Kate Morrell
The term ‘guaqueria’ – the act of looting archaeological sites – has been used in Colombia since the mid 19th century. Illicit excavations by guaqueros serve the existence of many public museums and private collections in Bogotá.
Within the film, looting is posited as political resistance, working in opposition to nationalist, colonial and Western-oriented approaches to archaeology and museum collecting practices.
The film centres around conversations with four Bogotána women, documenting their private collections of pre-Columbian ceramics, displayed within domestic settings and embedded within the interior architecture of their homes. We hear them speak of shifting value systems, rights and protections; engaging with urgent debates around cultural restitution and repatriation.
With (relatively recent) government laws put into place by the Ministry of Culture, prohibiting the export and transfer of cultural assets and stating that private collections must be declared; the women – identities withheld – articulate varied rationale for keeping commoditised objects (ceramics and gold) in circulation.
The film incorporates museum archive footage from 1980s–90s along with newly shot video and photography, interlacing the public and private, blurring ‘expert’ knowledge with non-scientific and personal language. Conversations are held in Spanish and part-translated to English to agitate further translation tensions and withholding of new knowledge.
Kate Morrell is an artist living and working in London. For the past 15 years she has worked with archives, collections and libraries to develop projects that identify and respond to under-researched or overlooked histories. This work questions the conventional logics that serve and organise collections. By doing this, it invites critical re-readings of the hierarchies and structures of power which are given voice in their presentation.
With a background in artist bookmaking, her practice is situated in the expanded field of publishing. She works primarily with print media – with sculpture, drawing and video as extensions of that.
She has developed diverse methods for working with collections of different scales and contexts. Projects include: documenting illegal, private collections of pre-Columbian ceramics, kept by housewives in Bogotá; research within the Jacquetta Hawkes Archive at the University of Bradford on the life and work of the British archaeologist, and a residency at a remote Swiss library, residing alongside ‘shelving robots’ in this innovative futuristic archive.
‘…Y el barro se hizo eterno (...And the Mud Became Eternal)’ is a short film developed during a 10 month British Council scholarship in Bogotá, Colombia.
University Gallery
The Quadrangle, University of Galway
Galway H91 FN8X
Access
Not wheelchair accessible
Accessible toilets (Quadrangle Building)
Accessible parking (Quadrangle Building)
Captioned film (see notes)
Transcript available
Seating provided
Opening Times
8-23 November 2025
Tues-Sun 12-6pm (closed Mon)
Getting There
10-minute walk from Eyre Sq.
Bus: stop 523031 University Road
Paid parking nearby
Access notes
The film includes the voices of several women: the four collectors, a collector’s daughter, the translator, and the filmmaker. Conversations are held in Spanish and part-translated to English using half-screen subtitles on the right of the screen. The change of speaker is indicated by a colour change in the half-screen subtitle. Selected parts of the conversation are left untranslated and this is indicated via standard subtitles.
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
Strange lands still bear common ground
Curated by Beulah Ezeugo
7-23 November 2025
Galway, Ireland
Image: Film still from ...Y el barro se hizo eterno (...And the Mud Became Eternal), 2020, HD video, 35 mins 42 secs