The cover image belongs to the series "A Collector's Habit" (2022) by Javier Rey. He is an artist, photographer and graphic designer of the National University of Colombia. Born in Bucaramanga (Colombia) in 1991. Currently based in Bogotá, he's represented by TheArtDesignProject (Miami, USA) and is the director of Taller FanLab, a studio dedicated to the production of museum quality expositions and fine art printing. His work has been shown in numerous collective exhibitions, a solo show at Permanente Gallery in 2018 and several international art fairs like ArtLima (Peru), Scope Art Fair (Miami) and La Feria Del Millón (Colombia). His work has also been published in books like Unlocked, by the Greek collective Atopos, as one of the 145 web’s most relevant visual artists and photographers of 2015. His images in which he explores the body and the possibilities of sculpture through photography have been featured in several publications in Colombia, USA, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Denmark and other countries.

 

The cover image, titled "Despojos" [Remnants] (2018), is the work of Andrés Montoya, a lawyer and professional photographer who has found in photography the magic of capturing memorable moments through light. He discovered in this art a fascinating universe where every little thing becomes a cosmos in which he loves to immerse himself. He is an explorer who colonizes moments with the intention of remembering them in the future, when his wrinkles bear witness to a serene time. He was born in Medellín in 1982 and graduated with a law degree from Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. In addition to his legal career, he is dedicated to photography, writing, and poetry. He has received several notable awards throughout his career, including Winner of the Street Photography Awards 2016, Winner of the Agenda del Mar 2015 Contest, Winner of the UPB Photographic Art Exhibition 2015, and Winner in the "Creativa" category of the Colombian Photography Salon, Biennial 2020. These recognitions have been an incentive to continue exploring and creating through photography. His goal is to capture the beauty and special moments that life offers, conveying emotions and telling stories through his images.

 

The cover image "Footprints of the Pacific" takes us to the Uramba National Natural Park, Bahía Málaga, Buenaventura. The photograph was taken by Juan Diego Martínez Marín on December 28, 2021. He holds a degree in Foreign Languages ​​from the University of Antioquia, a Master's in Education from the University of Antioquia and a TESOL from La Trobe, Australia. He is currently a professor and researcher at the Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana (UPB) in the Language and Culture Research Group at UPB.

 

 

The cover shows us an image from the series “Olas Fugaces” by Bernardo Hernández, renowned Colombian photographer and winner of the Sony World Photography Awards 2022. He is an electronic engineer and his photography is linked to an exercise in attention and mindfulness to discover new ways of seeing nature and the reality in which we live. His images offer mysterious environments, full of aesthetic tranquility and meditative focus, which are visual doors that lead to stories that have not yet unfolded and to dream worlds of compositions where abstract figures are juxtaposed against painterly backgrounds.

A member of the Medellín Photographic Club since 2007 and its President in 2018-2020, he has been awarded and finalist in more than 50 national and international photographic contests, among them: Spanish Andorran Iberoamerican Digital Circuit, Salón Islas Baleares (Spain), FIAP Gold Medal, 2013, Salón de Arte Fotográfico UPB, Special Mention, 2016 , Metro Photo Challenge International Contest, and first place (Colombia) in the Nuestro Colores category, 2017. You can follow his work through his Instagram profile.

 

Danne Aro Belmont, Executive Director of the GAAT Foundation (Grupo de Ayuda y Apoyo a Personas Trans), provides us with the cover image for this issue. She is an activist with experience of Trans* feminine life. Project leader in youth groups from the LGBTI social sectors, sexual and reproductive health, deaf and hard of hearing people and people working in prostitution.

The image is a tribute to Laura Frida Weinstein and Trans studies in Colombia through a collage image that evokes the importance and legacy of their productions and contributions to the country. The circles comprise two emblematic phrases by Laura about the TRANS-shaping power of Trans life experiences and about the importance of family recognition spaces in the lives of Trans people. It also contains color references in figures inspired by the Trans Flag (pink, white, and blue), LGBT social sectors and the “Non-binary” flag as a symbol of their contributions to advancement of human rights. As part of the legacy of Laura Weistein we find the image of the trans people identification campaign in 2015 in the climate of the issuance of decree 1227 and accompanying the fist as a symbol of struggle and resistance are the orchids characteristic of the GAAT Foundation, which she directed for 10 years, and the Heliconius cydno cydnides and Morpho menelaus butterflies — both native to Colombia and bearing symbolic colors of the Trans flag. Finally, the main letters have the color of the Trans memory flag that changes the central color white for a black one as a symbol of mourning in homage and recognition of the struggles of people with Trans life experiences who have passed away because of prejudices, violence and negative social representations towards their bodies and identities.

