From October 07th till December 30th, 2017, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain presents an exhibition of colombian historical and contemporary art pieces with the ambition to raise a sensitive and transgenerational panorama of the Gótico tropical movement which was and remains a unique cultural and artistic experience as intriguing as specific for Colombia.

In the second half of the XXth century, Colombia is heavily touched by violence. Very singular aesthetic characters appears in that context. Mentalities change, dreams and fantasies free themselves, ideas are publicly declared, new artistic forms appear. The violent break of social balance in Colombia forces a collective reconfiguration of wonders and hopes that the Gótico tropical delivers a monstrous vision.

Born in the 1970s from a circle of intellectuals called Grupo de Cali, this artistic adventure raises cannibalism and vampirism at the rank of recurrent motives of a literary and cinematographic new wave. In the deeply South American tradition of tropicalism and in the social and subversive aspirations of the time, Andrès Caicedo, Luis Ospina, Carlos Mayolo or Hernando Guerrero devote themselves through experimentation, critic and pleasure, to a transcultural appropriation of "Gothic" aesthetics.

As an esthetic and identity revolution, the Gótico tropical finds contemporary filiations in a Colombian emergent scene which stretches well beyond the city of Cali but remains nevertheless resolutely rooted in Colombian culture.  Contemporary visuel artists use the same passion for fantastic and disturbing aesthetics of exotic folklore as vectors of cultural revendication.

This exhibition is part of an exchange program between Passerelle and La Usurpadora (Colombia), initiated in 2014 within the collaborative platform FRACO which paid a tribune of Colombian artist Luis Ernesto Arocha, through various shows in French institutions in summer 2015 (Frac des Pays de la Loire -Carquefou, Frac PACA - Marseille, La Maison rouge – Fondation Antoine de Galbert - Paris, La Halle des Bouchers Centre d’art contemporain - Vienne and Passerelle -Brest).
This collaboration made also possible for young French Artist Anaïs Touchot to have a 3 months residency and a solo show in Puerto Colombia in Spring 2017 as part of the Year France-Colombia 2017.