Our mission is to generate inspirational interdisciplinary art projects. We have our own creative team and work with other artists who explore challenging social, poli tical and environmental issues from different perspectives, often involving people from communities silenced by lack of opportunity.

Working with our partners, funders and the media we stimulate cultural exchange, debate and dialogue to strengthen contemporary arts practice in Colombia and beyond. Más Arte Más Acción projects fall into three areas: Plataforma Chocó, Grains of Sand and Video Arte/Documentary.

Living outside Colombia for many years broadened my points of reference and gave me a new objectivity when considering what I had left behind.   Distance helped me to focus on aspects of Colombia’s identity whilst simultaneously returning frequently to the place that inspired these reflections.

Colombia's national emblems, its religious influences, the drug trade, violence, its macho sexuality and the repression of minority perspectives were themes I began to explore.

During these visits I increasingly engaged with marginalised communities by travelling to the country's remotest regions.  In places like Choco I concentrated on the idea of Colombian nationality, far away from the places that had formed my earlier beliefs about the country.  Here I physically distanced myself from Colombia's national stereotypes, the violence, drugs trade and corruption that mark us apart from others when we leave the country. As time passed my relationship with Colombia became increasingly complex. 

Oscillating emotions of love and hate formed as I began to see through the social, political and religious traditions that had once formed me.  I began to challenge the icons of power that so many Colombians revere and worship, re-ordering them and placing them together in conflict with one another.  In turn my idea of ‘Motherland’ was brought into perspective from my self-imposed exile.  By distancing myself from Colombia’s powerful conservative traditions liberated me over time to play with its icons from other perspecti

This intervention in a run-down colonial building in Bogota’s city centre is an ideal place in which to explore these ideas.  It includes artworks in a range of materials including cast bronze, video, drawing and hand-woven fabrics.  By placing these works together they challenge our views of politics, religion, violence and sexuality.  PAIS PARA QUIEN invites people to confront their national and personal identity.

Fernando Arias and Jonathan Colin won a Ministry of Culture Award to co-curate the XIII Regional Salon 2009/10. Through open submission and direct invitation eighteen projects were selected.

Starting with a talk given by a bacteriologist in laboratories across the region, this theoretical and practical session focussed on the principles of l  ife seen through the microscope. This interaction between art and scie  nce created a space for new dialogues to enrich the arts across the region.

The donated ashes will be used to complete an image that shows the inverse catholic action of "making the sign of the cross" and serves as a base for public reflection.  See the artist's interview about this theme in order to reach deeper into the motivations behind the work and its objectives. Text by Olga Lucía Lozano (Translated from La Silla Vacia)

A Prince Claus Fund award enabled Arias to travel to Israel and Palestine in March 2009. His aim was to produce a work based on the same principles as Humanos Derechos in Colombia.

The three-week visit led to complex and unsettling findings, challenging Arias' initial aim to reveal each side's common humanity. On this visit he interviewed people involved in the conflict and also intervened in Israel using graffiti, documenting it and producing a series of photographs that question the idea of state and territory. 

Humanos Derechos focuses on the human aspects of people directly involved in c onflicts and wars. It also looks at how our social environment and the circumstances within which we are raised lead to hatred and intolerance.

"Realising how complex the issues in Colombia's conflict have become made me want to strip away these layers of complexities and touch base once more with our common humanity" says Arias.

Humanos Derechos Colombia involves one member from the frontline of each group involved: the army, the guerrilla, the paramilitaries and land workers. "I filmed each person stripping off their uniforms and firearms, to show that beneath it all we are humans. This might sound superficial at first, but for these young adults to reveal themselves naked was a difficult test of self-confrontation. For me, it was an enduring task of persuasion. Getting these individuals to 'act' out in front of the camera involves certain levels of risk.

"The process involved interacting with every participant. Each provokes extreme hatred from one side in the conflict or another. By making each side perform the same task created a unifying level. It has also been a challenging opportunity to be intimate with the layers of this reality that seem so impossible to unveil. Instead I physically reveal their bodies that symbolise oppression.

