Juan Manuel Echavarria. Mouths of Ash. Bocas de Ceniza

"I was drowning in words." With that, Juan Manuel Echavarría walked away from thirty years as a writer of serious fiction. A year later he stumbled into his new work. One ordinary day while driving through Bogotá, Echavarría noticed that sidewalk sellers were displaying their wares on old battered mannequins. Riffling through the clothing, the shoppers paid no heed. For a brief moment, the mannequins took on a different life for Echavarría. They became the raped and pillaged citizens of Colombia, the rural peasants suffering massacre after massacre, displaced, turned into refugees by the tens-of-thousands, or killed, their mutilated bodies tossed into a river or a mass grave.
The damaged lives of ordinary people wrought helpless, homeless, and violent by fifty years of civil war normally went unnoticed by privileged citizens of Bogotá, buffeted by wealth and security systems. The shoppers, themselves among the disposed, found the mannequins quite normal. Cast aside stand-ins for the human body opened Echavarría's eyes, and through the mediums of photography and video, he went on to create a visual requiem to Colombia, his own violent country.