Jardín de mi padre is a book very close to the family album that starts from the story of a kidnapping and the photographer's attempt to reconstruct those difficult years until his father's release. The chronological order of the book helps to establish a narrative of the kidnapping while showing how the photographer intervenes in press articles, book pages, telegrams and other publications with cyanotypes and archival images. In the words of Joan Fontcuberta, "El Libro Jardín de mi Padre by Colombian artist Luis Carlos Tovar proposes the idea of post-memory as an exercise of imaginative reconstruction of life experience, as a generational therapy that gives voice to the marginalized and produces new empathy with the past".On February 20, 1980, Jaime Tovar was kidnapped by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and forced to wander for months through the humid, tropical jungle on the border of the Colombian Amazon. His son Luis Carlos, author of this book, was only a few months old when the events took place.
The guerrillas sent a Polaroid to the captive's relatives as proof of life. This project is based on the search for that uncertain photograph, but reflects a process of unhiding that transcends the event; a poetic exercise that speaks to us of our contingency and finitude, that points us to the legacy as the only means of survival. The absence of that fetish photograph activates a performative visual essay that resorts to the mechanisms of appropriation and collage to take autobiographical and documentary photography out of its conventional frameworks.