 

For this issue’s cover, Rory O'Bryen offers us the photograph "Sal, Manaure" taken in 2011 during one of the multiple journeys through the country that he has been embarking on annually since 1998, always with his old Leica camera. That year, sporadic rains and strong winds ceaselessly erased the roads of La Guajira, and the return to Riohacha from Bahía Portete became difficult. He found on the surface of a saline the image of the desert’s ability to turn into sea at any given moment.

 

Rory O'Bryen is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture: Spectres of La Violencia (2008), Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect (2013), Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader (2017), and Transnational Hispanic Studies (2020). His current research project focuses on the Magdalena River in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

https://doi.org/10.53556/rec.v57i0 

Juan David Caicedo Bernal is a Colombian graphic reporter and photographer. Winner of the Instareto en Cuarentena contest for his photograph “Familia.” For this issue’s cover, Caicedo offers us “Tarde de cuarentena en día lluvioso” (June 18, 2020), a visual meditation on the present pandemic juncture. His photography series during quarantine can be followed on the website Fotomed, which displays material related to the photography contest and cultural heritage supported by the Colombian Ministry of Culture.

 

https://doi.org/10.53556/rec.v56i0

Camila Rodríguez Triana (Cali, 1985) is a filmmaker and visual artist. She obtained her BA from the Integrated Arts Program at Universidad del Valle in 2008 and completed her MA in Film and Contemporary Art at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains (France), where she graduated in 2019 with a Jury Mention. Her first full-length film, titled Atentamente (2016), was premiered at FIDMarseille (France), where it obtained a Renaud Victor award. Interior, her second full-length film, was premiered at DOCLISBOA (Portugal), and was nominated to a Doc Alliance Award. The film was also screened at CPH:DOX (Netherlands), DOK Leipzig (Germany), Doclisboa (Portugal), FIDMarseille (France), Jihlava IDFF (Czechia) and Visions du Réel (Switzerland). Her third full-length film, En cenizas (2018), was premiered at Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam and  awarded a special mention from the jury. Her artwork has been exhibited at various international venues, such as Kiosko Galería (Bolivia), Galería No Lugar (Ecuador), Festival PROYECTOR (España), Salon de Montrouge (France), Museo La Tertulia (Colombia), Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori (Italy), Museum of the Moving Image (USA), etc. Currently, she works as Protégée Artist in the Department of Visual Arts with the artist Carrie Mae Weems, as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative award. She is also working in her next film, El canto del Auricanturi, produced by Mutokino.

 

The cover image belongs to her project Ejercicios de Memoria (2020), in which the artist works with three families who were displaced from their homes in Cundinamarca, Cauca and Valle del Cauca due to the armed conflict between guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the Colombian Army. For each family, the artist performs a memory reconstruction around their experience living in those territories and the process of displacement they went through. Based on this reconstruction, Rodríguez Triana creates three albums inspired in the story of the families. Through objects, images and thread, the albums reconstruct a memory map for each family. Each album is exhibited on an old table that has been rebuilt by the artist and that hangs on the wall. It is a table that allows us to feel how these families attempt to reconstruct themselves in the cities where they have arrived, and to face their territorial void and uprootedness.        

 

https://doi.org/10.53556/rec.v55i0

Javier Vanegas (Bogotá, 1984) studied Fine Arts at the Universidad de los Andes and obtained a master’s degree in Art, Creation, and Research at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) with full scholarship granted by the Fundación Carolina in 2017. In 2019 he started his Ph.D. dissertation in Fine Arts at UCM with photography as major area of research. He made his first individual exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) with his Degree Project from the Universidad de los Andes, entitled “Portarretrato Postmoderno,” for which he received a honorable distinction. In 2009, the artist participated in the exhibit Fotográfica Bogotá III at the Centro Gabriel García Márquez. In 2014 he showcased his work AMPO at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome as part of the Photography Festival in Italy, and in 2018 presented an individual exhibition entitled “Echos” at PhotoEspaña, in Madrid. His last photography project, EXTINTO, was exhibited at the Galería El Museo in Bogotá in 2019. He also participated in the work “Tempus Fugit” at LA Galería as part of the Fotográfica Bogotá event in 2019. Currently, he works as a university professor, researcher, and conference speaker. He has collaborated in the publication of books such as Tarjeta De Memoria / Memory Card, Ensayos sobre fotografía contemporánea en Colombia, Los sueños de la razón, and Revela Colombia (Instagram: vitoanacoreta). 

