María Buenaventura
El territorio no está en venta (The Territory is Not for Sale)
El territorio no está en venta (The Territory is not for sale) is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogota on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government.
Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve. It had remained relatively isolated from the city-proper until 1954 when it became incorporated into Bogota, triggering a process of residential densification through legal and illegal urbanization. Usme remains the very last green area for urban expansion.
The farmers do not want to sell because they want to keep their way of living, and even if some would want to become “urban citizens” they will not be able to afford to do so given the absurd price offered for their land. While the problematic transformation of land from rural to urban, and the multiple forms of displacement lies in those stacked papers, there are also moments marked where inflicted communities rise above those struggles. To represent the mobilization of these communities, the artist has excised a section of each decree to plant the local crop or mineral from the area; as each plant grows from the stacks of paper, the decrees in turn begin to materially deteriorate.
In appreciating this work, it is helpful to understand the rapid growth and densification of Bogota over the 20th century that has produced unequal urban development stamped by social divisions — the coexistence of informal and formal modes of survival, illegal and legal access to housing, and the blending of rural and urban lifestyles. Poor migrant workers fleeing Colombia’s 60-year armed conflict have settled in increasingly dense peripheries of the country’s capital, such as Ciudad Bolívar and Usme, thus informally extending the breadth of the city towards its southern borders at a rapid pace of growth. Most of them have purchased illegal plots of land from swindlers, built their houses by themselves and fought for infrastructure, equipment and services through political organizing.