La pequea ausente

"We live with violence and it is important to feel the grief because there are deaths every day. We create a reality to protect ourselves and, if we did not do this, we would not live here, or we would not be able to explain why we live here. My aim is to rethink death in a different way and to discern a little. We have to find a way out and this is facing it so that we no longer confuse a news bulletin with an American film. [...] Death becomes an everyday occurrence happening before us like the TV, so that I no longer see what happens; it is enough just living with the stories of the people around me. There will come a day, I do not know whether I will be here, when art will be more moving and more sublime than this which is so real - the possibility of dying any day."
Ana Claudia Mnera, quoted in: Arte y Violencia en Colombia desde 1948, Museo de Arte Moderno, Santaf de Bogot 1999, p.149