Nika what, how, why
No estoy sola / I am not alone.
What:
“I am not alone” is a music album made up of eight songs written as a result of a heartbreak while traveling around the Caribbean region of Colombia. They describe a series of fictional situations and tropical landscapes lived by a non-existing love affair.
How:
These eight songs are a result of a personal process of song-writing and instrumental improvisation recorded with lo-fi homemade methods without any musical education background, from 2010 to 2014. Once they where sketched and recorded, professional producers improved and re-programmed the instrumental composition creating a high quality recorded music album.
Why:
This songs where written and played as a form of exorcising and communicating words and thoughts that where never spoken. They intend to portray all the illusions and imaginative events built in an unfaithful romance that never happened in reality, but were constantly agreed on. This album is a form of registering and demystifying a silent love affair, and also affirmatively and publicly declaring it as real.
Apariciones / Occurrences
What:
Occurrences is a research project on urban myths and their political backgrounds happening in Bogotá. It has various forms of documentation such as interviews, diaries, fieldwork documented in video and audio recordings, which later materialized in a mural of drawings and black light installation representing symbolic imagery picked and selected from the dialogue funded with the people interviewed that live and work in the areas where these myths are meant to occur.
How:
After reading the myths on different texts, I selected certain areas I thought would be interesting due to their historical significance and went to speak to the people that lived nearby. The people narrated political and social events that occurred relating them to the spiritual occurrences of dramatic killings and deaths. I then drew 72 images that tell in a non-linear form those stories by using iconography and symbols.
Why:
I intended to do an exercise of physically verifying what isn´t verifiable. I went to the areas to have a sensorial experience, then realizing that those who live nearby could have a better connection with the spirituality of the area. I became amazed by how dialogue and storytelling could create all different kinds of truths and forms of belief that could then be portrayed as symbols and iconography in a cultural collectiveness.
Frases de insuperación personal / Self Un-improvement phrases
What:
A series of nine drawings of phrases taken out of Latin American classic pop songs that affirm statements and beliefs, converted into denials and disclamations. Each drawing and phrase is done with a font that adds meaning to the phrase in a visual form.
How:
The drawings are done with color pencils on office format white paper.
Why:
I intended to disclaim affirmations and beliefs that have been fixed in a cultural Latin American emotional education, usually taken to feel less miserable. I wanted to re-affirm and outstand sadness, denial, failure and negativity and speak out what I (and probably other people) truly feel.