"Invited to exhibit in Mexico in 1995, on the occasion of the Colombian-Mexican exhibition entitled "Por mi raza hablará espíritu" (For My Race Will Speak Spirit), Ospina only took a few drawings with him. There he contacted a replica manufacturer who, instead of working with clay, preferred to work with synthetic resins, achieving the same quality of an original. He wanted to say that even the material could be successfully imitated and thus reach the summit of the doubly fake. The idea fascinated him. He had not yet read The Seduction of Baudrillard. When he became familiar with the thought of this French author, he corroborated that his work moved between the "truer than the true" or "height of the simulacrum" and the "falser than the false" or "secret of appearance". Baudrillard mentions in his text "the idea of an altered truth" as "the only way of living from the truth".
It would seem that these sharp considerations guided Nadín Ospina when he made the different versions of "El difusionista" (The Diffusionist) (1995), conceived from the controversial theory that since the nineteenth century had been proposing that Mesoamerican civilizations had their origin in Asia and more specifically in India, collected in Colombia by Miguel Triana in his book "Los Chibchas". The misunderstanding derived from the very long beaks of the macaws carved on the famous stela B of Copan, which the illustrious and very serious researcher John L. Stephens described "as the trunk of an elephant, an animal unknown in that country". Although Stephens spoke of a resemblance and not a representation, the terse truth did not make a career. There were draftsmen, when photography was not commonly used in archaeological research, that when undertaking the task of reproducing Mayan reliefs and glyphs allowed themselves the license of remodeling the beak of the macaws and even suggesting big ears with the purpose of making the resulting figure more elephantiasic.
With this amusing tale in mind, Ospina took the "altered truth" and turned it into concrete reality. In Mexico, working from the fantastic drawing in the London Illustrated News that accompanied an article by G. Elliot Smith, a drawing that was supposed to be that of a Mayan frieze with an elephant motif, Ospina ordered the making of an Aztec urn with an elephant on the lid, an urn that he exhibited at the Museo del Chopo in front of the apocryphal drawing traced on the wall. By refiguring the urn, Ospina made it entirely possible that the diffusionism of historians G. Elliot Smith and D. A. MacKenzie could acquire the appearance of certainty. Neither Smith nor MacKenzie ever suspected that the evidence lay not in the past but in the future, in the creativity of Colombian artist Nadín Ospina."
Alvaro Medina. Book Refigurations. 2000
"Ospina's interest in pre-Columbian art has led him to find surprising examples of similarities between elements of pre-Columbian cultures and certain aesthetic manifestations of ancient oriental civilizations. This series of coincidences have been analyzed by the defenders of the hypothesis of the "transpacific relationship" that advocates migration as the basis of some American cultural developments.
Already in 1994 in the work "El Difusionista" presented at the Museo del Chopo of the Universidad Autónoma de México for the exhibition "Por mi raza hablará el espíritu" (For my race the spirit will speak) Ospina had dealt with the subject. The work is an installation composed of a central ceramic piece: an urn in the manner of a pre-Columbian piece with a lid topped by the figure of an elephant, a drawing executed directly on the wall, and a soundtrack that repeats an elementary and stereotypical oriental musical theme.
The drawing on the wall is a copy of an engraving published in 1924 in the London Illustrated News by the anatomist and mummy researcher Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937), who had simultaneously published the controversial text: "Elephants and Ethnolgists", which aroused passionate debate.Smith, the most important representative of the anthropological movement called Diffusionism, proposed that in some reliefs of the pyramids of Copan and Palenque, figures of elephants could be clearly recognized, animals that certainly were not found in Mesoamerica at least in historical times, deducing that these representations could only be possible thanks to a visual tradition brought by travelers from the East.
"El Difusionista" (The Diffusionist), Ospina's work, is an ironic commentary on archaeology and its inability to elucidate this problem, as well as on the manipulations of researchers who, for the sake of recognition, have been able to falsify the evidence by creating confusing speculative models. Despite the criticisms of his interpretation, Smith's work generated interest in analyzing the phenomenon and has given rise to numerous investigations. In 1961 the Ecuadorian archaeologist Emilio Estrada carried out excavations at the site called Valdivia on the north coast of the province of Guayas in Ecuador, finding an atypical type of pottery 5,000 years old that did not correspond to any local development that would justify its origin, concluding that its antecedents should be sought outside the American continent.
The type of pottery with which the most conclusive stylistic and temporal similarity was found was that produced during the Early Middle period of the Jomon culture of Japan, which flourished between 3,500 and 2,500 B.C. after a long evolution that places it as the culture that created the oldest known pottery more than 12,000 years ago. The diffusionists argue that the similarities found between this South American culture and its Asian counterpart are only possible thanks to transpacific travel and that its late and spontaneous appearance in this geographical area after the long journey of the first human wave coming from the Bering Strait is not probable.
Isolationists, on the other hand, attribute the coincidences to independent inventions, arguing that it is impossible for travelers to travel more than 9,000 miles apart.
Chilean researcher Jaime Errazuriz, who analyzed the Tumaco-La Tolita culture, found irrefutable evidence, according to him, of an oriental influence in this pre-Columbian culture. Errazuriz relies on the precision of the sophisticated realistic representation of this civilization that portrays during a short stylistic period the abrupt appearance of a human prototype perfectly recognizable by its oriental features. Errazuriz published in 2000 for the Catholic University of Chile the study Pacific Basin - 4,000 years of cultural contacts, an extensive analysis of the aesthetic coincidences between artistic productions of Mesoamerica and pre-Columbian South America with China, Japan, India and Southeast Asia in a two-way path in which he does not rule out the possible influence of ideas coming from the Americas in Asia. Presentation catalog of the exhibition Nadín Ospina - El ojo del tigre (The eye of the tiger). Museum of Modern Art of Bogota. 2003
