Rostros urbanos, espacios públicos, iluminaciones profanas en las calles de Bogotá

This article explores, through a teenager guerrilla member's life story, the problem of encounters and the mi grant's face as representative expressions of the urban, and of cruelty in general. Using a narrative where alternative images of the war in the mountains appear, and a travel through Bogota streets, this images? meeting is analyzed as a face or as a profane illumination, using Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas' works. That which cannot be defined in an encounter, as in a face, and that which applies to the way we understand the problem of identity in the city, can only be compared with the surrealist experience of encounters and disencounters between Nadja and André Breton, similar also to the anthropological experience of facing object consumption and the look over things while we w alk on the streets and descend from buses that bring us for the first time to the city.

This essay is a shorter version of a paper I wrote for the Symposium "Cruel sceneries: esthetics and signs of trance and violence in Puerto Rico and Colombia" that took place in San Juan de Puerto Rico in April 2001. I thank Manuel Hernández Benavides for his reading and suggestions to a previous version of this article.