Johanna Calle

lives in Bogota today and is married to antiquarian Julio Cesar Perez Navarrete who also is a buyer of photographic archives and documentaries.

She uses drawing to experiment with many other materials such as printed text, letraset, aluminum, wire, copper, iron and cloth.

Even though her ideas stem from issues observed within Colombia, they often have a greater global context and relate to many countries on different levels.

For example, her project Version Oficial (2008) involved searching official accounts issued by the Colombian government about the deaths of people in which she then made them illegible.

[6] For her series Nombre Propio (1997-1999) Calle did a significant amount of research into the cases of abandonment from the Institute for Family and Child Well-Being.

These ideas relate to a dark history Colombia has of disposing bodies in rivers, their faces floating and rolling on the surface.

Submergentes (2010-2011) is a project that uses galvanized mesh as well as letraset and ink to create scenes of people among bent and distorted wire and random numbers.

She also uses fragmented, broken and distorted pieces of wire in a grid-like structure that is a reference to old fashioned accounting books.

She says, “These allude to an economic order that has been altered, that will never be restored to its original form…” Once the accountancy grid has been distorted, so too have the numbers that it contained.

Wire is a strong, yet moldable material, which makes it interesting in the context of society, economy and culture because these aspects are always in flux.

[7] This relates to her Perimetros project where she created forms of a native tree to Mexico by typing on paper from Colombian ledger books.

There is a juxtaposition within these projects because a tree is a stable, strong object and the paper they are created out of is a fragile, flimsy version of its origin.

She is interested in how text and words relate to things like linguistic gender discrimination, dialects, names, slang, etymology and indigenous languages.

The typed text that she uses explores the themes of climate change and the alteration of cycles but overall, the project shows the importance of the word and testimony.

She believes our reliance on anthropological, ethnographic and semiotic studies of the equivalents of indigenous sounds are related to the intensity, frequency and effects on wildlife like the plants and rivers.

And her recently published book Abecé (2012) also deals with language by repeating each letter of the alphabet in different ways and shapes.

Silentes 1985-2015, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia (2015) Indicios, Casas Riegner, Bogotá, Colombia (2014) Grafos, Galeria Marilia Razuk, São Paulo, Brazil (2014) Est Art Fair, Estoril, Portugal (2014) Frieze Art Fair, Casas Riegner, London, UK (2013) Krinzinger Residencies, Krinzinger Gallery, Vienna, Austria (2013) Perspectivas, Ivo Kamm Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland (2013) Irregular Hexagon, Colombian Art in Residence (curated by José Roca), Sàn Art, HCM City, Vietnam (2012) Recent Drawings (Curated by Adriano Pedrosa), Marilia Razuk Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil (2012) Signos, Casas Riegner, Bogotá, Colombia (2011) Submergentes: A Drawing Approach to Masculinities (Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill), Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, US (2011) Perspectivas, MUZAC, Córdoba, Colombia (2010) Contables, Zona Maco Sur, Mexico City, Mexico (2010) Variaciones Dibujos, Casas Riegner, Bogotá, Colombia (2010) Dibujos (Cuarted by Virginia Pérez-Ratton), FundaciónTeorética.