There are only bloody fairy tales, because every fairytale is born from the depths of blood and fear.”
Franz Kafka, 1952
In this series, Ana González evokes the stories told by a nine-year-old girl, the daughter of a family displaced by violence in Juradó, Colombia. The work highlights the tension between the innocence of childhood and awakening to a reality altered by the ravages of war and forced disappearances.
Drawn to the original story of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1864), the artist reinvents these children’s stories of forced displacement and violence, developing a parallel between fiction and reality. In both cases, there are moments of abandonment, vulnerability, solitude and tension in a series of transformations that the children are subject to when exiled from their land. The series “Alicia” by Ana González is a reinterpretation of children’s stories where young girls are subjected to critical moments of homelessness, undergoing a metamorphosis as the plot unfolds until finally becoming the heroines of the story. Just as Alice in her “wonderland” constantly transforms over the course of the story, appearing, disappearing, becoming gigantic or tiny or turning into a plant, Ana González’s Alicia tells her story as if it were a children’s story, a fairytale that gradually transforms her through exile. Over the course of these stories, the girl takes on new dimensions, new layers and colors, and gradually fades until she reappears, more ephemeral and more volatile, at the end of her metamorphosis from a chrysalis, leaving behind her golden childhood years, her house, her dresses, her Sunday masses and entering a new dimension where the most human disappears and only the sacred, the pure and the immaculate remain.
The white dress evokes the innocence of childhood, the soul that remains pure over time, despite the circumstances, unaltered by the reality and the violence that it has been exposed to.
Ultimately, they are macabre stories of disappearances that get transformed into fairytales and fictional stories: letters and words that come and go, pieces of stories never told that, like the Alicia of Juradó, evaporate in time. As if, in the end, it had all been a long strange dream.