Iván Argote

A truck hauled Madrid’s own marble Christopher Columbus throughout the city on a winter day in 2022. A few passersby paused with confused looks at the dethroned statute and others reached for their phones to get a picture. Plucked from the Plaza de Colón where the monument was erected almost 150 years ago, the dismantled icon toured the Spanish capital like a tired piece of furniture. “Look, children, Columbus is leaving: the statue of the conqueror comes down from its pedestal and takes a walk through Madrid,” declared an article headline on the national newspaper El Pais. The attempt was not, however, the first to oust a marble patriarch of European sovereignty: a group of construction workers had attempted to remove the Joseph Gallieni statute in Paris’s seventh arrondissement a year prior, and after 40,000 re-Tweets and public uproar, the Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo had sent a city official to confirm the military leader’s likeness was still on its pedestal. Around the same time, eyewitnesses in Rome saw the ancient Egyptian Flaminio Obelisk being suspended from a crane at the Villa Medici, overlooking the Eternal City far from its long home, Piazza del Popolo. Mayhem was clearly in the air.

In reality, the Columbus was a foam replica covered with plaster and cement, the obelisk, a plywood copy with laser-cut engravings. The French leader’s removal from his pedestal was a special effects magic by 3D designers in Barcelona. All three pillars of imperious hunger were indeed still bolted to their groundings. The name behind the stunts was Iván Argote, poking at the normalization of historical monuments erected to commemorate colonialism, looting, and white supremacy.

For 15 years, Argote has been challenging the public about political shrines erected in lush parks and on busy squares. Their daily invasion into the collective sight numbs the society’s questioning of these historically—and physically—lauded legacies. The Colombian artist, however, shakes up the cemented idealization with interventions that mimic their deposition. While many cities continue to remove statues once dedicated to long-celebrated leaders with unfavorable pasts, he approaches those still standing with humorous denunciation. Through cinematic setups or purely digital manipulation, Argote hints at their toppling, assuming their fall as a domino effect to ask who they are and why they matter. “Most people who react to my actions don’t have a solid answer to who this centuries-old man is and why he is important,” he says. “Many of them, however, think that the monument should stay there regardless of the person’s history.”

Argote is currently asking his questions in Venice: he is one of the artists participating in the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere. History’s flirtation with truth and fiction sets his project’s foundation. The show’s curator, Adriano Pedrosa, invited the artist to present work as one of five imaginary pavilions in the Giardini, made by artists whose countries never had their own exhibition platform throughout the history of the biennial, or are currently closed or co-opted because of political reasons. Colombia, along with its neighbor Venezuela, is among those countries, and Argote’s informal pavilion takes the form of a fallen statue at the Giardini.

Gargantuan in scale, Descanso (2022) is a collapsed Columbus, the exact stone replica of him in Madrid, shattered into chunks that operate as planters. Inside them, foreign inhabitants live—they are different types of shrubs, grasses, and plants that have been brought to Europe from various geographies. “These so-called exotic invasive plants are considered trouble in Europe because they were brought during colonial times and now they are considered to be growing too fast,” Argote hints at the metaphor behind his landscaping. Different local greenhouses are helping him keep the work alive for the show’s seven-month run. From spring to fall, the nature will spread its leaves over the conqueror’s broken likeness as well as across the pedestal that once raised him above. Some parallel and others pinnate, different plant species coalesce together, rise under the sun and get drenched in the rain. The monument is no longer whole, but its parts endure a broken togetherness: static in nature and stone cold, they are irreversibly apart, flawed.

<Read the full essay from Issue Seven>