I'm tracing the diasporic dimension in my family's lineage, mapping out access routes to this diffuse transatlantic geography. Disembarking in contemporary ports, retracing the steps of the ancient transhumance, I've been testing the territory and describing the contours of an impossible cartography from my motherland: Chocó, the ancestral passage between the Caribbean and the Pacific in America.
The pilgrimage is motivated by the search for relationships that reveal unnoticed gestures; images that offer themselves as clues for the road.
Using the archive as a method, I collect and compose fragments of stories, trying to distort the categorical scientific canon with popular and counter-hegemonic narratives. Conversation is my aqueous medium. With installation and editing as exercises, I've been experimenting ways of making things public. My craft is the manufacture of picturesque objects.
[2017] Depredador
Commissioned necklace
40 x 10 cm
Alto Andágueda
This necklace is a pectoral made out of tiny plastic beads with the image of the Predator's face (from the Hollywood film that has the same name). This piece was crafted by the women of the Campos Arce family, Emberá-Chamí people forcibly displaced to Bogotá from Alto Andágueda river in Chocó.
A dispossessed group of Emberas from Risaralda and Chocó, has been settling in the Santa Fe neighbourhood, Bogotá. The youngest members of this community mix Spanish and Emberá when they speak, and they are the ones who are making avant-garde versions of the Okamas and Otapas –traditional Emberá necklaces– in which, for example, the U.S. flag, Jesus Christ, Wu Tang Clan, or Spiderman appear. That's where the idea for the pectoral piece came from as part of the research to Fiebre Super Nordica piece.
[2016-2018] Fiebre Super Nórdica
Plastic beads, metal tubes and synthetic cords
300 x 240 cm
Bogotá
The name of the project comes from a paradox. The Santa Fe neighbourhood, a “red district” of Bogotá is next to a commercial zone of refrigeration systems –a few blocks from Fiebre Disco Bar is the Super Nórdico refrigerators store. This curtain made out of hair beads, which recalls an image of a scientific-military thermal map, hanging over the street represents the entrance to a brothel, but I use it as a portal to the Chocó territory. It is an object that marks a liminal space and at the same time a map to navigate the cartographies of dispossession and migrations in this ancient natural corridor.
[2019] Mola Caimán Nuevo
Commissioned textile
50 x 45 cm
Gran Darién
This was the interpretation of a drawing I sent to the women weavers of the Guna Dule community of Caimán Nuevo. Based on the thermographic graphics of the movie The Predator, the cinematic fiction becomes part of the imagery of this modern weaving artistic tradition in Guna Yala. This work is part of the research for Fiebre Super Nórdica.
[2018] Abrecaminos
Multimedia Installation
(painting, textiles and video)
Variable dimensions
Bogotá
https://vimeo.com/260841153
Installation
150 x 300 cm
Bogotá
"Hotheads, temperate spirits, and cold lands," is an approximation to Chocó territory. Exploring this place, where one of the first colonial foundations in America was set up, is a way of revisiting the structural problems with which our territory has been shaped, and also the possibility of attending to other world visions that have historically challenged and resisted hegemonic and totalitarian gazes. This is also a manner to confront the always antagonistic relationship between center and periphery -cold earth and hot earth- proposing a dynamic visual temperature scale, to temper our vision.
Digital draw
Variable dimensions
Bogotá A flag.
[2017] Negros con actitud
Digital draw
Variable dimensions
Bogotá
The icon appears as a mixture between the iconography of moor heads, the carlist flag of the Spanish empire during colonial expeditions, and a poster of Compton’s rap band N.W.A. (this is why the piece is called Negros con actitud). With the carlist flag the Spaniards founded Santa María la Antigua del Darién in 1510, the first Spanish town on the American mainland. The moor heads are symbols of european domination in the coats of arms, an icon to manifest the fight against the evil. This is an appropriation of an ancient imagery turn it now a powerful weapon against racism.
