My work is centered on a exploration of ideas of historiography, narrative, memory and the human figure. Most of my work is a search for metaphors that illustrate the complexities of remembering, an exercise not just of why and what but also of how. This exploration has taken me into creating images that look to replace the common metaphor of memory and history as a container with a metaphor of memory as something alive, which can live, age, die or be killed, or exist as an ecosystem.

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The hummingbirds are a part of series of drawings and lithographs that is looking for a image of hope and a shape that our memories could take. These hummingbirds of text are made of newspaper articles from a massacre that happened in Colombia, in the town of Pichilin on the Caribbean coast. These are of course, heavy and difficult aspects of our history, and like any other country that has to deal with difficult parts of its history, these events and their stories as well as their impact and meaning, could be forgotten, erased, diminished, or they could take another shape. Whatever the shape is that we give them, as in any other event in our history, this shape gives that event its meaning and, more importantly, its purpose. 

 

The idea of these hummingbirds is that the shape I am willing to give to them (to these events, to these news stories) is that of a hummingbird, and, in that way, I propose a metaphor for the shape that this kind of history should take in our memory and in our society. This shape, that of the hummingbird, is that of a being which is able to fly; a being with strength and fragility. It is an image of a strong territoriality, of a being that is always present in the cycles of pollination, a animal that makes it possible for an ecosystem to flourish. Thus, this image proposes that it is not just that our past should be remembered, but that it should have such shape that it is alive and present in the ecosystem of our history and memory. 

 

 

The hummingbird is something that is shaped by our history and, because of the shape it takes, will help us flourish, and therefore give us reason and a path to hope.