               
The cover image belongs to the project wüin (“water” in Wayuunaiki), which sprouts from a number of trips to the Colombian Alta Guajira that have covered a large part of the region: Riohacha, Manaure, Uribia, Cabo de la Vela, Punta Gallinas, Taroa, Bahía Honda, Bahía Portete, Puerto Estrella, and Nazareth, to finally reach that paradise known as the Serranía de la Macuira. Some areas of the desertic Guajira peninsula have not had rain in more than five years, which is mainly due to El Niño phenomenon. Nevertheless, the problem increases if we consider the indiscriminate mining at the Serranía and the high level of corruption in the region. Due to the absence of paved roads, transport routes, health care centers, waste management facilities, sewage, aqueduct, primary and secondary education, and electricity (as well as to the scarce sources of renewable energy such as eolian and solar), the lack of drinkable water is only one more problem in a long list of difficulties and challenges that region endures. The Guajira, just as other regions in the country, has been gradually losing hope in the Colombian government after several administrations have continued to wear off the resources that are designated to these remote areas of the national territory.  

 

Claudia Gaitán Tovar (Bogotá, 1968) is the author of the cover image. She studied Fine Arts with a minor in Biology at the Universidad de los Andes. She lives in the outskirts of Bogotá and works as an independent artist. Throughout her artistic career she has always worked on the human body and the relationship that exists between war, incisions, markings, and stories about the body. The photograph on the cover belongs to a work called Los violentados (mixed technique on wood, 2014) and is part of a series entitled "La evidencia del cuerpo."

 

For Gaitán, the most important thing of her artistic work is to leave a visual testimony of the different interpretations that war imprints on bodies, whose traces tell us—in certain ways—untold stories. Wood (which is her primary working material) and the body have certain similarities: they both are malleable, resistant, flammable, absorbent, and flexible. On both surfaces one can print, mark, drill, saw, turn, paint, point, and craft things that can be so beautiful and also so atrocious. For her, the body tells us, like wood, the passage of time and the scars of its existence. This allows her to imagine endless interpretations of what she tries to capture in her works and photographs. Her use of materials adheres to stories and suggests questions about humanity and about what we are capable of achieving for both the good and the bad. These questions frame her own personal view of Colombia, which can thus be surmised from her own words: "I was born in the middle of a war in Colombia, and I continue to live in it, in a country that is 'always near' finishing the war."

Mateo Pérez Correa (Medellín, 1973) is the author of the cover's image.  He studied philosophy and mathematics at the Universidad de los Andes. In 2000 he studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. He currently lives and works in Bogotá (Colombia) as a photographer and professor at Universidad Javeriana. His works reflect on the interactions between human beings and the territory they inhabit, and, more broadly, explore how landscapes can be understood in relation to photographic images. He also works as an editor in Colombia for the South American photography journal Sueño de la Razón.

 

The cover's photograph (Bosque VII, Impresión Glicée, 100x120cm, 2012, Edición 1/5) belongs to the project El Salto, Geografía de la Mirada, which seeks to explore landscape photography through a series of images taken at the Salto del Tequendama (in the vicinity of Bogotá) as a place of evident tensions: The Salto del Tequendama is often seen as a majestic landscape that attracts the gaze of all tourists, as a historical icon of the nation. But also, El Salto is seen as a dumping ground for the uncontrolled pollution of the Bogotá River and as a fatal landscape where people come to commit suicide and alleviate their pain. These artistic motivations address issues of landscape control and configuration in the relationship between man and the space he inhabits.

 

https://doi.org/10.53556/rec.v52i0

David Alvarado (cover image's author) is a Colombian artist living in Granada, Spain. He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá and a doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of Granada. His series on One Hundred Years of Solitude has been exhibited in several galleries in Colombia, Europe and the United States. The picture on the cover, entitled "the exalted beauty," represents Remedios la Bella in her ascent to heaven over the banana plantations in Macondo. Úrsula, Fernanda, and Amaranta wave her goodbye from the earth.

 

https://doi.org/10.53556/rec.v51i0