Claudia Gaitán Tovar (Bogotá, 1968) is the author of the cover image. She studied Fine Arts with a minor in Biology at the Universidad de los Andes. She lives in the outskirts of Bogotá and works as an independent artist. Throughout her artistic career she has always worked on the human body and the relationship that exists between war, incisions, markings, and stories about the body. The photograph on the cover belongs to a work called Los violentados (mixed technique on wood, 2014) and is part of a series entitled "La evidencia del cuerpo."

 

For Gaitán, the most important thing of her artistic work is to leave a visual testimony of the different interpretations that war imprints on bodies, whose traces tell us—in certain ways—untold stories. Wood (which is her primary working material) and the body have certain similarities: they both are malleable, resistant, flammable, absorbent, and flexible. On both surfaces one can print, mark, drill, saw, turn, paint, point, and craft things that can be so beautiful and also so atrocious. For her, the body tells us, like wood, the passage of time and the scars of its existence. This allows her to imagine endless interpretations of what she tries to capture in her works and photographs. Her use of materials adheres to stories and suggests questions about humanity and about what we are capable of achieving for both the good and the bad. These questions frame her own personal view of Colombia, which can thus be surmised from her own words: "I was born in the middle of a war in Colombia, and I continue to live in it, in a country that is 'always near' finishing the war."