Morphology of Terror
Morphology of Terror is a contemporary art project that investigates how violence is remembered, mediated, and aesthetically transformed through moving images. The work takes as its point of departure a car bombing that occurred in Bogotá in 1989, using this event as a narrative anchor to question dominant representations of trauma and historical memory.
Morphology of Terror as a Contemporary Art Project
As a Morphology of Terror contemporary art installation, the project unfolds through a multichannel video setup in which iconic artworks are symbolically reinterpreted and made to “explode.” These visual ruptures do not function as spectacle, but as critical gestures that expose the normalization of violence within cultural imagery. The fragmentation of the image mirrors the fragmentation of memory itself.
Multichannel Video, Memory, and Violence
The work is grounded in a personal testimony: the artist’s mother’s account of surviving the bombing. This autobiographical element shifts the narrative away from abstract history and toward embodied experience, foregrounding affect, vulnerability, and the limits of representation. Rather than offering closure, the installation sustains a state of tension between remembrance and erasure.
Trauma, Aesthetics, and the Body
Morphology of Terror contemporary art challenges the aestheticization of death by confronting viewers with the instability of visual memory. The repeated destruction of recognizable forms questions how violence is consumed, archived, and neutralized within cultural systems. The body—both present and absent—emerges as a central site where trauma is negotiated.
Reframing Historical Violence Through Affect
By using multichannel video, the project resists linear narration and proposes a spatialized experience of memory. Sound, image, and temporal disjunction operate together to create an environment in which historical violence is not explained, but felt. The installation ultimately argues for the necessity of reclaiming traumatic narratives from an affective and corporeal perspective, rather than from institutional distance.