we read “Grupo de alum-nos ocupa Universidad de Los Andes,” referring to a student occupation making demands to the university authorities; in the upper right-hand corner, another one reads “Sancionan en U. de los Andes a 8 estudiantes” referring to the conditional enrollment that the academic council imposed on several students⁵⁵. The last one reads “Hija del fundador de Los Andes opina”; in it Dorotea Laserna, a seventh semester political science student, questions the motivations of the student movement at the university and its objectives; for her, they were revolutionaries camouflaged as democrats. This triplet contrasts different perspectives: student nonconformity, the repressive practices of the directors, and the view of a student who did not support the movement. The sources, read together —news and images—, provide a visual editorial that places the government and university directives on the same horizon, with los Andes as a strong protagonist.

Image 4.

Colombia, February 1971. Nirma Zárate and Diego Arango / Taller 4 Rojo and Clemencia Lucena Photoserigraphy on paper, 100x70cm, 1971

Like many of Taller 4 Rojo’s works, this poster was conceived to circulate in streets but also in artistic spaces, such as Cali’s First Biennial of Graphic Arts⁵⁶. It is disturbing that it was presented at the event in a month of major crisis in the school of architecture and the school of fine arts, when differences between professors and university directors were publicly expressed in the face of decisions such as closing enrollment for the school of fine arts based on arguments of economic and social impact⁵⁷.

Image 5.

Fragments of an article from the newspaper El Tiempo, March 14, 1971, p.11 "How women act in the student movement".

Colombia, febrero de 1971, consists of an artistic and cultural production that provides an index on the student movement’s capacity for agitation and the repressive response from the state. At the same time, it provides a clue to Lucena’s political and visual turn during those years because, although the poster is in line with the role given to cultural production by different political organizations, it does not yet formally respond to Mao’s guidelines that she and the FC embraced since late 1971⁵⁸; this was later expressed in her first art critique entitled “Formas puras y formas políticas,”⁵⁹ whose content constitutes a manifesto on MOIR’s cultural commitment that she would later transfer to her visual production.

On the other hand, this poster contains a creative tendency that coincides with Lucena’s and Zárate and Arango’s creative tendency, which can be seen in the counter-informative approach that each of them pursued. In the case of the couple, it is evident through the appropriation of press images re-articulated in their photo-serigraphs and even in 1970 and 1971 publications⁶⁰; in Lucena, it is seen in her transfer of press information to watercolor drawings with a high component of irony and humor to parody social events such as beauty pageants (according to works included in exhibitions in 1968 and 1969), or when copying images and transcribing political or governmental news in his compositions, as she did for her 1970 exhibition at the Belarca Gallery. Both operations are found in the poster: counter-information and irony around a sensitive subject for the authors, linked at some point, to Universidad de los Andes and to the context of the student movement and the repressive responses of the government, including the implementation of the State of Siege in several cities.

The definition of MOIR tactics and political theses coincided with the emergence of a social movement made up of students from public and private universities, organized to protest against educational privatization policies advancing in Latin America since the previous decade, and to defend university autonomy against the Atcon plan⁶¹. As a result, some university students joined the MOIR through Juventud Patriótica ( JUPA)⁶² or cultural groups, seduced by the central place occupied by artistic and cultural manifestations as tools for political transformation. This is what happened with several students linked to the university theater promoted in Medellín by Jairo Aníbal Niño from Universidad Nacional and Universidad de Antioquia⁶³, as well as with others on different programs at Universidad de Los Andes who participated in the Teatro Experimental de la Universidad de los Andes (TEUA) who sympathized with MOIR or militated there⁶⁴.

Image 6.

Page 148 of the catalog of the First Panamerican Biennial of Graphic Arts of Cali. La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art. Offset print on paper. 18 × 18 cm. 1971.

Image 7.

Exhibition view of Clemencia Lucena’s work (Untitled, 1971). Luis Ángel Arango Library Diapotheque.

Image 8.

S/T (Homage to Tuto González). Nirma Zárate and Diego Arango / Grupo Taller 4 Rojo. Silkscreen on paper. 100 × 70 cm. 1971.

The TEUA began in 1967 under the direction of Ricardo Camacho while he was a student and a militant in Sol Rojo y Fusil⁶⁵. Several testimonies describe happenings and theatrical sketches that the group performed since 1968 in the open space of the campus. As recalled by Piedad Bonnet,

These testimonies possibly correspond to a context of student mobilization and strike related to the internal functioning of the university or the increase in tuition fees, as was also the case with the “escalerazo” of 1968 reported by Lucas Ospina:

…a sit-in on the stairs at the entrance to the university. During this “escalerazo” over the tuition fee increases, there were presentations by the Theater Group, poster and banner design, mural newspapers, small musical improvisations, and the famous happenings, where the artists played a leading role⁶⁸.

