00:00I often arrive at nine in the morning and start rummaging through drawings I have,
00:11I do some tests, I gather the materials, I start dyeing. I put the dye in the pot. When
00:20I don't have the dye, so I go and look in the supermarket trash, I chat with people,
00:28I'll have a glass of red wine… I think art is important to me because it allows me to observe, but it's not a
00:44not a contemplative gaze, but feeling part of what I look at, and that the gaze transforms it, and that the gaze
00:49It's very much related to the hands, and that transformation makes you feel that the
00:55Things become part of you, they allow you to transform yourself from within and transform reality.
01:00I find it very difficult to separate work from everyday life. I can be on the bus and I'll suddenly...
01:08An idea occurs to me. I can be about to fall asleep and an idea occurs to me, and I'm already so asleep.
01:15that
01:15I can't draw it, and then the next day I remember it. But that mental space is indeed a mental space.
01:22that
01:22I go in. Yes, I do think there's like an entrance to that space, like it requires me to ask myself what's going on.
01:33at my work.
01:46And then this building started operating as a call center around 2015-16 and they wouldn't let me in.
01:54enter
01:54That's why, because he was busy. Later, the call center was taken over by a colleague named William Contreras.
02:02We applied for a scholarship from an organization
02:04A New York-based art gallery called Apex Art. We received the grant, that was in 2024, and a group of friends...
02:16I'd been looking for a workshop for a while.
02:19So we did the presentation first and talked with the group of colleagues and decided what to do.
02:26a proposal to the owner to stay here for a while.
02:30And we kept staying, yes, at first there were 15 of us, now I think there are 30 of us.
02:50The first thing that struck me about the space was how spacious it was, with so many architectural details.
03:04very delicate, yet consistent, an architecture with much detail and abandoned.
03:12That's what surprised me, because there were stone walls, marble stairs, everything gray,
03:22an entrance with some thin sheets that looked like bronze, and some sheets in certain areas,
03:32Some steps, like with wooden walls too, yes, very modern, very austere but beautiful, so I asked for this
03:41almost full of dust.
03:43The ceiling had some white MDF-like panels and they started falling off, then no, then no, that
03:53It fell on I don't know who,
03:55the ceiling panel, so we had to remove everything, that was the first thing we did, remove all these panels from the
04:02ceiling, clean, there was a lot of dust,
04:05We didn't want to paint because those walls also held a Telecom memory; we've tried to preserve that memory.
04:13But then I started working and I started making a mess and I said, well, that's enough, I suddenly
04:18I might repaint it in a year.
04:19But it was like a desire to start occupying the space.
04:23I bring the material and I always start dyeing, which I really enjoy because it's putting
04:29I'll heat a pot and then I can start doing something else.
04:31Because I'm super scattered, then I sometimes start doing ceramic experiments; downstairs I have some ceramics firing.
04:38Because there's a ceramics workshop here too, and drawing, writing, every day, like starting to review what I've
04:45done before,
04:46Read other things, talk to people in the industry.
04:50My first workshop was on the floor, in the mezzanine of the adjacent building, which is the Florentino Vesca.
04:56It's the big, big, big telecom building, that used to be a squat workshop.
05:02At that time I did not have permission from the owners; they did not know that I was entering the building.
05:07And I would go in and put up a door that would fall down every time I went in; I had to do somersaults to get in.
05:14to be able to enter.
05:15Later, when I entered university, I was in my undergraduate studies,
05:20I felt very uncomfortable in art exhibition spaces and artistic creation production spaces,
05:28On one hand, very much in line with contemporary art trends
05:33and also those trends heavily influenced by spaces that are too clean, too codified, too orderly,
05:45without much content. So what I began to feel is that, well, the artist produces her work,
05:50The artist produces her work in her studio and takes it there.
05:54And this position wasn't nourishing enough for me at that time.
06:01Because firstly, being a young artist, I was 22 years old at the time,
06:05You don't have spaces to show interesting things; the dialogue you have is with your teachers.
06:12Well, I arrived here and had to be alone for a long time and do research,
06:19Being here forced me to investigate the history of Telecom.
06:38These are two buildings, the Florentino Vesga building, which is named after the director of the first company.
06:45of telephones in Bogotá,
06:47But he also studied indigenous botany.
06:49Then I started to find myself asking myself questions that had to do with things that I was also...
06:57asking about my own history.
06:59So, how do I situate the indigenous aspect from the perspective of mestizaje, from an unconventional place,
07:05how indigenous thought can be situated in a place not inscribed within a closed tradition,
07:16but as I can, because I can't relate from there, because I wasn't born in a territory nor with a
07:24deep indigenous knowledge.
07:26I feel like being in here is like being in a world built by other people that we're trying to put the comma in.
07:42to the ball.
07:43And we could spend our whole lives doing that, but it's fun to do.
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