SurOriente 1985-2009, in this series, Cruz captures landscapes of artisanal brick ovens - an ancient art in which the whole family, children included, takes part. Ruins are all that remain of these ovens now, their inhabitants relocated to the outskirts of smaller cities nearby. SurOriente has the power to evoke other places… they are the frontier where the urban and natural landscapes meld, where even though there is no evident human presence the observer can discern the traces of the characters that inhabit them. These images reveal the drama of the location, confronting us with the abandonment and poverty in which these displaced communities live, on the margins of the city they helped to build. Cruz, lucid observer of reality, shows us the occult face behind the peculiar beauty of a place. These images, both beautiful and disquieting, invoke many scenes from the past and present. “I visited this area for the first time in 1985. This city caught me by surprise. The place fascinated me. I had already started photographing artisanal brick ovens but I’d never seen so many in one place, with a whole community working them. The first time I went, I was told that almost 500 families lived there. The ovens were in full production, some being over 50 meters wide; entire families lived there, having built their own houses with recycled materials, much like other displaced persons. The only new materials were the very bricks they produced for the construction of Bogotá being used as weights to hold their sheet roofing in place and keep it from being blown away. Five years later, the ovens had been closed down and the majority had relocated to the outskirts of a neighboring city. Some ovens were still working clandestinely, of which I
Suroriente 3561, 2005
Suroriente 2, 1985 Fotografía análoga, Fine art print, Papel satinado HP, Tintas Pigmentadas UV de Larga duración 70 x 10 cm.
Fotografía Digital, Fine art print, Papel satinado HP, Tintas Pigmentadas UV de Larga duración 78 x 100 cm.
photographed a few, but the majority of the locals were reluctant, not believing I was an artist; they were worried that I was working for the governmental environment agency and that police and bulldozers would follow soon after to demolish their ovens.
Biography
In 1995 I returned in search of the ovens but it was as if they had disappeared. I searched the mountains for a month. When I had almost given up, there they were, hidden away, mostly abandoned, solitary and in ruins with only one still working.”
My recent work deals mostly with the city of Bogotá: its bridges seen as great sculptures and thoroughfares; the palimpsests created in Universidad Nacional through the interaction between students who graffiti whitewashed walls of the buildings and the workmen tasked with painting over their statements in grey – a process started afresh each semester with the arrival of new students; the artisanal brick ovens where displaced peasants manufacture the bricks used to erect the city; coal mines and coke ovens on the outskirts of the city. I have also been working with alternative, antique photographic processes alongside videos for my ‘Internal Gardens’ series.”
“I studied theatre at the National School of Dramatic Art in Bogotá and began to take photographs when I was a stage actor in the early 70s. I bought a camera in NYC where my troupe was performing at an art festival. With absolutely no technical knowledge and guided solely by intuition, I set about capturing my first love – the theatre. Those first images awoke the interest of the artists participating in the festival and, years later, became my motivation to make of photography my means of knowledge and expression.