Jardin de Mi Padre

The book Jardin de mi padre by Colombian artist Luis Carlos Tovar draws on the idea of post-memory as an exercise in the imaginative reconstruction of lived experience, as a therapy spanning generations that gives voice to what has been marginalized and produces new empathies with the past. Jardin de mi padre is the project that won the prestigious prize Prix Elysee in 2019. Luis Carlos Tovar is part of a new generation of Latin American photographers who touch on local issues with an international visual language. The book is an edition made between Luis Carlos Tovar and Nicolas Rouviere in a masterful sequence and an editorial care that is rarely seen in photobooks. On 20 February 1980, Jaime Tovar was abducted by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and forced to wander for months through the tropical rainforest of the Colombian Amazonia. His son Luis Carlos, the author of this book, was just a few months old at the time. The guerilla fighters sent a Polaroid snapshot of their captive to his family as a proof that he was still alive. This project starts from the search for that uncertain photograph, but it reflects a process of rediscovery that transcends the event in itself. It is a poetic exercise that speaks of our finitude and contingent nature, that explores the legacy of the past as our only mode of survival. The absence of this fetish photograph activates a performative visual essay that has recourse to the mechanisms of appropriation and collage in order to remove autobiographical and documentary photography from their conventional frameworks.