By: María Isabel Abad L.
Let’s put it this way: Dora Luz Echeverría has been building herself like a house, a house with music and with silence, with art and with words. With your own room and others shared. With space for children and grandchildren, for friends, for love and also for loneliness.
It takes talent to be a house that sings – tangos, rancheras, boleros – and to continue opening spaces, at each stage of life, tailored to your own desire.
She is the daughter of the artist Dora Ramírez and the freedom that she embodied was her foundation. “I was not only so happy because my mother was my mother, but also because I was such a friend to her.”
During the pandemic, Dora Luz Echeverría recorded 222 videos with songs daily, with her sister Clara and her daughter María José, to bring music to the lives of many from a distance.
At the age of eight he knew freedom when his father was transferred, for two years, as technical vice president to Acerías Paz del Río, in Belencito, Boyacá. “That was a very happy time. From a social point of view, it was a delight. The children of the workers and foreigners went to my house and we went to them.” There, her mother also broke down internal walls and enjoyed the art and culture of which she was made, in a more open environment.
Therefore, when Dora-mamá returned to Medellín, she felt that her expanded soul did not fit within the social circle from which she had left. He decided to enter the Institute of Fine Arts, and the marriage slowly but definitively faded away, until he moved to work in Panama and created a new family there.
She had her parents as backup, who, despite the letters for her supposed downfall, supported her at all costs. The house in Caracas and Sucre suddenly opened in correspondence with the opening of the inner and outer world of Dora Ramírez. In the afternoon it was a youth meeting point; and at night, the center of local bohemia. Oscar Hernández, Manuel Mejía Vallejo and Carlos Castro Saavedra arrived there. Younger women artists arrived and a guitar teacher for the mother, whose lessons the daughter, Dora Luz, would learn with a good ear.
He says that the greatest prize in architecture is not in the biennials but in the joy of clients when they enjoy a coffee in the house they have built.
After graduating from Marymount, which during that time offered him a more liberal environment than other religious schools, he decided to take a break. For a time he dedicated himself to reading and walking without a very defined vocation. And so he expanded inside by reading all the books in the library. The house that was was filled with words.
It was a friend of his brother who, a few months later, suggested that he study architecture and helped him with the steps to enter the National University. “Entering a public university was a complete discovery of the world. Because I lived in a very socially limited world, right? When I go there I meet wonderful people. In some way I felt again what I had felt in Belencito, which was one world.”
Under this oak are the ashes of Manuel Mejía Vallejo, Dora Luz’s husband.
She did very well: she earned honors, was a student representative in ’68 and traveled to Europe with the theater group directed by Jairo Aníbal Niño, as the main actress. “University changed my life. Go from one pole to the other.” And so, as he crossed the city, he was also able to think about it. That is why the thesis that he did with several of his colleagues, called Goodbye to architecture, posed a strong criticism of the fact that architecture was fundamentally responding to economics. Despite not having been registered, this work won the national prize, because, upon seeing it, Rogelio Salmona, one of the jurors, had no doubt that this should be the winning work for a contest whose name was The Street for man.
It was also at the University, and not at home, that Manuel Mejía, her mother’s great friend, twenty-five years older than her, saw her for the first time as a woman after having seen her for many years as one of the girls at school. the house of Caracas. Thus began a courtship that lasted seven years. “What about the scandal?” she told her colleagues when they told her that they criticized her.
And one day the children arrived; Mateo, María José, Adelaida and Valeria, and with them a happy and loving motherhood, combined with classes and architecture projects, with parties at Ziruma, the Retiro house that was the epicenter of the cultural life of Medellín for many years , and with the long conversations with Manuel about life and about his books, in which she played a fundamental role due to her love of words “which are a delight” and for the structure that architecture gave her.
Until one day, without love leaving, separation came “to know what loneliness is like,” as the song says. The house that was became deep. He moved forward with the love of his children and became a diver, submerging his broken heart in the sea, which he says always brings him back to life.
Today she is still active in architectural projects that she carries out with her son Mateo, such as the expansion of the Jericó Museum (MAJA) and a theater in Apartadó; The guitar does not abandon her, and during the pandemic she recorded 222 videos with songs to put music to the silence of many.
She is a friend of her children, as she was with her mother, and art passes through all of them; In his hands he has the power to heal the scratches of his four grandchildren who brighten his life.
Sing Thanks to lifeby Violeta Parra, feeling each of the words of that song. And his throat is connected to his heart, which is why he doesn’t say more or less than what he feels and his voice sounds deep and firm, as if he had a lot of space inside. Space to which many approach looking for shelter and light. She is Dora Luz, a great house of Golden Light, as her uncle León told her one day. When she was little she reconciled with her name, a name that since then has not stopped illuminating the house that she is.
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