Cero Plumas (Zero Feathers)

From a very early age, as an Indigenous child and adolescent in the Colombian context, the violence directed at my effeminate expression shaped the way I inhabit the world; this ongoing photographic project is born as a response to that wound.

From a very early age, as an Indigenous child and adolescent in the Colombian context, the violence directed at my effeminate expression shaped the way I inhabit the world. This ongoing photographic project is born as a response to that wound: a gesture of repair, care, and rewriting of memory from the place of dissidence, affection, and imagination.

Through interventions on my family archive, the staging of fragmentary memories, and the rereading of power apparatuses, I work with the body as a living archive: a place where what has been erased reappears, memory is sensorially activated, and the personal is transformed into the political.

Drawing on critical frameworks such as María Lugones's coloniality of gender and José Esteban Muñoz's disidentification, Cero Plumas (Zero Feathers) questions the binary, hierarchical regime imposed by colonialism and proposes, following Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's formulation of ch'ixi, inhabiting mixture, ambiguity, and affective contamination between cuir/queer and Indigenous symbolic languages.

Confronting plumophobia and the disciplinary injunction to "not have pluma," the project chooses to expose and subvert it — restoring its potency as a sign of difference and disobedience. I reclaim the right to inhabit the anomalous, the strange; to reappropriate normative aesthetics in order to reinterpret them; and to celebrate sexual and gender dissidence against the politics of death and the narratives that constantly tell us we do not deserve to exist. To tell this story is to seek belonging — not in the place that was denied to me, but in the language I build from cuir/queer affirmation and the resignification of the colonial wound.