Snowstorm is an animation made by Raúl Marroquín in 1990 with a computer called Amiga Comodore. More than being a snow simulation, it is a digital illustration that seeks to explore the expanded possibilities of the Amiga Comodore team from the ideological and technical field of LowTech, an area in which Marroquin is a pioneer.
The scene of Amsterdam in the sixties represented a fertile ground for the development of local and foreign artists. The strong industrial growth, the strength of its institutions and the opening of migration policies generated the emergence of independent audiovisual production companies that attracted the attention of artists of the time such as Ulises Carrión, Michel Cardena and Raúl Marroquín. These productions detonated a historical moment in Holland: the entropy of Latin American art incubating in Europe.
In this way, this snow storm posed by Marroquin to be presented at the Torre Colpatria as well as the achievement of a dream, is also the presence of a Bogota artist who has developed in northern Europe. It also contains the reference of an artist who does not belong to the history of art in this country but who should belong. This is how this projection manifests a way of understanding that the history of Latin American art today is not only written from the Colombian territory but also from the outside, including other perspectives and with this including the history of the migration of Colombians abroad who are still separating of the territory, nowadays having an improvement in the political conditions and under a globalized look, they return to contribute to the culture of the same one.
Snowstorm is a work of little technical pretension, which appeals to the LowTech culture, which proposes the development of technology from the user in response to the mass media. The work is a poetic gesture that among other things refers to the fact that in Colombia we do not have snow and that the little we have in our snowfalls is doomed to disappear. Snowstorm a work that arrives since 1990 and adapts in 2017 to the place and city that gave rise to its author who nostalgia yearns for the dream not to return.
From small and formal gestures, or grandiloquent and full of ideological connotation, the artists proposed by BMA for ARTBO | Weekend, they generate fundamental questions about language, about otherness, about systems that generate an irruption in the landscape, filling the dark night in the middle of the excess of luminous urbanity.
The height of the Tower allows the overflow of these hidden messages to passers-by who were never interested in art, but also winks at those who possibly have had contact with the work of some of these artists and who recognize some detail of his speech; generating in this case, from a particular position (a private tower that floods the night with light) of access to information, also provoking an experience charged with possible premonitions.
By Daniela Medina Poch & Iván Tovar
Raúl Marroquín (Colombia 1948). Multimedia artist who works with video since 1968. He is considered one of the pioneers of video art in Europe. His work is part of a large number of public and private collections, such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Center Pompidou Paris, Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Museum of Modern Art New York, Collection Saatchi London, Ludwig Collection Germany, Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht . His work has been presented in museums in Europe, the Americas, Japan, China and in institutions such as ICA London, ICC Antwerp, Neue Galerie Aachen / Cologne and Chicago Art Institute. During his postgraduate years at the Jan van Eijck Akademie in Maastricht ( 1971 - 1974) Marroquin published Fandangos; one of the first artist's magazines in the European continent.
