Donde vivo es bonito

Donde vivo es bonito “Where I Live Is Beautiful”] is not merely a single artwork; rather, it is a process—a project that gives physical form to the development of an idea and a perception through drawing, painting, and installation. In its initial 2011 drawing-based version—born from the act of walking through and observing the city—the project identified urban expansion creeping up the mountainsides, displacing the mountain’s “green” with the “brick orange” of the modular brick unit. This construction spills over the mountain—a consequence of social and political phenomena in our country, Colombia—creating an overlay of lines and planes, stacked and placed side-by-side. Thus, the project’s fundamental module became not the brick itself, but the format of the superimposed drawing sheet used to shape this vast mountain.

In 2012, the work evolved into printmaking, a medium allowing for the serial repetition of the image—mirroring the nature of housing developments. This enhanced the sense of layering, as facades were placed side-by-side and stacked atop one another to form the mountain.

By 2015, the project had expanded into three-dimensional space, breaking free from the wall to become an installation that viewers could physically navigate and experience.

In 2019, the work revealed the colors and designs with which residents of downtown Bogotá personalize their homes—their houses on the mountain. These are homes facing disappearance amidst the dizzying rise of vertical housing—the “multifamily complexes”—which are replacing the two-story, single-family dwellings where the concepts of “neighbor” and “neighborhood” were woven together.

In 2024, the project began arranging these facades according to specific “neighborhoods.” For the proposal to be developed at UN_FAIR, the plan is to install a series of facades representing city-center “neighborhoods”—such as Las Cruces, La Concordia, La Candelaria, La Macarena, and La Perseverancia—to recreate the “mountain” that surrounds and towers over the city center (where the Hotel Tequendama, the fair’s venue, is located), thereby allowing visitors to “traverse” and recognize these lived-in spaces.