1. Being an Afro-Colombian Artist Today
For me, being an Afro-Colombian artist today is a constant affirmation of identity, memory, and resistance. Ancestral roots are a vital force in my work. While my family’s history isn’t always clear—my father, an only child, was raised by a man who left home at a young age—there’s still an unbreakable thread that ties my art to my Afro heritage. My paternal family is from Asnazú, in Buenos Aires, Cauca. They later moved to Cali, where I was born. Cali is a city that’s intense in every sense: its heat, its rhythm, and its culture. Afro heritage here is palpable, from the sugarcane mills to the workers—most of them Afro-descendants—to the music playing in every corner.
Being Black in Colombia means feeling different, speaking different, seeing the world differently. I remember having a special bond with my father through music. He would share his salsa records with me, talk about composers and orchestras—and I grasped it all quickly. I had an ear for music.
2. From Play to Destiny: Art as a Life Path
As a child, I used to spend summer holidays at my aunt’s studio in Restrepo, a small town four hours from Bogotá. I’d watch her create religious sculptures, oil paintings, and crafts. I loved it so much that I would count the days until I could go back in December. That left a lasting imprint in my subconscious.
Later, choosing a career path wasn’t easy. I loved literature, and though I started studying engineering, I became deeply drawn to the library, where I started to read and ponder into the world of art. What truly shifted my course towards my creative side was cinema.Cinema is precise—framing, color palettes, social context.
My work carries a lot of that visual language from filmmaking. With this inspiration in mind, I quickly changed my career path, finally entering Art School. Like good cinema, I want my art to open people’s eyes, to point things out, to confront. Issues like segregation and systemic racism have become background noise, and I want to bring them back to the foreground.
3. Memory, Territory, and Resistance in the Work
In my 16-year career, my work has gone through several stages—always through painting. At first, I became fascinated by African-American cinema posters, especially from the Blaxploitation era. They allowed me to explore visual language while telling black history.
That led to the “Riots” series, depicting racial segregation and police brutality in the U.S. Inspired by the HBO series The Wire, I then explored the lives of gangs and Black ghettos—always wondering how to speak about Blackness from a local perspective.
Eventually, I realized a huge gap in my own education: Afro history isn’t taught in Colombian schools. One morning I came across a poster of “Pambelé,” a famous Afro-Colombian boxer and descendant of cimarrones (escaped enslaved people who formed autonomous communities). He rose to stardom and later fell from grace due to drug abuse. That discovery was a turning point.
Now, I’m revisiting Cali’s neighborhoods through drawing, studying Colombia’s republican architecture and its ties to Latin American dictatorships. These dominant structures age into fossils whose origins people forget. I’m also painting Afro-Colombian landscapes along the Pacific coast—spaces surrounded by silence, memory, and sea.
4–6. Defining Encounters: Eduardo Ojeda and ArtDome
Meeting Eduardo Ojeda and working with ArtDome has been transformative. In a country where cultural projects often fizzle out due to lack of support, Eduardo brings vision and trust. He believes in mid-career artists like me—now in my 40s—who still have much to say.
The Colombian art scene is under pressure. Most artists move to Bogotá early on, even if their artistic sensibilities were born elsewhere. Contemporary art constantly asks us, “What else? What’s next?” That question, while difficult, is a gift. Unlike the European or U.S. scenes, Latin American art has its own unique questions, and even if it draws on classical or modern traditions, it must ultimately confront its own realities.
That’s why it’s so important when someone like Eduardo—who brings extensive international experience—engages with the local Colombian art scene. His fresh perspective allows our discourse to connect with global practices while staying rooted in the local.
11–13. Recent Work and Necessary Provocations
In my current work, I aim for more conscious engagement from viewers. I approach the process with both meticulous care and intuition. I often compare it to a cooking technique called “separating the egg”—isolating the yolk from the white, depending on what you need.
In my ink or monochrome paintings, I reduce the image to a single color threshold. This allows the piece to function like one large drawing, inspired by medieval Chinese painters. I play with transparency and layering. The monochromatic palette forces the viewer to follow the line, gradually entering the scene and experiencing surprise.
But painting is not a linear process. It often slows down or circles back—like searching for something lost. Sometimes I use spray paint, sometimes a video camera. The medium shifts, and with it, the message. That dialectical materiality directly impacts the viewer. It determines whether a piece fails or becomes repetitive.
If someone only had 30 seconds to view my work, I’d want them to feel something they can’t quite put into words. Something that lingers and stirs a deeper curiosity.
“We inhabit places that disappear the moment we turn our backs on them…”
This phrase has stayed with me. Because art—like memory—fades if we don’t face it head-on.