Colombia has been looked at from different angles. First, as a land of volcanoes and mountain-ranges bounded by two great oceans and the ocean-like Amazon River. Then, as a group of people situated between Bolivar and the absence of Bolivar. Furthermore, as a paradise of biodiversity where millions of natural species live together, and where the cockatoos are a multicolored prolongation of anacondas and humming birds. She has also been looked at as an absurdity, as a country which sprouts a sort of anguish that hides under an astonishing manipulation of images and words. Of Colombia there are photographs and memoirs, albums that preserve our grandmothers' pressed violets, as well as novels in oils by Fernando Botero, by Alejandro Obregon, by María de la Paz Jaramillo. In short, Colombia is really a manifold ingathering, a motley totality of sensations and odors, flavors and impressions on the skin and on the memory. Thus, the only thing we can make of all this is that when we speak of Colombia, we are speaking about a real fact, about a place in which to live it out, to abide in fallow barrenness, to wait for an undefined something, which in toto marks our glances and our conversations with a note of anxiety.

Casa Colombiana wishes to be something different. In this book it is we who look at ourselves, at our simplest and most elementary things, at the way we relate to our objects and areas. Here, there is room for a simple naked truth, that of the language we use when we speak to ourselves in our silences, when we tell ourselves what only we can hear, when we confess to ourselves our yearnings and our expectations. In these pages is our relationship with an everyday aesthetics, where the location of simple constituent things plays a key role in the feeling we have in the presence of a landscape, our landscape. Here, sotto voce, is our mental organization, at times exuberant, at times dry and disciplined to an unblemished clarity, wherein lies our hope for better times.

This is a book intended to say in a new and arresting way what has always been said, to explore ourselves indoors with patience and painstaking honesty. After seeing ourselves in the full light of truth, facing what lies beyond our domestic line, we shall be able to know something more about what we want and may expect from our collective endeavors.