Paper has held the memory of mankind throughout history. It has enormous symbolic meaning in itself, having transmitted knowledge and preserved it throughout centuries. As a material for artistic expression, it offers great versatility; it can have the tactile qualities of leather or metal, be solid as stone or light as a feather while retaining our memories and thoughts in their folds.
For more than 20 years, my artistic production has focused on working with this material and on the possibility of expanding its uses as a medium to explore three-dimensional and sculptural drawing and writing.
As a subject matter, I explore migration, communication, and social exclusion, focusing on how traumatic experiences can cause identity crises and cracks in memories. Reflecting on my personal experience as a migrant, I became interested in language and communication, producing an artistic body of work that visually focused on written texts.
For me, writing became a tool to reflect on how language shapes our memories and identities. As “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”, from Borges’s story, I wanted to rewrite stories of others, word by word, to be both a reader and a writer, and to embody and understand the deep meaning of their voices. Using liquid paper as my “paint”, I have written stories of dozens of women affected by violence — particularly in the context of my country, Colombia. I transcribed testimonies of immigrants, traced maps, books, drawings of refugees and set up large calligraphy installations.
Ultimately, I seek to evoke memory and communicate a sense of fragility, emptiness, absence and forgetfulness with my work, as well as highlighting the drama of many life stories.