Etcétera, Bogotá, 2012 - 2018

During the shooting of the film La Estrategia, Iván Argote adopted a working method that blurred the line between filmmaking and direct action. The film crew became a temporary intervention team, carrying out real, unsanctioned gestures in monuments and public squares across Bogotá. These actions were conceived not as spectacle, but as subtle disruptions—moments where the authority of historical symbols could be quietly questioned through collective presence and simple materials.

One of these interventions focused on the statue of Francisco de Orellana, located in the National Park in the city center. Orellana, a Spanish conquistador, proclaimed himself the “discoverer” of the Amazon River and forest—an assertion that encapsulates the colonial logic of naming, possession, and erasure. The monument celebrates an individual figure while ignoring the vast, complex histories and civilizations that existed long before his arrival. For Argote, this claim of discovery is not only historically inaccurate, but conceptually absurd.

To counter this narrative, the crew constructed a cube of mirrors around the statue, temporarily making Orellana disappear. Rather than confronting the monument directly, the intervention redirected attention away from the figure itself. Reflected on the mirrored surfaces were the surrounding trees, the sky, the park, and the movement of the city—everything that exists beyond and despite the colonial hero. The statue dissolved into a shifting mirage, replaced by its environment, suggesting a reversal of visibility where context overtakes domination.

This gesture aligns with Argote’s broader practice of reworking monuments not through destruction, but through displacement, humor, and poetic inversion. By allowing the landscape to overwrite the monument, the intervention proposes an alternative form of remembrance—one that acknowledges presence, multiplicity, and continuity rather than conquest. In La Estrategia, these fleeting actions become cinematic traces of resistance, emphasizing that public space, like history itself, remains open to reoccupation and reinterpretation.