SICORP - SANTAFE AUCTION

This work was part of a large curatorial project called 'Ephemeral Museum of Oblivion' (rough translation). As part of the Agoraphobia collective, we devised a set of fictional companies that organized a street, open-air auction in a central part of Bogotá, where actual steel train tracks were sold. This event was also accompanied by the distribution of a designed infographic handout publication, which explained how politicians from the late 1950s stole Bogotá’s transport system through manipulation and deceit. The space in which the auction took place holds significant historic importance, as it is where Jorge Eliecer Gaitán was assassinated. Many academics point to that day as the beginning of the 60-year civil war.

The story of the Bogotá's tramway can be interpreted as the use of public heritage in favor of private interests, masked by manipulated social mobilizations. The tram lines were initially designed in such a way as to connect the elite neighborhoods with downtown Bogotá, rising their property's value and incorporating them into the urban area. The 1910 boycott was encouraged by political actors and energy company owners who sought to get an American company out of the country not due to a nationalist claim, as argued, but because this would ensure that the new public administration would scale the tram to the electrical system and thus be they, the agitators, who benefit by providing electricity through their companies. The Bogotazo, on the other hand, was an event in which the anger of the masses was channeled deliberately to destroy the tram system as much as possible and thus to justify its ruin and to promote the implementation of the bus system operated by private companies.

This new system threw the city to chaos, contaminated it and produced the phenomenon known as the "centavo war". The change benefited private owners and the city got stunned with transportation mafias and without a functional, responsible and collective urban strategy.

Project developed for the Regional Salon of Colombia in 2015 with AGORAPHOBIA Collective.