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Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia

    

Event details

Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia

La Decanatura 
(Elkin Calderón Guevara & Diego Piñeros García)


March 7 to April 4, 2020

Deluge Contemporary Art
636 Yates Street, Victoria BC  |  deluge.ca
Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 5pm
On March 25th, 1970, less than a year after the arrival of the first man on the moon, The Space Communications Centre of Colombia was inaugurated in the tiny municipality of Chocontá. The monumental satellite antenna, built in the middle of an untamed landscape, would be responsible for microwave transmissions of radio and telephone signals. In 1981 the second antenna or Ground Station for International Communications would complete the Space Communications Centre complex. Chocontá, whose colonial name is the Loyal and Noble Villa de Santiago de Chocontá, began to be known as the "Satellite City of Colombia.” For more than two decades the Satellite City was a destination for the curious. 45 years later it is in decline; people no longer visit, while the surrounding landscape seems to slowly absorb these massive and neglected structures.

Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia was planned as a tribute, a lullaby and a farewell. The Chocontá Symphonic Youth Band, whose members range from seven to fifteen—too young to have first-hand knowledge of the antennas in their splendour—were responsible for creating and performing a requiem. The structures’ imposing nature and location within the inhospitable climate of the dense Colombian savannah evokes a glorious past, an agonizing present and an uncertain future.
Deluge Contemporary Art, 636 Yates Street

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