Smoke Curtain

Cortina de Humo (Smoke Screen) was developed for Fragmentos, the counter-monument created by Doris Salcedo in Bogotá. The installation revisits the events of 6 November 1985, when, as 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.

The installation is built around a large, walk-through screen made of mist. Visitors enter the space by passing through the projected image itself, turning the act of crossing the screen into a physical encounter with the mechanism that once displaced the events of the Palace of Justice from public view.

Archival footage of the siege, the football match and the National Beauty Pageant is projected onto the suspended curtain of mist, while fragments of radio transmissions, testimonies and whispered voices move through the space in a multi-channel sound installation. Images remain unstable, dissolving into the mist, while voices emerge from the darkness.

The match did not erase the events of the Palace of Justice; it displaced them from public view. Rather than reconstructing the siege itself, Cortina de Humo follows the traces left by that displacement, where memory persists through fragments, testimony and the voices that continue to resist disappearance.