Self-portrait. Manually altered archival photographs. This work is based on the classic format of anthropometric photography—front and profile shots—a tool developed in the 19th century by physical anthropology and criminology to classify, control, and racialize bodies. In the Latin American context, these visual devices were used to reinforce colonial hierarchies, legitimize eugenic theories, and establish indigenous difference as a sign of backwardness or deviance. By reinscribing my own body in this visual structure, I do not seek to reproduce its original function, but rather to interrupt it. The choice of a pink background, punk hairstyle, and mix of traditional clothing and contemporary aesthetics configure a Ch’ixi identity that escapes colonial taxonomies. The pink hue introduces a queer code that fractures the rigid, militarized masculinity that the historical photographic archive imposed on indigenous subjects, giving way to a performativity that is recognized both in my ancestral lineage and in gender-sexual dissidence.
Portrait with my mother in her room, a contemporary reinterpretation of Michelangelo’s Pietà. As an indigenous Pasto and queer son, I surrender to her embrace, transforming the religious gesture into an iconography of care and resistance. Between the crucifix and the Bible, I confront gender coloniality, a concept developed by Argentine philosopher María Lugones to explain how colonialism not only imposed racial hierarchies, but also established a binary and hierarchical gender system that degraded and dehumanized indigenous peoples, erasing pre-existing sexual and gender diversity. This photographic act defies these impositions and reclaims tenderness as a political force: a territory from which I return to my mother as one who returns to the earth, to the memory of my ancestors, and to the possibility of rebirth.
An autobiographical performative photograph that reconstructs a childhood memory marked by the surveillance of hegemonic masculinity. In a domestic room, my body—dressed in a blue satin suit and red heels—rises above a wardrobe, while a fragment of America’s Next Top Model, a program I secretly consumed in my childhood, appears on the television. This performative gesture embodies the clandestinity with which I explored affections, desires, and practices prohibited by dominant gender codes. The scene is both a refuge and a denunciation: a territory of political imagination where queer memory emerges from intimate resistance, demanding visibility and rewriting the personal archive in the face of the cis-heteronormative narrative.
A manipulated photograph of a recovered letter written in adolescence, on April 16, 2014, projected onto the wall as a vestige of an intimate and clandestine archive. Under the directed light, the handwritten page reveals a state of extreme vulnerability permeated by a sense of not belonging. By publicly displaying this fragment, the work subverts the private destiny of the letter and turns it into a political testimony, denouncing the symbolic violence that forces people to live in self-censorship and silence.
Photograph altered from a family archive. In the original scene, taken in the courtyard of our family home in Ipiales, Nariño, my mother appears standing, while I occupied a place that I decided to cut out in my childhood, in an early act of self-erasure. This gesture responded to an experience marked by homophobia and a life that I believed not only unviable, but impossible in the long term. In the present, by incorporating my fingerprint into the void, I affirm an existence that was long denied to me, even in my imagination. The piece engages with notions of archive and counter-archive: it transforms a domestic photograph into a territory of repair, where the maternal bond and self-recognition intertwine to resist the violence that sought to erase me.
Intervention with archival photograph. As a child, in this photo from the family archive, I erased the presence of my cousins. I did it without knowing what I was doing—an unconscious gesture—leaving only my figure and a void that spoke of loneliness, of a body trying to exist without certainty. In the present, I project a rainbow reflected from a DVD onto that void. It is not a vestige of the past, but a light that recognizes what already lived within me: a silent, contained diversity that I had no words for at the time. The colors spill out like a porcupine’s embrace. That gesture resonates with what V. Jo Hsu calls homing in Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics: narrating to find belonging, not in the place that was denied to me, but in the language I construct from erasure. It is not an answer to the question that haunts me, but it is a way of sustaining it: how to protect the sex-gender diversity of childhoods without considering them a threat, just like the embrace of a porcupine?
Self-portrait at La Descomulgada Waterfall, in Ipiales, Nariño, a sacred site for the Pasto Indigenous People. In our worldview, time is spiral: it is not linear but circular; it has a beginning, but no end; always returning to its origin. This constant becoming transcends the fixed identity imposed by the coloniality of gender: no one is only male or only female, nor human versus animal, but rather a shifting mixture of vital powers. In this photograph, I use camouflage not only as a military strategy, but also as a staging that conceals in order to protect. In the most repressive years, many people in the LGBTIQ+ community have had to camouflage themselves in cisheteronormativity: wearing clothes, using gestures, or telling stories that do not reveal their difference. In this sense, concealment is not always a choice, but rather an imposition of fear, exclusion, or pathologization.
Altered photograph from the family archive mounted on a page from a 2017 Colombian military doctrine manual. The original image, taken during my childhood, shows a body gradually assuming a rigid posture: shoulders back, chin up, stomach tight. This bodily disposition coincided with one of the most well-known within the Colombian National Army: the so-called “attention position,” an emblem of obedience and discipline. In this visual gesture, I confront not only the militarized discipline of bodies, but also what American writer Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality: a political institution that imposes the heterosexual norm as a natural and unique destiny. By intervening in the childhood image with glitter and placing it in front of the uniform mass of soldiers, I disobey that pedagogy of obedience that sought to tame my desire and my sensitivity. Instead of submitting to the rigidity of what is imposed, I claim the possibility of inhabiting a childhood and adulthood that escape these normative choreographies, where brightness and difference become my strategy of resistance.
Self-portrait lying on the grass, covered by the shade of a tree, staring at the horizon.
Personal archive photograph treated with bleach and placed on soil, a gesture that evokes the erosion of the archive and the need to reposition it from the perspective of affection and memory. Chlorine not only destroys, it also opens a crack where the imposed ceases to speak for me and a liberating fissure emerges: the possibility appears to inhabit ourselves from dissent, to intervene in our history without aspiring to purity but rather to contamination and permeability.
As a child and teenager, I suffered constant harassment for not conforming to binary gender expressions, for my abilities, and for my delicate swan-like poses. That violence affected my emotional and psychological well-being and led me to develop suicidal thoughts at a very early age. Cero Plumas was born as a response to that trauma and wound: it is an act of reparation and an attempt to rewrite my story from a place of dissent, affection, and memory.
The work unfolds from interventions in my family archive, from a reinterpretation of devices of power such as the colonial and military archives, and from dramatizations of inaccurate memories from childhood and adolescence. In this gesture, the body itself becomes a living archive: it reincarnates what was erased, reactivates memories that seemed impossible, and opens up a space where the personal becomes political.
Theoretically, the project engages with concepts such as gender coloniality proposed by Argentine philosopher María Lugones, showing how colonialism imposed a binary and hierarchical regime that erased the sex-gender plurality of indigenous peoples. It also ties in with cultural critic José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of disidentification, understood as the escape from fixed identity categories and the act of subverting labels in order to inhabit impossible interstices. Along the same lines, I find resonance in the ch’ixi, formulated by Andean thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: the coexistence of contradictory elements that live together without merging, and that reject any clean synthesis. I do not seek purity, but rather the power of contamination, where queer and indigenous languages are interwoven without hierarchies.
Plumophobia—violence against effeminate expression in men—is a central theme. Naming the project Zero Plumas (Zero Feathers) is a way of ironizing the disciplinary demand to “not be effeminate”: exposing it, subverting it, and restoring its power as a symbol of difference. This gesture intersects with writer Adrienne Rich’s critique of compulsory heterosexuality, highlighting how the hetero-cis norm has domesticated childhoods and bodies, confining them to obedience. In response, my interventions claim the right to inhabit ambiguity, to reappropriate normative aesthetics in order to dismantle them from within.
