Bogotá, una ciudad que se teje entre tránsitos y fronteras

Bogotá, a City Woven Between Transits and Borders

This exhibition speaks of a city woven through bodies in transit, while at the same time, amidst its gray skies, dark mountains, and intense cold, it has shaped these moving bodies. Body and city ultimately merge into one. They cannot be thought of separately, but rather through knots that intertwine and create spaces of contact.

Interweavings that shape bodies and spaces.

Borders that expand and contract like the garment presented in the piece Clothing as (Non)Border, a work that emerges from the close environment of Alejandra Martinez. She grew up watching how her mother’s bedsheet workshop became a workspace and source of livelihood for migrant women and youth without education or job opportunities in Bogotá. Through sewing, many of them found not only income but also a place of affection, care, and survival. Alejandra states that this gesture of collective care runs through the piece and roots it in an ethic of accompaniment and listening. Places like the one Alejandra brings us, through a garment constructed and composed from the stories of people who have experienced exclusion in Bogotá due to migration, racialization, or belonging to marginalized sectors, bring us closer to the dark seams of the city inhabited amid struggles and violent borders. But they also allow us to see the possibilities of other ways of coming together and rebuilding lives through everyday practices.

In parallel, When Am I, When Have I Been? by Wesley Sinisterra is an audiovisual work born from his desire to gather fragments of his life in transit. Since 2022, the author has been writing poems that build a narrative of a body traversed by time, absence, and a sought identity. This work attempts to capture the experience of being without ever fully feeling here. It is an intimate piece that questions whether the past continues to shape us and whether the present can ever feel like home. The poems evoke a poetics of existence in transit, where the subject is woven day by day amid borders and uncertainty. A bodily writing that is part of his transits between encounters and losses.

Laura García’s work The Shape of No One, Matter That Doesn’t Fit is a textile sculpture that uses a genderless mannequin as a symbolic support to question the borders imposed by gender binarism in fashion. The piece is composed of an amalgam of garments traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity, deconstructed and intervened with subversive techniques of sewing, draping, and printing. The work brings us back to the possibility of questioning borders through seams and their mending, through the non-binary body of the mannequin dressed in scraps and heterogeneous pieces.

Course Director: Juan Ricardo Aparicio

Project Supervision and Curation: Catalina Cortés Severino

With contributions from: Laura García, Alejandra Martinez, Wesley Sinisterra