Who are the People of America
~
Claudia Salamanca
Claudia Salamanca received her BFA from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá Colombia with a scholarship for her work developing films with disenfranchised youth. Salamanca built her undergraduate education by combining art seminars, computer science courses and her community college education as an electronic technician. She started teaching really early in her life which made her art practice inseparable from pedagogy. Claudia got her M.A. from Rutgers University with a Fulbright Scholarship with an emphasis in Science, Technology and Culture and holds a PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley. Currently she lives in Bogotá, Colombia where she teaches in the Arts Department of the Javeriana University.
claudiasalamanca.com
With parts of a film made in 1953 and built around the question WHO ARE THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA, the response of Claudia is an appropriation which uses the gesture by Andreas Bülhoff and Marc Matter in their ɅV record in order to undermine the apparent natural legibility between images and words. The jumps are resulting from cutting in image and text, all the moments where non monosyllabic words were spoken. This gesture creates a montage in which what is absent breaks cliches of language and of how a word calls for representation. This is an invitation for what is ‘non-said’ and ‘non-seen’ to appear as a ghost in our present associations.