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This text articulates conceptual cores of my plastic experimentation: the activation of hybrid cultural strata embodied in presences, in friction with matter and its behaviors, which give them body. Let this entry be free from being an explanation; read it as an extension of my artist statement. [BIO]
Excerpt from a conversation held with art theorist Andrea García Casal on her contemporary art blog “La écfrasis de Miss Goethe”, in January 2026. The full interview, with its original editorial context, is linked at the end of the text.
1. Transformation of the Body into Form
The Gold Museum in Bogotá houses works such as the “Jaguar-Man” and the “Bat-Man” that represent ritual bodily transformations. How has the specific study of these shamanic practices of metamorphosis influenced your sculptural methodology? Do you see your work as a continuation of those ancient cosmologies or as a critical dialogue with them?
More than reading those figures as “shamanic practices”, I have always been interested in them as formal solutions to a very concrete problem: identity does not become fixed. The Jaguar-Man or the Bat-Man do not explain a belief; they sustain an unstable state of the body. As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro observes when describing Amerindian perspectivism, the jaguar is not a symbol, but someone from its own body. That observation feels very close to the studio: I work with forms that never quite decide what they are. Transformation does not appear as a theme, but as a material condition of the work.
2. Anthropomorphism as a Visual Language
You mention that anthropomorphism is a special feature of pre-Hispanic figuration that has always fascinated you. In your current works, how do contemporary materials (cardboard, latex, recovered objects) translate that ancient quality of attributing life to the non-human? Is there a difference between the ritual anthropomorphism of pre-Columbian cultures and the way you update it in “Precarious Altars”?
Pre-Hispanic anthropomorphism does not consist in humanizing objects. It consists in recognizing agency where modern thought sees mute things.
Following the example of the jaguar I referred to before, taken from Amazonian lowland cosmologies: each species sees itself as human and perceives the others from its own body. It is not metaphor, it is an organization of experience. It is a different way of organizing the real: the world changes according to the body that inhabits it.
In Precarious Altars I try to work from that same demand, without turning it into a theme. Cardboard, latex, or clay do not represent bodies: they behave as such. They tense, yield, hold weight, or fail. If something appears anthropomorphic it is not by stylistic decision, but because matter begins to respond like a body.
3. The Absence of Museums and the Construction of the Imaginary
Bogotá lacked museums like the Prado or the Louvre, but it had the Gold Museum. How did that particular cultural geography shape your formation as an artist? Do you think working without the great European references allowed you to develop a gaze more rooted in the Americas?
I grew up with the Gold Museum, not as the only one, but without a doubt as the major museum space that most marked me in my hometown. It is not a museum of images, it is a museum of presences.
One of the great exhibitions of Olmec art organized by Princeton University (Ritual and Rulership) showed that in pre-Hispanic anthropomorphism it is not a matter of “works” in the modern sense, but of active presences, linked to primordial powers. That idea that accompanies the Olmec also flows in Muisca, Tairona, or Quimbaya goldwork; for me, the pre-Columbian is not representation: it is pre-image, pre-representation, presence. This revealed itself and stayed with me from early on: a form can operate without representing. Matter comes first; there a presence breathes; afterward, if necessary, explanation arrives. Or one attempts it.
4. Shared Experiences: Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and American Tribes
You mention that your time living alongside Indigenous communities in different countries has been fundamental to your work. What similarities did you find in the worldviews of peoples so geographically dispersed? Is there any specific moment or encounter with a community that represented a turning point in your artistic practice?
I did not work from an ethnographic interest in the strict sense, nor as a romantic escape in the manner of Gauguin. What I was looking for was something else: consistency in a way of perceiving the world from another gaze. In that sense, I feel closer to Artaud’s experience with the Tarahumara than to a classic anthropological investigation. If there was ethnographic intention, it was an intention of integration: to see the world, digest it, and thus transform my gaze.
What appeared strongly was the intuition of a world understood as a common and living organism, with which one interacts, from which one learns, and to which one belongs. “Remember the earth whose skin you are”, writes Joy Harjo. Not as a slogan, but as sustained experience.
In direct relation to my work, more than symbolic similarities, I found shared ways of organizing the real: continuity between body, environment, tool, and everyday action as membranes that succeed one another. In my studio, when a piece resists or collapses, that continuity stops being an idea and becomes very concrete.
5. Spirituality vs. Documentary
Between ethnographic coexistence and artistic creation, where do you draw the line? Does your work seek to document, interpret, or ritualize the worldviews you study? What is your ethical responsibility as a Colombian artist working with ancestral knowledge from other cultures?
