Bells and Harps: Tania Candiani’s Vision for Medellín

Nestled in the Aburrá Valley in the central range of the Colombian Andes, the city of Medellín emerged from the basin of its eponymous river. The mid-20th century’s rapid industrialization resulted in the canalization of this waterway: restructuring natural deviations into a straight, concrete path. Stripped of its original beauty, the river became a receptacle for the city’s sewage and industrial discharge.

Tania Candiani’s spectacular solo exhibition, ‘Ofrenda’ (Offering), is anchored by a sonic and sculptural lament for this history. Curated by Emiliano Valdés at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), the show centres three major new works made for – and, in many senses, with – the museum and its publics. Prólogo (siete campanas) (Prologue [Seven Bells], 2024) is an instrumental installation of trumpet-shaped woven forms hung from the ceiling. Field recordings taken at significant sites throughout the city, most notably the mouth of the river, attune listeners to sensory registers of place.

The following room pairs Tornase montaña (To Become Mountain, 2024) with Cuando el río suena (When the River Sounds, 2024) in an abstract evocation of Medellín’s distinct geography. This later work shapes an acoustic wooden harp according to the river’s former course: museum-goers are invited to play the instrument’s chords in a tactile, albeit metaphorical, engagement with a collective resource now rendered off-limits. Flanking this work are two pieces of a sculpture that mimics the topography of the mountains which embrace the city. Constructed with local artisans using a pre-Columbian building technique known as tapia pisada (rammed earth), the dense forms of compressed mud, soil and water reverberate with aural remembrances of the river’s lost path, recovered with chords played by the city’s inhabitants.

Candiani continually revisits how we might find ways of living together, which can only begin with the desire to understand modes of perception outside your own and is only sustained by holding such understanding in a state of reverence. Like the recurrent forms of harps and bells, these are the pressing concerns to which the artist returns in her poetic practice. Valdés’s equally nuanced curation, which complements the site-specific commissions with a selection of extant works on paper and in video, makes the potency of her invocation explicit, while simultaneously emphasizing an often-overlooked aspect of Candiani’s practice: namely, what the making of concrete things, as philosopher Richard Sennett writes in The Craftsman (2008), might ‘reveal to us about ourselves’. Whether weaving wicker (Prologue [Seven Bells]) or pounding earth (To Become Mountains) or coding video and synthesizing sound (Preludio cuántico, Quantum Prelude, 2022), this creation of the material world has the capacity to elicit new understandings through action: perhaps offering a respite to the intra-planetary crises we are all facing.

In the interim, we try to elicit moments of joy – of release – that are sometimes found in music, sometimes in rivers. The real offering of Candiani’s exhibition at MAMM is just such an instant. Suspended a storey high at the back of the museum’s formerly industrial nave is a massive screen onto which is projected the two-channel video Tidal Choreography (2023). Filmed during a residency on the Shannon Estuary in Ireland, this work follows local swimmers whose daily patterns adhere to the rhythmic infill of their sea-linked channel. Exposed, moss-covered rocks slowly give way to synchronized bodies that shift with gravitational forces, the camera alighting upon limbs afloat and at rest. The museum space, transformed into a shoreline with deck chairs, enables visitors to gaze upwards at this aquatic release: a vision of how the Medellín river might have been similarly encountered in the past and could potentially be experienced again in the future. The video’s narration intones: ‘She was alone, she was unheeded / She was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted / Alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters / And the sea harvest of shells and tangled and veiled grey sunlight.’

Tania Candiani, ‘Ofrenda’, is on view at the Museo Arte Moderno de Medellín until 1 September

_{Main image: Tania Candiani, ‘Ofrenda’, 2024, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín}