I arrived to the School of Plastic Arts because of my affinity with painting, something I enjoyed since I was a child. However, the School showed me other languages and expressions as installation and public art. Reading the city, its neighborhoods, people´s realities and activities led me to be interested in creating work for public places. It also allowed me to relate with different communities and showed me other art production methodologies, as the cooperative and collaborative art.
Venture into unknown places of the city aroused my interest in traveling and register the places visited through drawing. Since then, I have accumulated a large number of books of sketches that are both, a testimony of an artistic exercise as of a fieldwork. These books express several of my academic and personal interests, as the sensitivity for interacting with communities, for visiting heritage sites and learn about other cultures.
Venture into unknown places of the city aroused my interest in traveling and register the places visited through drawing. Since then, I have accumulated a large number of books of sketches that are both, a testimony of an artistic exercise as of a fieldwork. These books express several of my academic and personal interests, as the sensitivity for interacting with communities, for visiting heritage sites and learn about other cultures.
Being still an undergraduate student I started working as an art teacher and developed an interest in anthropology. Some years after, I decided to pursue a Masters in social anthropology in Mexico. That academic experience gave me more analytical and methodological tools to read social problems like the ethnographic method, so I decided to use art in response to those needs.
I became curatorial and educational coordinator of socio-artistic projects in different museums, where art exhibitions were the vehicle to work with different publics. This professional experience showed me the route of art pedagogy as another way of expression and creation. Designing and developing art educational projects for specific publics and with creative and social results is for me a mayor art work, similar to the composition of music and direction of an orchestra.
Projects as “The city and the children” / “La ciudad y los niños”, which I coordinated at Museum of Modern Art in Medellin required the creation of an independent methodology by collecting ideas from an interdisciplinary group of artists. The purpose was to introduce children to a sensitive and respectful way of living. This project articulated the production of public art actions, collective rituals, literature, photography, painting, video and ethnography.
On the other hand, through art education I have developed the ability of producing didactic resources, as illustrating books. Illustration for children is one of my favorite personal activities, because I can express in drawings and literature ideas of my perception of childhood, ludic, education, etc.
To summarize, my plastic expression can be analyzed in five lines of development:
1) Painting production, based in an abstract expression, in the experimentation with different materials, in the recycle of objects extracted from the streets, demolitions, etc., which has some references to the urban landscape.
2) Public and collaborative art production based on the observation of popular life (informal work, homeless children, significance of spaces, etc.), and on the collection and installation of pieces picked up from the urban space. On this line I have developed important works as “Boxed city” / “Ciudad Encajonada”, selected and exhibited at the XXXVI National Salon of Artists of Colombia, 2001.
3) Production of travel sketches and drawings of urban registers of daily life, which includes a collection of more than 10 books, which bear witness to my everyday surroundings and my travels in Colombia, South America, Mexico and Europe.
3) Production of travel sketches and drawings of urban registers of daily life, which includes a collection of more than 10 books, which bear witness to my everyday surroundings and my travels in Colombia, South America, Mexico and Europe.
4) Art education projects (through museums and other institutions) for specific publics as rural students, children in risk, etc.
5) Illustration projects destined for early childhood that narrates stories based on my personal experience and memories and on the observation of children from different cultures and regions of Colombia. They reflect the lessons learned from 10 years of professional pedagogical work.
Those five lines of my artistic production summarize and reflect the route of my affinities, academic research and professional experience, mixing art with social development.