As a Latin American artist, the Indigenous does not appear to me as a separate category: it runs through and underlies Latin American culture as a whole. It is in art, in food, in music, in politics, in everyday language. It is not about asserting an Indigenous identity, but about recognizing a living cultural continuity. From there, ethnography stops operating as the study of the “other” and begins to function, when it is useful, as a tool for understanding what we are.
In that sense, certain ethnographic observations act as a magnifying glass. They allow one to formulate precisely structures that are already active in material experience. For example, in his work with Emberá communities, Stig-Emanuel Isacsson observes that there are no isolated objects, but states of being in transformation. I conceive it as a clear formulation of something I recognize in my own work: form does not represent, it acts.
The work does not document or interpret a worldview. It sustains a material presence that behaves as such. And that is, again, one of the central questions opened by pre-Columbian art: not the production of symbolic objects, but the state of being that rests in matter.
6. Indigenous Otherness in Contemporary Art
Living in a multiethnic country like Colombia seems to have been fundamental to your work. Now that you live in Valencia, do you feel that this geographical and cultural proximity to Indigenous communities has changed the way you create? How do you maintain that lived connection from a distance?
Distance removed the anecdote and left the structure. Once outside the immediate context, what remains is not the specific experience, but the way certain relations are organized and sustained over time. That continuity does not depend on geographical proximity, but on how the work is thought and inhabited.
Today that connection appears in the way I organize the studio space, in how materials relate to one another, and in how I respond to their resistances. It is not a direct lived experience nor a memory activated from afar; it is work of structural coincidence that continues to operate in practice.
7. Research Methodology
You describe pre-Columbian art as “a very serious and constant field of study”. What have been your main sources of research? Do you work from archives, academic publications, or is direct experience your main laboratory?
I read archives, look at collections, and return to the studio.
Publications help not to decontextualize. The studio tests those ideas. When a piece fails, information appears. That back and forth prevents research and process from becoming a closed discourse.
8. Pre-Columbian Technique as a Contemporary Tool
The Gold Museum exhibits sophisticated techniques: goldsmithing, filigree, lost-wax casting. Have you incorporated any of these ancestral techniques into your current practice? If not, what is the conceptual reason behind this choice?
I do not incorporate pre-Columbian techniques. I am not interested in transferring procedures out of their world.
I am interested in the structural lesson: technique as a form of thought. I work with poor and unstable materials, with the same seriousness. They do not promise permanence; they force you to stay attentive.
9. Materials as Signifiers
In “Precarious Altars”, you use cardboard, latex, clay, and recovered objects. These are materials of contemporary precariousness, not of pre-Columbian nobility (gold, ritual ceramics). Is this contrast intentional? Does it pose a critique of the way contemporaneity has displaced pre-Columbian sacred materials?
Materials work when they enter into relation. They tense, wear down, resist. Meaning appears in that behavior.
I work with material bodies that react. They hold weight, fail, transform. In that process the work activates.
When something is perceived as alive it is because of the way it acts in space and in relation to other materials. Presence manifests in the behavior of the form and the interrelation of layers.
The precarious is part of that material logic. In many Indigenous cultures gold did not concentrate economic value: it was a fragment of the sun, a living matter. From there, cardboard occupies an equivalent place. It is tree, it is wood, it is a forest full of life compressed until it becomes a deformable sheet. In that state it continues breathing, yielding, responding. The work is built in that material continuity.
10. Category and Classification
Your work is described as “sculpture, painting, drawing, installations”. Do you feel these Western categories limit the expression of a worldview that does not recognize them? How do your creative forms negotiate with the taxonomy of Western art?
Classifications and systems of order are part of the modern world we have inherited and inhabit. We operate in compartments, identities, and hierarchies; we think through containers and contents: molds of classification. That logic structures museums, disciplines, and languages. From there arise my boxes, my false classifications, my archives, and the Jeroglíficos series (2018–2021): conscious attempts to order a world that does not accept stable compartments.
That work with boxes and systems seeks to make visible the absurdity implied by objectifying what is alive. The niche never manages to contain what it aims to order. What is contained always overflows.
In that same sense my relation to media is organized. The work moves between drawing, painting, installation, or sculpture because it responds to a continuous material logic. Layers make the two-dimensional fluctuate toward the three-dimensional; painting gains volume; latex configures space; drawing becomes structure. Mixed media functions as a practice of hybridization where material states blur and affect one another.
