Abstract
This paper examines how narcoaesthetics, the visual and material culture surrounding drug trafficking in Colombia, produces powerful imaginaries of excess, spectacle, and violence. Narcoaesthetics functions not merely as a style but as a visual regime where ornamentation and luxury serve to naturalize illicit economies and obscure their violent foundations. Focusing on Camilo Restrepo’s A Ton of Coke (2021) and Victor Escobar’s Tráquira/Paisacres (2009–10), I argue that contemporary Colombian artists critically engage these visual codes, exposing their connections to historical forms of colonial extraction and contemporary capitalist desire. Restrepo’s work, a digital NFT rendering of cocaine as a commodity, underscores how the aesthetics of shine, mirrored in jewels, gold, and brilliants, operate as both fetish and social commentary. By translating cocaine into an immaterial digital asset, he highlights how narco economies, like crypto markets, depend on abstraction and detachment from material consequences. Similarly, Escobar’s ceramics, covered in fake diamonds and presented against black surfaces, evoke the ostentation of traqueto (drug trafficker) culture while referencing vernacular pottery traditions from Ráquira. This creates a tension between artisanal craft and narco-capitalist display, prompting reflection on the interplay of local traditions and globalized aesthetics of power. This analysis draws on theories of materiality (Jane Bennett) to situate narcoaesthetic imagery within broader circuits of consumption and visual culture. By exploring how these artworks interrogate and reconfigure everyday practices of seeing and valuing, this paper highlights contemporary art’s capacity to expose and destabilize narcoaesthetic regimes of power.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
NARCOAESTHETICS, CONTEMPORARY COLOMBIAN ART, MATERIAL CULTURE, VISUALITY, VIOLENCE, JEWELRY, IMAGINARIES
