THE MAKESHIFT HOME
PAULA NIÑO

My parents' house is located in the south of Bogotá. The façade has visible bricks, a green roof, a green door. At first, I slept on the first floor, but with the arrival of my brothers the house was extended and I got a new room on the second floor. Built as if from nothing. One day it wasn't there, the next I was asked what colour I wanted the walls to be.

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In Colombia, we don't move to a new house when the old one becomes too small. In Colombia, rooms are added, old walls are torn down and new needs are built up. We build vertically to get closer to the sky, to never have to leave. Rootedness to the territory, to the neighbourhood, to the favourite bakery and corner, is part of the cultural identity, but what if we have to go? What if my parents get divorced and the house has to be sold? What if someone takes us out by force?

 

Colombia is one of the countries with the highest number of internally displaced people in the world, reaching almost 7 million in 2022. A consequence of the increase in forced displacements, the confinement of communities, extortion, forced recruitment and targeted violence.

I think of all those who have to improvise a house, all those for whom the makeshift becomes permanent.

 

I decided to migrate, without anyone threatening to put my life at risk. I decided to leave, accepting how much I would miss the afternoon sun with my cat, but also knowing that four houses away a man had been shot when I was a child. 

I decided to start a new home on the other side of the world, and although each house still feels temporary and borrowed, I know I still have my room on the second floor, on “la calle 39 b sur”. 

 

Paula Niño, 2024

 

 

"There's no place like home," a formula that we internalize as children thanks to Lyman Frank Baum's classic children's book The Wizard of Oz (1900). This thoroughly ideologically charged saying constructs the home as a value-conservative "bubble" that offers protection, emotional stability, and comfort. In her in-situ installation, Colombian artist Paula Niño challenges this traditional concept of home in the context of global mobility, diaspora, and transnational identities.

 

To this end, Niño creates a powerful "transcendental space" in which inside and outside interpenetrate. Historical references, the artist's life story, and the biographies of the viewers merge into a microcosm of their own, which only attains its ephemeral validity as a supposed home in the here and now.

 

Paula Niño takes us to the brick façade of her parents' house in Bogotá, which once bore the house number 65-15. Neon orange and irritatingly flickering like a mirage, the façade rises stylized from a rectangular grid that the artist has applied directly to the architecture of the exhibition space with tape. In contrast to this, she places her biography on the most enormous wall, almost lost in space, as a kind of "finestra aperta sull'anima". In an unsparingly open and personal way, she interweaves her life story with historical events that have had or continue to impact the artist's life directly, but presumably also on that of the viewer. Niño puts herself in the line of fire, makes herself vulnerable, and thereby raises specific questions of identity, integrity, and political discourse. 

 

A highly symbolic ready-made, snow-white container bag, in which belongings are usually stowed and which could itself function as a temporary space, reminds us of those forced to leave their homes for political reasons, to move on, or no longer have a place to stay. A cryptic slogan can be found on the bottom of the sack: "A THOUSAND AND ONE IS STILL A THOUSAND." This saying reflects that flight and displacement are often only recorded as rational numbers, not as individual fates. Paula Niño thus illustrates the increasingly prevalent operational rationalism that has no sense of memory, time, and remembrance - the parameters that decisively shape the idea of home, belonging, and identity.