Piedemonte (2019-2024)
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Piedemonte is a long-term project about political violence in Colombia and its impact on the author’s family history and psychology. Through black and white photographs, he reflects on how family memories and intergenerational trauma shape the way he thinks, perceives and remembers.
Between the mid-1980s and the late-1990s, some 5,700 members of leftist political parties were systematically murdered by agents of the Colombian State and paramilitary forces. Among the victims and survivors are family members, friends, and acquaintances of the author’s parents. As violence and fear became part of their everyday life, the accounts of such events became ever-present during the author’s childhood. This project does not deal with the events themselves, but with the obsessive ways they were (and continue to be) recalled in his family, and the resulting, underlying anxiety.
The images depict familiar places — such as his parents’ house, where the author grew up — as well as newly visited places he only knew through family stories and photographs: nearby towns and landscapes his family never returned to after fleeing decades ago.
The project’s photographs are made following and impulse — akin to the feel of an obsession or the performance of a compulsion — and their visual language attempts to translate how intergenerational memories shape the author’s perception and imagination of places and times. Boundaries and transitions between interior and exterior spaces recur since the house where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence was both a refuge and a place of isolation.
“Piedemonte” refers to the subregion of Colombia where the author was born and raised — an intensely humid zone at the transition between the Orinoco plains, the Amazon rainforest and the Andes.
See the book here.
The project’s photographs are made following and impulse — akin to the feel of an obsession or the performance of a compulsion — and their visual language attempts to translate how intergenerational memories shape the author’s perception and imagination of places and times. Boundaries and transitions between interior and exterior spaces recur since the house where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence was both a refuge and a place of isolation.
“Piedemonte” refers to the subregion of Colombia where the author was born and raised — an intensely humid zone at the transition between the Orinoco plains, the Amazon rainforest and the Andes.
See the book here.