"Each person was filmed individually but is seen to undress at the same time as I set the timing for each step. A metaphor for the different steps - in reverse order, that people have taken to liberate themselves by force through the creation of militias and ideologies or by being recruited with or without choice. In the case of civilians forced to abandon their land and belongings, the metaphor acts in the same order as the removal of their clothes.

Arias invited voters to comment on the poster and recorded their responses. However, one of the Uribe supporters reported the group to the police, saying she was frightened of these people and that they supported armed groups in Colombia. Without asking who they were, the police officers swooped on the group and arrested one of them for causing public disorder.

The rest of the day was spent talking to the police, explaining who the artists were until the Chief Superintendent offered a formal apology, alongside the arresting officer. He concluded that the woman who had reported the group to the police had influenced the police officer to believe her views and that the police officer had failed in his duties by not asking the group any questions. Ignorance and fear lay at the heart of these events, issues that concern many Colombians living in their home country.

Arias' contribution looked at the art market through the eyes and experiences of people far removed from the glitz of one of the world's most profi table art fairs. 

Enriching and enabling the commercial art world to exist, the average artist's income in London in 2005 was below the minimum wage. However the 2005 Freeze Art Fair had a turnover of £33 million. Arias recorded the views of various people to create an audio piece.

Asked one of the guards at the Pabellón Cuba during the 5th Havanna Biennial.
I stopped painting and asked him:
- Writing what?
He pointed at the wooden platform I was standing on and replied:
-That.
-Writing what?
I insisted again, inviting him to pronounce the word I was writing.

After a few failed attempts, he turned to his female colleague, also Cuban, and asked her to read it out to me.
- You read it, I can't. I'm getti  ng out of here.
His female colleague now alone read the word in a low voice as if trying to guess something.
INFIDELIDAD
Then she started again and read the first two letters. After a pause she continued with the third, fourth, fifth and sixth and stopped. She looked at me with a nervou  s smile, then turned away to search for her colleague, leaving me with the answer to my question: They were afraid to say this word out loud.

All twelve copies with an 'appendix' containing the artist's own work from 1991 to 1998 were simultaneously exhibited in the following galleries and libraries around Britain: 

Whitechapel Art Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Royal College of Art library, Guildhall University Library, Chelsea School of Art library, Bluecoat Gallery Liverpool, Glasgow School of Art Library, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, Edinburgh School of Art Library.

For half-truths I became the personification of a country that lives in a fictitious time and space. I acted as a transmitter between the press and the people, in this case from the daily newspapers El Tiempo (The Time) and El Espacio (The Space). Each day for a week I wore that day's front-page news, printed on the back, and walked the streets. The front of the t-shirts read: 

'Neither time nor space can erase what you made me dream' Kylie Mynogue b. 1968. 

'Time and space are just an illusion' - Berkeley 1685 - 1753 

For those seven days I walked the streets of Bogotá in order to remind myself and other Colombians about the reality of living in a society where the news is based on half-truths".

At the time, I was working with an idea of finding balance within myself. I stared at the sea for hours. I saw the line of the horizon swinging like a spirit level, which never reached total equilibrium. The line was the edge between life and death.

I visited M at the hospital and asked for his permission to use his voice that I had recorded during his crisis. We sat on a bench and talked a little. He was very lucid. We looked at the void. I wanted to go back and swim into the open sea to reach the line of the horizon. I swam for almost an hour. It was only when I got back to the beach and seeing the preoccupation I had caused my colleagues -some thought I had drowned- that I realised the meaning of this action: I wanted to live but at the same time die, I was standing on my own line.

With the sea, unwanted energies went and I became myself again. By then, Mario was recovering somewhere far away and it was time for us to evoke him. Eventually, M's voice and the video of the swinging line became one piece: Spirit Level. I presented it as a video/sound installation during the Open Day of the workshops.

Finally, I decided that 'Spirit Level' should be left alone and I had to think of a new idea, which was to become art when installed at CCA. A piece of Formica resembling wood found somewhere in the forest of Grand Riviera where I wrote the words 'CONTENTPORARY ART' did it.

I thank life for letting M exist next to me during that time and Natalia for her understanding."

In 2007 Fernando Arias and Jonathan Colin made a journey from London to Choco in Colombia travelling over land for large parts of the journey.