Landscape art often offers the viewer a pleasant distance. A mountain is framed, named, and made available for contemplation; the strain of reaching it disappears. Colombian artist José Alejandro Restrepo reversed that bargain in Paso del Quindío I, his 1992 video installation. Seventeen monitors rise in a pyramid and show footage from his ascent of an Andean route in 1991. Some images record a measured climb; others register the unsteady movement of a body near the top. The mountain is not offered as a smooth postcard. It has to be crossed.
MoMA’s artist account places the work in conversation with nineteenth-century European explorers, including Alexander von Humboldt. Their images and writing helped define how distant publics saw the region. Restrepo returned to the route with a video camera, but he did not claim that a newer machine could finally produce an objective truth. He has described his own account as one interpretation within a chain of copies. That modesty is pointed: the authority of the explorer has too often depended on pretending the observer did not shape the scene.
The installation’s many screens also interrupt the single commanding view. A pyramid can suggest a monument, but the footage is fragmented and moving. No one monitor can hold the whole passage. The viewer must assemble a route from partial records, the way historians assemble a past from documents created for different purposes. Restrepo has spent decades asking which visual archives are allowed to become history and whose experience those archives erase.
MoMA included Paso del Quindío I in its 2023 exhibition Chosen Memories and later listed it in a collection gallery titled 500 Years, on view from November 2024 to June 2026. Those settings put the work in conversations about colonial representation without reducing it to an illustration of a textbook argument. The artwork’s form is part of its claim: repetition, height, physical effort, and broken continuity make it difficult to consume an Andean landscape as an empty possession.
This matters beyond a museum. Maps, travel accounts, satellite images, and tourist photographs still invite us to confuse a view with knowledge. Restrepo does not ask us to abandon images. He asks us to keep track of who made them, where that person stood, what the instrument could record, and what the frame left outside. The Andes in this work are neither a pristine wilderness nor a lesson pasted onto scenery. They are a place whose representation has been fought over, one climb and one screen at a time.