That logic appears clearly in Olmec art and in Chavín, where beings present themselves as composite bodies. Jaguar, eagle, human, and other powers coexist in a single form. A being can be other beings at the same time. Being is at once a multitude of beings; one could even say that multiplicity is a condition of what is: a recurrent place in my work, where modern structures confront a multiple and polymorphic world that insists on not being ordered.
11. Artificial Intelligence and Ancestrality
“Precarious Altars” integrates AI-generated animations that “extend the movement and breathing of physical forms”. Do you see AI as a continuation of the transformation and metamorphosis celebrated by pre-Columbian cultures, or as a denial of the manual and the embodied?
Indeed, it is transformation; it always has been: animism has not returned, it never left. AI is its contemporary form.
AI is an algorithmic cannibal: it has devoured language, images, knowledge, and residues of our culture in order to articulate itself as a digital body of anthropomorphized language.
A jaguar is not a symbol: it is someone from its body. A tool is not a thing: it extends the body that uses it. Between them there are no objects, but powers. AI appears today at that same threshold, where we no longer know whether we are facing a thing or an active presence, with agency of its own. Every day the balance tips a little more toward the latter.
12. Precariousness as a Sacred Condition
In your work you propose that “the sacred and the everyday coexist, sustaining the same fragility”. Is this an inversion of the pre-Columbian hierarchy, where the sacred was monumental and lasting, while your version is fragmented and ephemeral?
It is not an inversion. The sacred in a monolith does not depend on the monument itself nor on the durability of the material, but on operative potency, on what it activates in a community or in a society. What is most sacred—the ceremony, the ritual—is precisely what is most ephemeral.
I work from that logic in a present traversed by downgrade. Matter appears compressed, fragile, provisional. Cardboard, latex, and unstable assemblages describe the current state of the material world: exhausted surfaces, stretched structures, exposed bodies.
In Precarious Altars, sacrality manifests as transitory presence. Something holds for a while, acts, and dissolves. The everyday and the sacred share that same condition of operative fragility.
Form exists while it operates. Precariousness is the ground where that operation becomes visible. AI does not introduce precariousness: it makes it visible.
13. The Position of the Spectator’s Body
How do you expect the spectator’s body to relate to “Precarious Altars”? Do you seek to evoke a ritual experience, or rather a critique of contemporary desacralization?
I am interested in altering the spectator’s perspective not in a physical or performative sense, but as a change of point of view. To disorder the relations between plane, volume, and space, rather than to provoke bodily displacements. The work operates there: when dimensions stop obeying a clear hierarchy and perception has to readjust.
I work from mixed media precisely to produce that disturbance. I build volume from the plane, use painting as space, take drawing into the three-dimensional, and allow the three-dimensional to become plane, shadow, or digital echo. The usual categories—ground and figure, support and body, material and projection—stop functioning with stability.
The work does not resolve as a frontal image nor as a closed object. It is experienced as a field of relations where it is not entirely clear from where to look. At that point, the spectator’s body comes into play not as anatomical presence, but as perceptual consciousness that adjusts its way of being and seeing.
I do not propose a ritual nor a symbolic narrative. I propose an unstable perceptual condition. If something is activated, it is a different attention: more porous, less sure of its own coordinates.
14. Being a Colombian Artist in a Global Context
Your training includes studies in Bogotá, Florence, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. How does your work negotiate between the weight of Colombia’s pre-Columbian heritage, European formation, and U.S. experimentation? Is there tension between these intellectual geographies?
My formation unfolded as a passage. Bogotá, Florence, and Santa Fe sedimented into the work as lived experiences, not exempt from contradictions, tensions, and nuances.
In Florence I understood that the Florentine artist confronted a process of hybridization of traditions not so different from the one I confront. The Renaissance faced an ancient art—the Greco-Roman—that surpassed the Gothic technically and philosophically. The response was translation. Bacchus, angels, cherubs, and bacchantes coexisted on the same plane. The past was incorporated into the present through formal and bodily solutions. That way of living with an overwhelming heritage, without neutralizing it or turning it into ornament, was decisive for my way of thinking about the relation to the pre-Columbian.
Santa Fe provided a decisive experience. There I lived alongside Navajo, Lakota, Hopi artists and many other Indigenous nations, and I was interested both in their ways of life and transmission and in the historical violence through which modernity has crossed those cultures. It was one of those circumstances where material precariousness does not annul a deep and active cultural richness.
