Nika what, how, why

No estoy sola / I am not alone.

“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. 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.

These songs where written and played as a form of exorcising and communicating words and thoughts that where never spoken. They intend to portray the illusions and fantasies shared by two lovers in a fictional romance that never happened in reality. This album acknowledges and demystifies a silent love affair, and also publicly affirms it as real.

Apariciones / Occurrences

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. The project was later materialized as a temporal mural in a local contemporary museum in the city. The mural is assembled by drawings and a black light installation, representing symbolic imagery picked and selected from the dialogue established with the people interviewed that lived and worked in the areas where these myths are meant to occur.

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 local residents. They related spiritual occurrences to political and social historical events that involved killings, suicides, tortures and deaths associated with drug cartels, passion crimes and social riots. I then drew 72 images that tell in a non-linear form those stories by using iconography and symbols.

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

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 by reversing the phrases with negativity and NO. For instance, a phrase which originally stated, “I will know how to lose” is now reversed to “No, I won´t know how to lose.” Each drawing and phrase is done with a font that adds meaning to the phrase in a visual form.

The drawings are done with color pencils on office format white paper.

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.