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, amidst political turmoil and rising violence in Colombia, my father, a journalist and director of an agricultural magazine, was falsely accused of murdering the Minister of Agriculture. What began with his torture at a military facility (Cantón Norte) ended in his exile and more than fifteen years of separation from our family.

Cuevas de Sacromonte emerges from that absence. Taking its name from a site outside Bogotá that was used as a torture center, 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 and generate a metamorphosis of absence itself. This fracture shapes the way I inhabit, remember, and narrate my father's absence, exploring its echoes in a process I am still unraveling.

To give shape to this exploration, I work across multiple formats and techniques: archival imagery, thermal photography, Polaroid transfers, and screen captures. Each medium serves as both tool and metaphor, allowing the crack to operate as a mutating force within each technique.

From a Latin American perspective, this story does not seek to contain a single truth; rather than focusing solely on violence, it aims to reclaim silence and emptiness as forms of presence.

As a young Colombian woman and a migrant in Spain, I approach this project not only as an artist and photographer, but as someone tracing the echoes of her own history. Although my work has been linked to social issues for years, this is the first time I am giving voice to my personal story and that of my father, whose absence was long normalized in family albums and inherited narratives. Living as a migrant has also allowed me to revisit and understand his exile from a new perspective. Thus, this project goes beyond recounting events; it is an active exploration of how personal absence can be interpreted and mediated by multiple factors, ultimately creating a new, constantly transforming form of reality.