15 Apr Flowers Between the Stones, 2010

Multimedia Installation

This work is the beginning of a personal cartography on my decolonisation journey. The first track of the migration process that starts in my hometown Popayán and extends towards Europe to pick up the steps that lead me more and more back to the south.

The research about identity, cultural encounters, migration processes and their impact on our social, cultural and artistic development is published in the article “Flowers Between the Stones”, in the book Utopia of Alliances, Conditions of Impossibilities and the Vocabulary of Decoloniality, from the Editorial Group for Writing Insurgent Genealogies, which I co-edited. This project is a critical analysis of the Colombian city where I was born, the institutions that shape it and the structures that formed my first patterns of thought and behaviour.  

During the research carried out in Popayán, I met a member of the Nasa indigenous community with whom I made the video clip Pueblo Nasa which talks about the indigenous Cosmo vision and their intrinsic relationship with the land and the natural entities that are part of it. The video is narrated in Nasa Yuwe; one of the surviving native languages of the indigenous peoples of Colombia. Due to the atrocious impact of colonisation on the indigenous communities, my friend prefers to keep his identity protected.

Exhibited multiple times in Semper Depot at the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna, 2010.

Better Without You

Photo series “Better without You”: in September 2020 the Misak people toppled the statue of the Spanish coloniser Sebastián de Belalcázar, located at the top of the Morro de Tulcán, after a symbolic trial where he was found guilty of looting, genocide and other atrocities. The Morro or Pyramid of Tulcán was used by the natives for ceremonial purposes and is the main archaeological site of Popayán where elements of the pre-Columbian era were found. Its sacred connotation was usurped by the Spanish colonisers and trampled symbolically by a statue erected by a Spanish artist. The statue was torn down together with many other social veils by the struggle of the indigenous peoples for the recognition of their rights and the visibility of their history. In these photographs I portray the dance of today’s generations with the history we are rewriting.