Research Catalogue

This thesis stems from the need to investigate an original painting technique developed by the author, which combines figurative painting and solidified atmospheric phenomena. The heart of the research is a simple and radical question: How can an ephemeral phenomenon be made permanent? The answer takes shape through the creation of sheets of solidified rain, transparent membranes that preserve the logic of the drop, the flow, the surface tension. These membranes are superimposed on figurative paintings, generating a multidimensional visual language. Transparency is not an aesthetic effect, but a temporal device: it freezes the work, suspends it, holds it in an eternal instant.

Esta web es producto digital del proyecto Narración gráfica, laboratorio de objetos, cartografía digital y mediaciones en experiencias con comunidades de artistas migrantes, registrado con Cód. 10160180521 proyecto institucionalizado sin financiamiento del Centro de Investigaciones y Desarrollo Científico - CIDC de la Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. Hace parte del proceso metodológico de desarrollo de la tesis doctoral Narración Gráfica de Experiencias: Intercambios en Imágenes de migración. Con la realización del proyecto, se busca incentivar el uso de la narración gráfica como proceso horizontal que permite relatar y revisar la importancia que tienen las prácticas artísticas de las comunidades en la construcción de tejido social. La propuesta de mediación artística se visibiliza como una estrategia colaborativa que permite el diálogo y el intercambio. El trabajo se inscribe y contribuye a las apuestas del Grupo de investigación para la creación artística y de la Línea de investigación en: Estudios críticos de las corporeidades, las sensibilidades y las performatividades. Adscritos al doctorado en estudios artísticos de la Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas.

Introduction This research investigates the possibility of transforming ephemeral liquids—primarily seawater and rain—into solid, stable, and optically active materials, within the methodological framework of the Divergent Gaze, a phenomenological protocol that considers imagination as a pre-scientific hypothesis capable of being empirically verified. The artist does not simply observe matter, but interrogates its molecular stability, manipulating transition states to arrest fluidity without destroying the identity of the liquid itself.

This essay proposes the “Erased Museum” as both a critical framework and an institutional ethics: a museum that recognizes loss as its primary collection and disappearance as a mode of curation. Drawing from Absential Aesthetics, it argues that destruction—by fire, flood, war, neglect, theft, or obsolescence—does not terminate cultural meaning but reorganizes it into a second, invisible archive composed of voids, residues, and public conscience. Through case studies and touchstones including the Library of Alexandria, Brazil’s National Museum (2018), the Mosul Museum (2015), and architectural and curatorial practices that preserve wounds rather than conceal them (e.g., post-damage restorations and void-centered memorial architectures), the essay reframes conservation as a dialogue with entropy rather than a fantasy of permanence. It also traces contemporary artistic strategies that curate absence directly—fabricated archives, missing inventories, empty frames, restitution bureaucracies—showing how loss can become documentation rather than mere lament. The work concludes by extending the ethics of disappearance to the digital domain, where decay occurs without smoke, and by proposing “transparent loss protocols” as a future-facing curatorial responsibility.

This thesis, (Documented Artistic Research Project (Doctoral Thesis)), investigates the crisis of Regie (i.e. of the agency of directing) in a post-#MeToo landscape. It argues that the outset of this crisis lies in an expansionist gesture – rooted in the avant-gardist ambition to merge art and life – by which directors have conflated artistic mandate with managerial control; a gesture culminating in the toxic institutional cultures painfully exposed during the last decade. Starting from this point of no return, the thesis examines the question of how to acknowledge the fact of directorial power abuse without cutting our practices off from the potential – or even the necessity – of directorial agency as such. Its title “Reinventing Regietheater” thus carries the tension between a historical form of theater (generally known as “directors’ theater”) and a yet-to-be-found future expression. Conceived as artistic research, the discrete focus of the thesis is the rehearsal space and its confines. Within the micro-scale of the latter, the crisis of Regie reverberates first and foremost in the non-foreseeable instances of the actor-director interaction; namely in the increasing scrutiny applied to the tool of improvisation. In contrast to the prevailing strategy of eroding the rehearsal space’s symbolic boundaries (in the interest of directorial accountability), the thesis conceptualizes – practically as well as theoretically – a “Space of Rehearsals” as a heteronomous zone of safe but ecstatic play. This “Space of Rehearsals” is constructed through a rehearsal method informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference as well as the interaction framework “Wheel of Consent”. To answer its main questions, the thesis presents a “written part” as well as a set of “online resources” containing the documentation and “re-stagings” of the practical experiments. Four “books of Regie” present methodological reflections, a critical genealogy of a theater of directing (based on the author’s symptomatic practice) as well as the central concepts. Three so-called “Pre-studies”, devised through practical work with professional actors/collaborators form the empirical basis of the thesis, sketching out different possibilities for the actor-director relation in a re-invented Regietheater. In the proposition resulting from the above, directorial agency does not necessarily sit with the director. Nevertheless, the disciplinary divide between actor and director is upheld; as well as the radical asymmetry in the distribution of authorial power, albeit in temporally limited and co-curated iterations. The main argument of the thesis is thus that the artistic potential of the historical form of Regietheater can be salvaged without taking a revanchist or revisionist stance: the idiosyncratic directorial agency known as Regie has its place in consent-based rehearsal settings.

The zoo is not a neutral site of animal display but a meticulously curated mise en scène where scenography dictates perception. This exposition reframes the zoological garden as a dispositif of control, foregrounding fabricated rock formations, artificial lighting, and concealed barriers as theatrical devices. Through square format photographic series that exclude animals, the work exposes the zoo’s fragmented geographies as staged spectacles designed for human imagination rather than ecological integrity. The project interrogates authorship, agency, and representation, inviting viewers to reconsider the zoo as a cultural theatre of estrangement and illusion.