Smoke Curtain

Cortina de Humo (Smoke Screen) was developed for Fragmentos in Bogotá and takes as its point of departure a largely remembered yet insufficiently examined episode of Colombian history.

On the evening of November 6, 1985, while the Palace of Justice burned during the military retaking of the building, Colombian television and radio audiences were presented with the live broadcast of a football match. At a moment when the country sought information about events unfolding inside the Palace, public attention was redirected elsewhere.

The project examines this act not simply as a media decision but as the first layer of a broader process of concealment. In the decades that followed, testimonies, investigations and judicial rulings revealed arbitrary detentions, torture, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings linked to the military operation. Yet many of the victims’ families continue to confront the persistence of impunity and the fragility of collective memory.

Cortina de Humo contrasts the image that was shown with the histories that remained obscured. The work reflects on the mechanisms through which states, institutions and media shape public perception, asking how visibility and invisibility participate in the construction of historical narratives.

By foregrounding testimony, listening and remembrance, the project proposes collective memory not as a fixed historical record but as an ongoing process of confronting silenced histories and unresolved forms of violence.