EL TESTIGO.

Memorias del conflicto armado colombiano en el lente y la voz de Jesús Abad Colorado

Colorado, a social communicator at the University of Antioquia, began as a graphic reporter for
the newspaper El Colombiano de Medellín, Colombia, where he worked from 1992 to 2001. He
is the Colombian photographer who has most documented the armed conflict in Colombia. He
was a researcher of the Historical Memory Group of the National Commission of Reparation and
Reconciliation in Colombia (CNRR) between 2008 and 2013.

A representative sample of the work of this Colombian graphic reporter can be seen in the
exhibition ‘El testigo. Memorias del conflicto armado colombiano en el lente y la voz de Jesús
Abad Colorado’, which brings together, in the San Agustin Cloister of the National University of
Colombia in Bogotá, more than 500 photographs, many of they unpublished, captured between
1992 and 2018.
Through black and white photographs that are the result of 25 years of work and travel through
different parts of the national territory.
The images tell stories and events of armed conflict, displacement and reconstruction of the
social fabric in different regions of Colombia.

The exhibition maintains the ethical tone of Jesús Abad Colorado, where he does not accuse or
take sides, but he invites the collective responsibility of a painful history that has crossed the
country and a reconciliation to foster hope and reconstruction. The exhibition is presented with
the scientific rigor of this journalist but at the same time with the affection and feeling that
characterize it: a loving portrait that bets on human hope and dignity evoking reconciliation as
an invitation to put ourselves in the skin of the other, in the skin of war.
La casa de Angie en la Comuna 13.
Octubre de 2002
Black and white represents for the photojournalist memory, which is one of his obsessions, to
leave a record of the pain left by war, but also the resistance and revival of hope.
That photograph was taken in Medellín in 2002, during the Orion operation in the La
Independencia neighborhood, when it accompanied Scott Wilson, a Washington Post
correspondent in Colombia. The history of that photograph is very particular, they were touring
the commune 13 seeing the consequences of violence and they were doing interviews, a girl
named Angie, started looking at him from the window of her house.
I Through this photo we can identify the consequences of violence in this part of the country,
this is the reality that children have to face daily.
The main purpose of the author is that hopefully these images, which are a claim to memory, a
manifesto against oblivion and a calligraphy of hope helps us understand that war is the defeat
of all.

El Claustro de San Agustín.

Currently, the building has a smaller area than when it was built and its cloister is made up of
two levels of stone columns that support arches in patterned brick and limit the wide galleries
that surround the large central courtyard. Its spaces retain the characteristic sobriety of colonial
architecture. Its clay tile roofs blend into the landscape of the historic center of Bogotá and its
austere facades, consistent with the spirit of the community that once inhabited it, have a
rhythmic succession of rectangular windows that are interrupted only to give rise to the entrance
cover.
The Garden of the Cloister is a square of 32 meters of edge, whose lower floor is formed by
semicircular arches and Doric columns, while in the upper, somewhat lower, the columns are of
Ionic order. They are a total of 72 large windows that open to the inner garden, filling the
monastic cloisters with light. All around is crowned by a balustrade that borders the upper
terrace. The central well and the garden complete the decoration. The useful space of the
Garden is approximately 750 m2. At night the beauty of the cloister is highlighted through its
artistic lighting.

Evidence.