Transhumants

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The Series Transhumants was born, when I decided to travel on the “Expreso del Sol”, a train that goes from Bogota in the Andean highlands to the city of Santa Marta on the Caribbean Sea coast of Colombia. There were many pictorial and magic scenes that I observed on that long journey of almost two days as I traveled down from Bogotá, which is located at a height of 2,630 meters above sea level, to the warmer land of the coastal Caribbean Sea, passing through six departments, several temperature zones, multiple ecosystems, and the legendary jungle of the Magdalena River all the way to the Cienega train station, where I arrived at my last stop.

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During those long hours I journeyed through the entrails of Colombia, a new and unknown territory which greeted me with the nostalgic sound of the Expreso del Sol whistle. The tireless to-and-fro movement and the shaking of the rails brought me memories of other goodbyes and perhaps melancholy farewells. Those were memories of other lives, perhaps lived in an unforgettable preterit, they came to me as scraps of emotions that arose like déjà-vu that yet I couldn't retain even if I wanted to.

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As the train descended from the cold climates of the mountains to the hot weather near the sea, the air began to warm and brought with it something magical. On the train, I met other kinds of people than those that I had known in my regular daily urban life. I also encountered situations, which although I had previously heard about were occurring in my country, I had not personally experienced until then. I met the forgotten, poor, intriguing, voluptuous, dangerous, needy, suffering, hopeful, and beautiful people of Colombia. That trip was a revelation. It was a turning of a corner within my own artistic work.

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I knew it right then and there.  It was as if, by instinct, the Transhumants had come into my life.  The deafening sound of voices invaded me and drowned out the loud noise made by the train running on the rails. These were voices that came with the wind and I welcomed them to my own multitude of Transhumants that agitated and desperately wanted to arrive and occupy my canvases.

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That trip was like staging a play with real actors. I remember how at sunset a group of Colombian army soldiers got on the train and traveled among us for about two hours, they wanted to know some information about the guerrillas. Fearful, people feigned being deeply asleep so as not to be questioned. When the soldiers left the train, a group of people started to talk to me and tell me many stories about Colombia, which at that point was totally alien to me.  I was absorbing everything with my artist's soul, hearing all those stories and immediately I was imagining how those stories would invade my next paintings and permeate throughout my canvases.

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Then, after midnight, the train gently slowed its speed and without stopping, silent ghosts appeared, when they climbed onto the train. This was a very young group of guerrillas dressed as soldiers and heavily armed. Again, suddenly more than half of the train travelers fell deeply asleep to avoid talking to them. This was a pure survival drama. When some of the guerillas came to talk with me, they didn't understand what I was doing on that train. They wondered why a young artist from the city, who was traveling with a backpack full of colors, brushes, pencils, notebooks, drafts, literary notes, and poetries, chose to travel by this forgotten kind of transport (at that time, the railroads in Colombia were an impoverished and little-used system) and preferred to be exposed to that forgotten part of the other half of the soul of Colombia. I had no answer other than my silence and a direct look at each one of them. For each one of those who questioned me, I searched with my own eyes trying to reach and comprehend what they kept behind their eyes which were full of fear, courage, helplessness, dreams, and accumulated sorrows. It was then that I suddenly understood everything. We belonged to two opposite sides, standing face to face with different life currents. All those beings including myself, on the Expresso del Sol train, were all part of the different forces that constituted my Country. That day I learned to respect the dreams of others and to love my own dreams even more.

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On that long journey where I measured my forces with other forces, I understood that the truth does not belong to anyone, that it belongs to all of us. That we all are Transhumants of the life stream one chooses to walk and that we each carve out our own path. The Transhumants series was born on that trip.  However, the Transhumants continued to arrive from many other places long after that trip. At that time, life led me to live in Europe, Asia, USA, Mexico and many other places where the Transhumants continued to invade the magical space of my canvases.  These Transhumants were masses of people in movement and they flooded onto my canvases.  My paintings sought to capture these migrations as people moving across the planet on journeys that had not yet finished. There were many reasons for these migrations: violence, a better future, natural disasters, etc., however, as an artist, I did not need to enunciate these; instead I focused on the migrations and the mass movement of the people themselves.

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My paintings captured many migrations and the occurrence of great exoduses, like when the Berlin Wall fell (Transhumants Towards the West, 170 x 203 cm, Acrylic on canvas, Bogota 1990), or when thousands of people marched in protest at the disappearance of loved ones (Where are the Missing People, Oil on wood, Diptych 120 x 240 cm, Mexico 1996) and so many other complex situations where masses of people were moving.  All of these scenes entered my canvases.  I paint the energy of people on the move. People walking through time, it does not matter if we never move from the same place. We are always Transhumants journeying through the infinite limitlessness of time.

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Mari Gamarra