[2024] Mil Pesos
Inks on linen
120 x 300 cm
Sivirú
While researching traditional agricultural production systems in Chocó, we met the community of Sivirú, in the lower Baudó river, located between the estuaries on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. This painting was born from the observation of a seed of the milpesos palm, a super food that is harvested in abundance like the naidí, the borojó, the chontaduro or the papachina. The visual fiction that I propose condenses a landscape that comes from the macro to the micro and vice versa, using industrial inks but also some natural pigments such as bija and coca.
[2021] Es por ahí carajo
Cobalt ink on cloth
170 x 120 cm
Quibdó
Exhibited at Pacific Shark (fish market in Bogotá) this piece, made in Quibdó, recreates a mental landscape while researching the history of rice and sugarcane in the Atrato River. Both crops were promoted by an agricultural development program in the 1980s, operated by dutch trotskyists who came to install an environmental system designed for inter- Andean valleys to the flood zones of the rainforest. In spite of the technological and genetic change it implied, the program contributed to the social organization of the black people’s actual community councils.
[2022] El pato de las tres patas found wood and commissioned synthetic shoe 95 x 30 x 105 cm Bogotá
Coming down from the Montes de María, site of historical palenques of black cimarrones, I came across this trunk on the beaches of Puerto Colombia. The name of the piece comes from a joke told by the marimbulero of the group Sexteto Tabalá in San Basilio de Palenque: Emiliano Herrera Hernández, to which I reacted with this sculpture that came to me in a dream, and led me to the “zapatero zoñador” who made the shoe in Bogotá.
[2024] “El muerto se pone pesado cuando sabe quien lo carga”
Printed posters
35 x 27 cm
The Archimedes Project proposed to build a port in this gulf of the Pacific Ocean where humpback whales come to breed. The dispossession of these lands at the hands of paramilitaries continues to be a silenced fact in this area where development plans are still being plotted with transnational interests, mainly trade with the People's Republic of China.
Chinese ink on sacks
240 x 500 cm
Quibdó
Exhibited in Stuttgart, this piece, intended as a psychological portrait in the midst of an unprecedented spiral of violence in the capital of Chocó, ended up being a landscape or psychography, painted on sacks of fertilizers and products that enter and leave this tropical rainforest territory.
[2022] Castillo de solitud
Silver leaf, aerosols, pastels, wood and stone
Variable dimensions
Stuttgart
Asserting that “there is no such thing as extractivism in reverse”, I exhibited in the project room of the Akademie Schloss Solitude: a piece of a tree from its park and some cobblestones from its sidewalks, barely disguised, for their contemplation. At that time, the German State was intensifying the purchase of coal in Colombia as a response to the cut-off of the Russian gas pipelines in its territory; the same story that in the early 20th century led German capitalists to invest in the platinum mines of Chocó because of the shutdown of the Russian mines.
Printed fabric
150 x 200 cm
This cloth is an appropriation of a famous sculpture in Colombia, a work of the artist Hena Rodriguez made in 1932. This is part of a visual essay: a refusal of ownership, an exercise of liberation for this Afrodescendant miner woman from the historiographic narrative of the National Museum of Colombia that condemns her to be an allegory of slavery or a simple Cabeza de Negra (Black Head).
Sun - dried fruit painted with chrome - plated ink
17 x 10 x 10 cm
While researching the history of platinum extraction in Chocó, I learned of a revolt in the sixties by the people of Bebará that stopped the activity of a dredge of the multinational mining company Chocó-Pacífico, as it damaged the crops of the black farmers, including their bacao trees.
The next piece is a counterpropaganda to the brands of the liquor industry that are co-opting the commercial scenario for the spirit of the black communities of the Colombian Pacific: B/Viche.
The multinational Diageo is behind a criminal move to take over the headlines in the business of this spirit that has been legalized after centuries of persecution.
negro es el viche y del pacífico es su denominación de origen: de territorios colectivos entre la selva y la lluvia al pie del monte, el mar o el río son las marcas blancas desbocadas por el lucro
artífices
