What made you want to become an artist? What motivates you to create? 

Art has always been a very important part of my life. Ever since I can remember I was surrounded with music all the time, then theatre and dance came. Shortly after, painting and drawing were always part of my routine whenever I had the chance to grab a pencil and paper (or literally at any surface) and when I grew up, I had my first contact with photography using my family’s camera. Art is what I’m most passionate about, so I decided that it was the thing I wanted to do all my life.

I get inspired by little things, someday it will be my emotional state, another day can be a song that I’m really into, etc. But the aspect that motivates me the most is the power that a piece could have. Art is a tool that helps people to communicate feelings, political postures, information and advice. My main goal is to produce pieces with a meaning, something that people couldn’t forget.

How did the fact that you are coming from Colombia and moved to Mexico influenced your work?

I think that culture is a factor that influence every artist and being fortunate enough to have two nationalities has helped me to put a little of them in my work. Exploring Mexico’s culture being aware of its social context and

Non-positive actions that are normalized by a Mexican, can be criticized from an external point of view, through my art.

How do you thematically plan a piece of work? What are the steps involved (ie. finding materials, research) ……and where do these fascinating ideas come from? 

Most of my work’s ideas comes to me spontaneously, I like to think myself as an impressionist photographer who captures a moment in an instant. I really like to work with analog processes and while developing pictures in the lab I experiment a lot, I like to create unique pieces while playing with materials and the exposure light.

When it comes to a theme, I use to work with topics that are resonating with me at the moment, I love to have a research and write key words that could help to make a project happen. After that I sketch the possible design of the composition, and if it is a collage, I search for the pictures that can help construct the piece.

To what extent has your everyday life as an artist changed during pandemics? 

It opened the possibilities, as I mentioned before I get inspired in the little things this notion strengthens during the lockout. But I can’t deny that at first it was hard for me, many projects got cancelled, currently I’m in my last semester and I’m still not able to return to college and work on the photography studio and labs, so technically I had to improvise a lot with what I have in order to achieve the results in my pieces.

How do you feel about being involved in an online residency program? How important is it to stay connected with the international art community?

At this point in my life, I want to receive all the knowledge possible and I am excited because this residency is the perfect opportunity to achieve that goal.

I think that collaboration in art is something really important and sharing with people of other cultures has been a fundamental part of my life this has filled me with incredible experiences, learning to know the world, through the eyes of people whose lives are different from is something that I enjoy immensely.

What are your thoughts about the theme ‘artist on standby’?

I think it has so much potential, this is the time we can use the technology and collaborate with other artist and try to reconstruct the art world as we know it, make in it more accessible for everyone to mention one example.

Tell us a bit more about your project…

Currently I’m finishing some details of my graduation project that consist on photographing details of 3 buildings in Guadalajara, Mexico that were intervened by the murals of José Clemente Orozco (Instituto Cultural Cabañas, Palacio de Gobierno and Museo de las Artes MUSA). This series consists on 3 photographs of each building, 1 tectonic detail (the facade), 2 interior of the building and finally a detail of the mural. I was motivated to make this project because I notice people on their daily life tend to ignore the beauty that surrounds them due to the rush of the day or just simply are used to see them every day, that they don’t observe all its little parts and what makes this place special.

What do you want to achieve before things return to normal?

I’d like to graduate and start to strengthen communication with other artists by creating collective projects.

Any future plans/projects?

My future plan is to continuing creating, getting into art curses and never stop learning.  I’d love to do an artistic internship in a different country and also getting my own photographic lab to continuing the analog processes I had to stop due to the pandemic. There’s also a Project I’m planning that will on making compositions with the test strips I used to recollect, when most of my classmates discarded them. I kept them as I always considered that there where many possibilities for their possible use.