Later, by a combination of chance and personal decision, I settled in Spain to pursue studies linked to new technologies applied to art at the Universitat Politècnica de València. That stage was key for situating my relation to technology: it reinforced an inclination toward manual processes, simple systems, and low-tech solutions, where technique appears as an extension of the body and not as a substitution of making.
Today my studio is in the mountains near Valencia. That territory—with its layers of history, ruins, mestizajes, peoples erased by successive empires—functions as an operative frame that offers distance and structure to the work. It is a place that nourishes the process without absorbing it, allowing one to think, feel, and reorganize the work from an assumed belonging. That mode of relation to place—letting a history act without becoming identity—is analogous to the anthropophagy formulated by Oswald de Andrade: to devour the world in order to transform it into something else.
Bogotá remains as a constant ground. Not as a theme nor as an origin one returns to, but as a way of being in the world. It is a hard and complex city, and in my early years it was a largely mysterious territory. There my first mutants appeared: unstable, hybrid forms, still without a name, traversed by material and vital tensions.
Over time, places stop being external coordinates and become skin. They are not the cities themselves, but what one incorporates from them. That internal city is what keeps working, even when one is no longer there.
15. Decoloniality of Form
Many contemporary Indigenous artists speak of “decoloniality” as a political and aesthetic urgency. Does your work aspire to a decoloniality, or do you reject that category for considering it equally Western?
Decoloniality is not my starting category, nor a program. My practice does not begin from a political urgency formulated in those terms, but from a historical and cultural experience that is already hybrid, mestizo, and stratified.
In the Latin American context, the pre-Columbian does not appear as an “outside” that must be recovered or corrected in the face of modernity. As I pointed out before, it is part of the very structure of our culture. From there, the question is not how to “decolonize” form, but how to recognize the material and bodily continuities that never stopped operating.
Latin American modern art understood this clearly. Historians such as Álvaro Medina have pointed out that modernity in Latin America is not built in opposition to the pre-Columbian, but from it. In artists such as Frida Kahlo or Rufino Tamayo, the pre-Columbian does not function as citation nor as identity rescue, but as an active stratum that organizes color, form, and body. There is no illustration of the past; there is persistence.
In a contemporary register, Nadín Ospina has shown how far the separation between Indigenous art, modern art, and contemporary art responds more to museographic and colonial logics than to the real experience of Latin American culture. That division is a construction, not a fact.
In that same line, practices such as those of Lygia Clark displaced the work from the stable object toward a bodily and perceptual experience that could no longer be organized from inherited categories.
My work situates itself within that continuity. It does not seek to correct history nor to propose an alternative framework. It moves from a structural coincidence: materials that act like bodies, forms that do not represent but sustain presence, identities that do not fix. From there, form is not decolonized: it behaves, enters into relation with others, and, when everything works, it activates.
16. The Art Market and Authenticity
How do you navigate the tension between the authenticity of your research into ancestral worldviews and the demands of the contemporary art market, which often exoticizes the “Indigenous”?
The market tends to ask for quick signs: “the Indigenous” as style, as label, as exoticism, or as theme. I work from presence and material behavior. My interest and my biography are not a marketing strategy; they are an authentic inclination, lived with passion to the last breath.
I am not an artist obsessed with the pre-Columbian as a closed field. It is one of my great influences, yes, but not the only one. From my early formation, and later with more clarity in Florence, I understood that culture works like a tree: the same root yields different fruits. I am interested in the mestizo, the amalgam, the crossing of traditions. In the Renaissance, Dionysus, Apollo, and Prometheus merge with Christ and Saint John the Baptist in the same symbolic broth, fluid and interconnected. That logic of mixture, translation, and friction is what I recognize as my own.
I could also say that my Latin American influences are modern: Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, or Frida Kahlo, with her relation to Coatlicue understood as a deep conception of the maternal—the earth as body, food, life born in pain, sacrifice, and blood. In it, the Aztec appears as embodied thought, in addition to visual citation. With all that, and assuming that the pre-Columbian is a common source for countless Latin American artists, I preferred to study it from the source itself, avoiding the widely known mediation of 20th-century Latin American modernism.
In my work other layers equally decisive also coexist: the punk-rock attitude, contemporary low-budget Spanish cinema, historical Expressionism and its current drifts, or the trace of Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer in an ethics of making that does not separate thought and matter.
In that same European lineage, Marcel Duchamp’s gesture—from the readymade to the inframince—opened a threshold where material categories become unstable: between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, between object, plane, and event, the work ceases to fix itself and begins to operate.
I do not act out of fidelity or attachment to an origin, but out of continuity of an energy that transforms through art.
