This is the second serial project by Erika Diettes. In the previous set, Silencios, produced in 2005, her lens focused on the survivors of the Holocaust. She picked out and portrayed twenty-nine individuals, survivors of the Nazi concentration camps who migrated to Colombia and refashioned their lives there. Her ideas of moral violence, the reanimation of life and the visibility of the real victim are both an accusation and reparation for a tragic event.

Diettes’ most recent production is also set in a human drama and is also the result of research and fieldwork. This time the artist has taken as her subject the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. This bloody and inhuman war is highly complex and diverse. The leading players include the two most visible guerrilla and paramilitary groups — the FARC and ELN — the state’s forces of defence and repression, and common crime. The production of drugs has taken root in the various factions too and has allowed the specialized organizations (the mafias) to widen the cracks in an already critically divided country. Violence and death have a long tradition in Colombian culture. It is therefore natural that many artists here have worked on this burning issue and continue to be curious about it. It is inevitable that they should seek to sensitize, denounce and bear witness, in order to construct memorials and forms of reparation which go beyond the symbolic or solidarity.

Drifting Away includes a real tour of the scenes of urban and rural violence in Colombia, seeking out the victims of the war and asking them about their memories of it. Diettes’ strategy was to detect individuals with direct experience of the grief produced by the death or disappearance of a loved one. She visited them, came to know them, and interviewed them. She also persuaded them to part with an item of the victim’s clothing for a short time so that she could take a photograph of it. One way of remembering and preserving memory is to keep objects, photographs and clothing of those no longer with us. This is a way of keeping hope alive, of fighting oblivion, or ritualizing the experience of death and bringing back a person who is no longer here.

One of the forms of evasion which is fostered with the victims is the way that their corpses are thrown away, into the sea or a river. This riverborne departure from the world is a way of removing the identity of the dead and of atomizing the tabulations that could be made of them. It is an effort to erase the facts and let the current disintegrate the evidence of the crime. The water loses all those connotations which it has: the source of life, the vehicle of prosperity, the guarantee of subsistence and the agent of fecundity. Denied all these characteristics, the rushing river becomes the agent of impunity and a macabre vista in which death is swirling.

As in the series Silencios, these works in Drifting Away lack any unnecessary dramatization or artificial effects. The clothes float in the moving water and are offered as silent testimony of a great shipwreck. The images acquire greater force by presenting themselves as elements of day-to-day life and use, but also by evoking the absence of their former owners, who can no longer use them.

Erika Diettes sets up the scene with a huge water tank, the lights to illuminate the target, and the single piece of clothing which she has looked for, found and selected. This exercise stimulates the effacement of the article’s former user — both the loss of his identity and the disappearance of his body — and at the same time encourages the preservation of his memory and the recovery of his name for the gruesome inventory. In order to underline the fragility of life and the image that photography itself gives us, she prints the results on large sheets of glass, which act as translucent supports for the pictures. Although the works are individual objects and are presented with that intention, each of them seems to be complemented by the others. As a whole, the number and variety of these works have an unusual and overwhelming effect which makes it powerful and intensely moving.