The Flickering Darkness

The Flickering Darkness (Revisited) explores the journey that food produce takes from its arrival before dawn at the Corabastos market in Bogotà, Colombia – the largest of its kind in Latin America – to its consumption across the social spectrum.

In this work, delGado attempts to create sense out of the market’s chaos and order, while inviting wider reflections on society’s strata and how they interact.

Three screens show details of the market in close ups and wide shots. Most of the images are identifiable but the editing and juxtaposition often bring out abstract and geometrical resonances.

The soundscape is evocative – a mix of industrial noise, vehicles of every sort, human voices. The scale of the operations and the hundreds of people at work create the sense of a huge machine, with the labouring humans at times seeming anonymous and indistinct.

In the middle of the night, long queues of lorries transporting food from all over the country line up to unload their produce at Corabastos. We see coteros and zorreros (porters who work with carts and those that carry their loads by hand) transporting the food from one corner of the market to the other.

The goods are classified and stocked up at interior market stalls. By 2am all this activity must cease, in time for the commerce that follows. Vendors set up their stalls and once again the market becomes a hive of trading activity.

The work then looks at the preparation and presentation of the produce as edible dishes. In this final section of the installation, delGado contrasts the humble consumption of simple foods at workers’ restaurants with the elaborate choreography of fine dining experiences.

More information about the work can be found here – www.juandelgado.co

The Flickering Darkness (Revisited) is supported by Unlimited; celebrating the work of disabled artists, using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and Spirit of 2012.

Through this support the work is accompanied by an audio description (available through headsets at any time) and screened with captions at regular intervals.