In this work by renowned Colombian artist Eskibel, recently presented at the Ciudad Mural Festival in Porlamar, Margarita Island, we observe the torso of a body with tropical skin emerging from a lush background of large green leaves. The body's hands are raised, held by metal shackles from which hangs a luxurious strand of pearls that connects both wrists, while the head and face remain outside the upper frame of the image.
The anonymity of this body transcends the loss of a proper name. Following Édouard Glissant, opacity functions as a right to exist without submitting to the transparency that the colonial order demands in order to classify and exploit. Michel-Rolph Trouillot pointed out that the colonial archive produced a unidirectional legibility by demanding name, origin, and lineage from the enslaved body, whether Indigenous, Lucayan, or African, while maintaining the master's anonymity in the administrative record.
The mural reverses this asymmetry. The exposed body withdraws from the gaze that seeks to identify it or calculate its value. The absence of the face functions on two levels that coexist without canceling each other out. On the one hand, it records the historical violence that reduced their bodies to "available meat" that required no name to be exploited. On the other, it retains a layer of opacity by refusing to fully surrender to the gaze of the observer, be it the tourist, the chronicler, or the State.
At the center of the image, the pearl necklace and the metal shackle form a single element that exposes the extractive grammar. This logic demands that a body be exhausted so that value can be transferred elsewhere. The same material that immobilizes the diver's wrist is the one that will eventually adorn the necks of the European elite. The diver's shackle and the court jewel share substance and origin, demonstrating that luxury is not separate from the violence that produces it. The mural unites both objects in a single stroke to fix this continuity.
The verdant foliage surrounding the torso is embedded in the genealogy of the forest as a space of resistance and re-existence. What to the colonizer's gaze represented savagery, undergrowth, or a space to be conquered, constituted for Indigenous and African peoples the territory of life, where the cumbé or palenque was founded and where their own temporality was sustained outside of colonial control. The fact that the hands seem to emerge from the leaves and not simply be surrounded by them suggests that escape acts as a vital force from within the image. Furthermore, it is profoundly significant that the sea remains absent from the painting. If the waters were the stage for extraction and torture, the forest becomes the place where it is possible to forge one's own law.
In a single body, through its composition, Eskibel brings together the mark of dispossession and the condition of possibility for escape. This coexistence generates the tension inherent in the colossal, understood as the excess that the colonial system itself produces without being able to fully manage it.
