256 | 43 SNA - English texts of the city’s private companies as well as of cultural and educational entities. It’s an opportunity the good times that Medellín currently lives. Let this be the opportunity to thank the media, corporate sponsors, allied entities, and definitely, to praise the participating artists. For the Ministry of Culture and the entities associated with the 43 (inter) National Salon of Artists, it’s with great pleasure that we invite you to discover the artists and works presented in order to know not to know…
To Know and to Not Know in One Salon Mariángela Méndez Artistic Director 43 SNA The implicit contradiction in this Salon’s title—an event that during most of its history has tried to settle seemingly insurmountable differences about the idea of art, about what is native and what is foreign—does not propose a reconciliation, rather a coexistence of beliefs in the same space. Part of the exhibit presented here deals with SABER [To Know], the compass for survival that recognizes the importance and actuality of ancestral and innate forms of knowledge, of specific traditions and ways of understanding developed in a particular territory. The other part, recognizes a parallel force, a DESCONOCER [To Not Know] that accepts the suspension of univocal meanings, that launches us into doubt, ambiguity and uncertainty, a link to all that is new, allowing our escape into the future or impossible presents. Differences between the works focused on knowing and those that spark not knowing are revealing, they make manifest two ways of thinking and engaging with the world. Consequently, the Salon offers two faces: one bright, clear and translucent; the other opaque, obscure and remote. One offers enrichment, clarity, the other restlesness, uncertainty; its task is to keep us aware of the world in all its inundation and incomprehensibleness, to make
us distrust the pretension of having found a definite formula. Nevertheless there are, on one side, things that we can only know by believing —even if we don’t know them—and, on the other, things we know through our experience alone, so that we are left without doubt. In short, it is said that there are things we don’t know, things that we know and things that we simply believe. It is said that he who believes cannot simultaneously know, and that he who knows is beyond the darkness of not knowing. We also know there are truths that remain hidden, resisting our stubborn certainty that every interpretation of the world and of our own existence, is based in an opposition between things ‘known’ and ‘not known’. Saber desconocer [To Know Not to Know] allows us to recognize the impossibility of keeping separate and in opposition both tasks. And it does not ask us to renounce independence and revelation. On the contrary, it allows us to confirm that when you ask about the meaning of the world we immediately become believers. Socrates, the platonic, always claimed, regarding ultimate and determinant truths, that he knew nothing by his own experience, they were all things he had only heard. He who believes is a listener that doesn’t know on his own, that doesn’t see with his own eyes; he listens and maybe in listening his eyes become acute and can perceive when something is revealed. Like the believer, we avoid a frontal view of the world. We dream with a complicit relationship, a dual relationship with beings and things; not a contract but a pact that illuminates the