These experiences linked to theatrical, plastic, graphic, and musical languages gained vigor during the student strike between 1970 and 1971. The students’ capacity to socially mobilize through cultural practices that embodied forms of political imagination and self-representation —that is, their performative force— explain why the University decided to dissolve the theater groups in the second semester of 1971⁶⁹. At the same time, there was pressure on the student and faculty community at the school of fine arts and architecture, which led to the closure of the former, as we will explain below.

The university environment was fundamental in political and cultural terms for MOIR to consolidate as a party, with a particular emphasis on the uniandino environment. Significantly, although research exists on the theatrical and musical fields such as those cited in this document, no similar studies involved

the role of the plastic arts in the FC, and the sources found in our research only address the contribution of painters and plastic artists in very limited detail. There are only a couple of documents through which we can reconstruct some information about the closure of the school of fine arts at the university during the student movement, following the suspension of new enrollments in mid1971, and the expulsion of certain students and professors. Indeed, different forms of censorship operated around this episode, not only, as Juana Hoyos suggests, because of institutional interests, but also because of what it may have represented emotionally for many of its protagonists⁷⁰.

It is precisely this that motivates our interest in considering the visual production of TAR in parallel to the theatrical contribution because, in the same way that many TEUA students became involved in the student movement or joined the MOIR, several students from the school of fine arts and architecture followed a similar process⁷¹. At the same time as the happenings, a group of students close to the MOIR organized an art exhibition in the middle of the strike and soon, just as the theater took to the streets as a vehicle for agitation, the images produced by TAR went hand in hand with the party’s strikes and mobilizations. We can identify the correspondence of these conditions in published testimonies and in some of the interviews we conducted. That “Exhibition of the School of Fine Arts”⁷² was announced for May 14, 1971 and there is a poster and brochure with a silkscreen cover, presumably designed under the guidance of Nirma Zárate⁷³. Carmen Escobar remembers it as a cultural event held in the context of the student movement, which involved in particular, women students —like most of the students at the school—, who were —like her— active in the strike, and who would soon integrate the MOIR’s FC like María Victoria “la mona” Benito. The latter, according to Escobar, is the woman who appears in the image of the poster behind the entrance threshold and working with a silk screen frame⁷⁴. The booklet includes a text by Professor Juan Cárdenas on the role of the visual arts in the production of knowledge and the debate on the social “utility” of the arts. The last page includes a text, presumably written by students, which continues the idea and explains the event with the participation of students and professors, as an exercise of the school’ s self-representation in a moment of internal crisis immersed in the university’ s general situation. Thus, the scenario of student turmoil at los Andes, prior to the closing of the school of fine arts, became the best source for the TAR.

Gradually, the youth militancy of the JUPA, the TEUA, and TAR at Universidad de los Andes and other niches were articulated with the horizon of political formation outlined by MOIR. This is recorded in the testimonies of Nelly Rojas, Carmen Escobar, and Elvira Cantillo when they describe the visual production of TAR in Moirist activities. For example, on the day of collective murals in public spaces in Manizales in 1980 to denounce the Russian imperialist invasion of Afghanistan and a series of posters for the commemoration of the centenary of Marx’s death in 1983 (which included a bust made by Rojas and placed in Villavicencio)⁷⁵. There were also activities to commemorate the communist movement in various towns in the department of Santander during 1981, which included theatrical presentations, musical gatherings, and visual production in banners, murals, and posters, as recalled by Felipe Arango, Alvaro Arcos and Eduardo Cardenas⁷⁶.

Image 9.

S/T (Poster for the promotion of the "Exhibition of the School of Fine Arts, Universidad de los Andes). Universidad de los Andes silkscreen workshops directed by Nirma Zárate. Photoserigraphy on paper. 70 × 50 cm. 1971.

Image 10.

Catalog of the "Exhibition of the School of Fine Arts, Universidad de los Andes". Nirma Zárate. Photoserigraphy and typography on paper. 20 × 20 cm. 1971.

