'Threshold': What will the new sculpture that will be on display at the Virgilio Barco Public Library starting in November look like?

"Umbral," a work by Carlos Castro Arias, will be built as a tribute to the healthcare workers who faced COVID-19 in Colombia five years ago. This artistic proposal won a call from the National Academy of Medicine and the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Sports.

Its imposing visual and spatial presence, its simplicity, and its multiple meanings were the factors that made this piece so striking, and it also met the established criteria. Some of the requirements were: the work's adaptability to the urban context, its technical and operational feasibility , its artistic and conceptual value, and compliance with the established budget and deadlines.

"Umbral is a wound in space. A powerful presence that imposes itself on the urban landscape like a silent cry, like a memory suspended in time. Its structure is based on the cross, a symbol recognized throughout the world.

An emblem conceived to protect life in the most hostile environments—war, disaster, disease—and which, from its origins, evokes the presence of medical personnel charged with providing aid, neutrality, humanity," says Arias about the meaning of his work.

And he added: "The work takes this cross, breaks it down, fragments it, makes it vulnerable. The more than 50 steel bars that comprise it—arranged horizontally and vertically —no longer form a perfect sign. They are vestiges of a broken balance, echoes of a system stressed by the weight of the irremediable. Each bar becomes a pillar, a vertebra within a broken but still upright column. Together, they support a monumental stone block, weighing more than five tons, that symbolizes the immense emotional burden of the presence of the Coronavirus that medical personnel had to carry during the most uncertain days of the pandemic."

The piece, more than eight meters high and almost seven meters wide, will be located in the Virgilio Barco Public Library polygon, at the height of 63rd Street, across from Simón Bolívar Park.

In this regard, Mauricio Uribe González, president of the Colombian Society of Architects, who also served on the jury, states that "Bogotá is a city of sculptures. It has nearly 400 commemorative monuments and works of art in public spaces. And it could have many more. Hence the importance of proposing new visions of art in the city, and the goal of further democratizing art."

For Santiago Trujillo Escobar, Secretary of Culture, Recreation, and Sports, “this is a monumental, powerful work, a device endowed with the strength and beauty that define the contrast that confronting and surviving a pandemic as a society represented for us, thanks to the enormous efforts of healthcare workers at all levels of care and with a deep ethical commitment. 'Umbral' will be a new permanent sculptural landmark for the city, which we will deliver next November.”