By Karen Paulina Biswell

NAMA BU, in native Embera meaning WE EXIST reveals a colaboration with the Native American Embera Chamis community, an intensely personal voyage of themes that revolve around personal and collective identity amidst a backdrop of extreme beauty and violence in Colombia. NAMA BU is divided into three separate parts, each exploring different aspects of the artists relationship with this unknown world.

She begins thrusting the viewer into voyeur status, inviting us to see through the peephole of her suite in the Hotel Dorantes in Bogota. Day after day she would invite her subjects, mostly women and children, to pose for her while they begin to inhabit this· lost in time· space. The resulting analogue images are mistifying....intense... painterly.

All of a sudden we find ourselves immersed in the mountainous jungle, seemingly sequestered by the Natives themselves, we are kidnapped and disappear into the deep forest. From voyeur to hostages, we are then allowed into their cosmic vision, from fascination at first, to misunderstanding, and finally to what can only be called a true revelation, as they take away the camera and begin to reveal to us their inner world.

'Having been raised between Paris and Colombia, I have always been in transit from one world to the other, my identity always being questioned and reality being fought out between European urban existence and the idea of a lost paradise. I explore this schism and the logic of sense through the dramatic questions of who, where and why. Finally, there was the subject of art itself, the object transcending time through photography, animation and transition. It is a personal journey by way of projection and fabulation, transcending meaning, not interested in revealing per se, but in exploring what is hidden.