El León

The verses of poet León de Greiff hover over archival images of the grand auditorium that bears his name at the National University of Colombia. Declared a national monument, this venue has been one of the country’s cultural and academic symbols. However, the disturbing images recovered here seek to recount, if not evoke, one of the most tragic periods in its history. In the 1980s and 1990s, teachers and students linked to left-wing social and political movements were disappeared and murdered by paramilitaries and the state. The cloisters were turned into a war zone and its great cultural stage into a funeral home. Hundreds of students mourned the murdered professors Alberto Alava, Mauricio Umaña and Jesús Antonio Bejarano right there. The images that inhabit the space float like ghosts; they speak to us from that time about something terrible that is happening and has happened there. However, from the tragedy emerges a collective roar that overflows the auditorium and fills the campus’s central plaza. They shout: “Not a minute of silence!”