Cuevas de Sacromonte

Set in 1970s Colombia, a father exiled after torture and false accusations, a daughter left in absence. This project revisits their broken bond through experimental image-making, where archive, pixel, and the crack become tools of memory.

In the 1970s, amid political unrest and escalating violence in Colombia, my father, a journalist and director of an agricultural magazine, was falsely accused of the assassination of the Minister of Agriculture. What began with his torture ended in his exile and more than 15 years of separation from our family.

Cuevas de Sacromonte emerges from absence. Borrowing the name of a site once used as a torture center on the outskirts of Bogotá, the project reconstructs the interrupted bond between father and daughter. Absence becomes a fissure—a crack—whose power lies not only in what is missing but in its capacity to expand, to generate new spaces of presence and meaning. This rift shapes the way I inhabit, remember, and narrate my father’s absence, exploring its echoes in my own life, a process I am still unraveling.

To give form to this exploration, I work across multiple formats and techniques: archival images, thermal photography, Polaroid transfers, videocall screenshots, and both digital and analog photography. Each medium functions as both tool and metaphor, allowing the crack itself to operate as a generative force across every technique. Through these layered approaches—substituted characters, reimagined spaces, and manipulated images—I transform absence into material, turning what was missing into a space of creation and expansion.

From Latin America, this story does not seek to contain a single truth and, rather than focusing solely on violence, it seeks to reclaim silence and emptiness as forms of presence. It proposes a new way of telling our stories, one in which intimate wounds open a collective dialogue about absence, presence, pain, and identity, transforming silence into another form of testimony.

This project unfolds through a photobook, an exhibition, and an audiovisual piece that explores the crack into expansion:
www.perlabayona.com/cuevas-de-sacromonte-video


As a young Colombian woman and migrant in Spain, I approach this project not only as an artist and photographer but as someone tracing the echoes of her own history. While my work has long engaged with social issues, this is the first time I give voice to my personal story, and to my father’s, whose absence was long normalized in family albums and through the stories of my parents. Living as a migrant has also allowed me to revisit and understand his exile in a new light. So, this project is not merely about recounting events; it is an active exploration of how personal absence can be interpreted, reshaped and mediated by many factors...finally, creating an ever-evolving new form of reality.


If awarded the grant, the funds would support the production of a limited edition of the photobook (e.g., 500 copies), consolidating the narrative and conceptual structure of the project. Also, since this is not only a photographic project but also an artistic one, where different techniques are explored, the participation in portfolio reviews and the potential exhibition at PhMuseum Lab would provide invaluable feedback, and visibility, enriching the work both artistically and conceptually.