Red Very Red

Red Very Red

Gabriela Pinilla has created a beautiful illustrated hagiography of one of the most fascinating characters in Colombia’s political history, the great María Cano, a pioneer of union and workers’ struggles whose very figure seems to gather all the crucial threads for a pending reflection on the relationship between aesthetics and activism in Colombia. In Pinilla’s story we clearly see that for María Cano political energy and sensibility, workers’ organizing and a certain poetic and performative disposition were all part of the same task. Because, ultimately, the collective and the common can only come about when spirits go into rapture.