This multidisciplinarity was also manifested in the field work of theater groups, musicians, and painters in rural areas to investigate and prepare their staging, compositions, and realistic representations of peasants and workers, a practice that prompted some artists to “take off their shoes” as Linda Jaime and Elvira Cantillo did in Sopó, Nemocón, and Magangué⁷⁷. For some, this practice was inspired by the “barefoot doctors” of the People’s Republic of China, when many intellectuals of the Cultural Front engaged in an exercise of radical social immersion in rural areas to participate directly in organizing at grassroots level. They were called “barefoot,” as a metaphor for the stripping of the bourgeois symbol of shoes with the “conviction to make social and political changes by being the leaders of such changes.”⁷⁸

This link between TAR and FC members with the “barefoot campaign” led to the programming of cultural activities of a commemorative nature, carried out directly in rural contexts, as pointed out by Abelardo Díaz:

…It is worth noting the work of the barefoot doctors in promoting activities on historic dates for the world and national left, such as May 1st, March 8th, the Rebellion of the Communards (1781), and the Banana Plantation Massacre (December 1928). Commemorations of the commemorations were held for the first time in unexpected places, with parades, posters, and special events, which served to spread a political culture that was traditionally concentrated in the cities⁷⁹.

Felipe Arango also recalls his involvement with the JUPA when he was studying architecture at los Andes during the student strike. Six months later, he joined the Frente de Barrios where he participated in designing posters and banners for demonstrations and, later, for Alberto Zalamea’s campaign for Congress in the 1972 mitaca elections⁸⁰. That campaign popularized proclamations signed by Zalamea and Francisco Mosquera that summarized the MOIR’s intellectual and cultural approach, such as “to fight for a national and scientific culture at the service of the great popular masses. To support the struggles of students, teachers, and professors in favor of free and compulsory education for all Colombians” and the well-remembered slogan, “supporting the struggle for the creation and defense of a revolutionary art.”⁸¹ In sum, the operation of the MOIR’s FC propitiated a transversal production of artistic practices to articulate their contribution with political work as several parties and movements in our context also attempted to do:

In Colombia, the leftist parties thought of cultural politics as a great mass movement that would take their ideology to broad sectors of the population, through what they called “propaganda in disguise”; that is, through means that were not explicitly political and that could pass as inoffensive before the civilian and military authorities” […] “The question of how to communicate with the masses in a forceful, clear, fast, economic, and safe way became an increasingly important issue within the revolutionary projects, since winning the sympathy and support of the population was a factor that would determine the revolution’s victory or defeat. The leftist parties in particular and the popular movement as a whole, sought to participate in the production and circulation of information, and for this purpose, they made use of all the means of communication available to them⁸².

Following Parra, it remains to review how the MOIR assumed this, from its Maoist definition and as a new democracy party.

Performativity of images, political imagination, and self-representation

The shift between MOEC and MOIR determined Francisco Mosquera’s understanding of the student body as the ideological basis of the revolution and the preparation of MOIR’s political program, in parallel to the Sino-Soviet rupture at continental scale. In a way, Mosquera broke with Havana as Mao did with Moscow to embrace a political and cultural horizon that resulted in an escalating interpretation of the new democracy and the cultural revolution in Colombia, ready to intervene and transform the horizon of its political project through culture, art, and images. It is as if this understanding of the role of art and culture allows us to imagine the integration of a global ideological horizon with a localized perspective that is ready for visual production.

The conjuncture of that historical moment, between 1969 and 1971, describes a context in which the ideological bases of Maoism made their way into a new political project —that of the MOIR— with a novel horizon of action; novel even for Maoism, but which had not yet confiscated its aesthetic proposals in formal terms. It therefore corresponds to the graphic language of Colombia, febrero de 1971, the nature of the happenings at Universidad de los Andes during the student movement, and the reference to Picasso in the poster of the I Encounter of the Workers of Revolutionary Art, an organization that drove the ability to imagine and assume roles in the party under an exercise of artistic self-representation. But a few months would be enough for Mao’s aesthetic project to become established in the direction of the MOIR to the TAR, with texts by Clemencia Lucena such as “‘Formas puras’ y formas políticas en el Salón,” published on December 5, 1971 in El Tiempo, very close to the definitive assimilation of the policy of new democracy enthusiastically declared by the MOIR in “Vamos a la lucha electoral,” signed by Mosquera in the fourth issue of Tribuna Roja of January 1972.

The interdisciplinary deployment of the FC led to the production of images in various artistic languages from niches of collective conceptualization consistent with the party’s policy of popular intervention. Thus, the visual performativity of these images, stimulated by a particular ideological orientation but in conflict with the theoretical disciplines of the art of the time, led to behaviors, organizations, campaigns, mobilizations, actions, and projections that mediated the political imagination of the militants who participated there, the popular bases accompanied by the party and the witnesses of the time, encouraging or confronting their reaction to such agency.

Far from drawing an apology on the cultural gesture of the MOIR, this story describes a place of memory that is ironically novel, since the reconstruction of these images activates their stories and the validity of the past as a time capsule, a linking of moments that installs them in a new cycle of political imagination to address a part of the present.