
How to make your own perishable monument?
Audiovisual essay and paper sculpture.
Biennial of Art and Decoloniality RƎEXISTENCES, Decolonial Museum.
Museo Colonial, Bogotá, Col
2021

In 2021, the indigenous Misak community toppled the monument of Sebastián de Belalcázar in Cali as a symbolic gesture rejecting the worship of the colonizer. Days later, city residents erected a cardboard replica of the monument. In interviews, the residents expressed, "We don't know how long this makeshift monument will stand, the 'vandals' will soon come to bring it down." Two days later, the monument indeed collapsed, but it was not due to human action; it was destroyed by the rain. I took this caricature-like gesture of "self-sabotage" and designed a 3D cardboard cutout of the monument, sized like a letter. Through social media, I invited different people to build their own monument, add a phrase representing a thought system that should perish, and then destroy it. All participants briefly named ourselves the "Colectivo Chipiri" group.
Later, as part of an exhibition at the Colonial Museum, I led the workshop "Ocarina Workshop: Summoning Rain and Peeling Bronze," where we crafted ocarinas to "invoke the ancient rain that would bring down, cleanse, and purify the monuments and narratives we believe should perish."












