Mapping power and violence

The Beta version map is a collaboration with Victoria Sacco

Hotel Las Américas / Santa Cruz-Bolivia / April 16, 2009

Using the events surrounding the so-called Assault at Las Américas Hotel (Bolivia, 2009), the project will draw a map of relationships between individuals and events, with the aim of visualizing how a conspiracy of historical scope was created. Countering popular misconceptions that violence is solely irrational and impulsive, the Hotel Las Américas project hypothesizes that violence is carefully constructed, with roots that perpetuate negative imacts in the region today.
 
The assault took place on April 16, 2009, when Bolivian police entered the Hotel Las Américas in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, killing three individuals and arresting two others, all identified as mercenaries. The interpretation of the facts are opposite: the official version maintains that the group, mobilized by the autonomous elite of Santa Cruz, planned to assassinate the Bolivian President Evo Morales, while the opposition assures that the assault was fabricated by the Bolivian government to harm the autonomist movement in Santa Cruz.

The research will be carried out in three stages: the first will involve research into the relationships between all the individuals implicated in order to construct a textual map of violence (the beta version of which is presented here); we will then construct an atlas collecting related source images; and finally the project will be assembled and published as a book documenting the entire investigation.

Beta version / Digital print 36 x 33 inc.

This series of drawings was made by street cartoonists that work in Plazoleta de las Nieves in Bogota, Colombia. These artists are part of the informal economy of the city, among them displaced individuals who were part of government sponsored violence demobilization programs.

From left to right: Eduardo Rozsa-Flores - Elöd Tóásó - Mario Tadic - Michael Dwyer
Magyarosi Árpak - Branko Marinkovic - Evo Morales