Howls in the Mountains
Howls in the Mountains is a multi-channel audiovisual installation based on a research project carried out in El Huila, Colombia over a period of one year. The project is based on the stories of women who are active members of Asomhupaz (Association of Huila Women for Peace). Asomhupaz is an association made up of women in the process of reincorporation, victims, peasants and mothers who are heads of households, created in Huila (state in southern Colombia), with the aim of guaranteeing, defending, and strengthening their rights, promoting political participation. and democratic, demanding a comprehensive implementation of the Peace Agreement with a gender approach, an agreement signed between the extinct FARC guerrilla and the Colombian government in 2016.
It seeks to reach a deeper understanding by inviting us to decipher our perception of the world and how we relate to it. So we can see through its holes, through the illusion of consensual reality. When we do that, the world as we know it ends, and we experience a radical change in our perception, another way of seeing.
The reintegration process is an intermediate space, the place and the sign of transition, where we realize that realities collide.
Deep Beyond the Visible
Deep Beyond the Visible explores layered narratives that surface what remains concealed within dense foliage and shadowed terrain. This body of work is composed primarily of satellite images captured between 2000 and 2016 over the Colombian jungle—images that map the territory from a distant, technological gaze.
The images trace river courses. In the jungle, rivers are not merely waterways; they are highways—paths of movement and survival. They provide access, sustenance, food, water, and connection, while also carrying everything that passes through them: life, memory, and conflict.
Interwoven with these images are recorded testimonies gathered during my recent research in Colombia. I interviewed women who lived, walked, and fought within these territories for more than a decade prior to 2016. As militants of the FARC guerrilla, the jungle was not a backdrop to their lives—it was their habitat, their shelter, their teacher.
These stories both reveal and withhold. They illuminate while remaining partial. They bring light into the shade—the very shade that satellite imagery cannot fully capture. It is within this blind spot, this technological failure to see completely, that survival was made possible.
What remains unseen is not empty.
It is alive.
Glimpses of Light
Glimpses of Light is a short film born from listening. Developed in collaboration with Paul Zalevskii, Drew Soleiman, and Eric Hoegemeyer, the work engages oral testimony as both material and method—affirming that memory is never anonymous, and that telling is always a relational act.
As Alessandro Portelli reminds us, to tell requires the presence of someone who will listen.
The film emerges from the lived experience of civil activist Paul Zalevskii and his partner, who in June 2020 were subjected to an illegal invasion of privacy by law enforcement agencies in the Kyrgyz Republic. Hidden cameras were installed in their hotel room, recording intimate moments without consent. Upon returning from vacation, they were surveilled, confronted with the footage, and blackmailed—threatened with public exposure, fabricated criminal charges, and violence unless they cooperated with authorities by providing information on NGOs and LGBTQ+ organizations.
Their refusal triggered further persecution. Intimate videos, personal data, and calls to violence were disseminated online as part of a political smear campaign aimed at discrediting civil society, LGBTQ+ communities, and Western-affiliated institutions. The outing forced Paul and his partner to flee the country, seeking refuge across borders while navigating fear, precarity, and the absence of institutional protection.
Despite the severity of the case—the first publicly documented outing of LGBTQ+ civil activists as a political weapon in Central Asia—it received almost no international media coverage and minimal response from global institutions.
Glimpses of Light does not reproduce spectacle or trauma. Instead, it creates space for testimony, presence, and ethical listening. The film asks how oral stories—fragmented, embodied, vulnerable—can enter broader discourses of LGBTQ+ liberation, where freedom is not abstract but urgently lived. It reflects on what is lost when intimacy is repeatedly exposed and punished by homophobic regimes, and what remains when voices insist on being heard.
The work seeks not only empathy, but responsibility: to imagine forms of support that move beyond personal solidarity into academic, cultural, and legal realms. Above all, it honors a story that needed to be told—and someone willing to listen.
Blind Engagement
Los Angeles, California 2016 An experience dreamed before it was lived.
How do we connect with one another?
How do our bodies speak—quietly, instinctively—without words?
What moves between us as chemistry, synchronicity, understanding… or misunderstanding?
We are immersed in an excess of information.
Rather than offering clarity, it often pulls us into anxiety and confusion.
We know now that not everything we see is meant to be believed,
that much of what appears solid is illusion.
Recognizing this becomes a return—to the solar plexus,
to the center where intuition resides.
It asks us to remember, or perhaps relearn,
how to see with the heart.
We are physically connected and physically apart at once.
Both are true. Both are real phenomena of the body.
When one sense dissolves, others awaken.
Loss becomes opening.
This is what unfolded during more than three hours of walking, rolling,
moving together with our colleagues through downtown Los Angeles—
three days after the nightmare decision in America took place.
It was no longer speculation.
No longer metaphor.
It was fact—
a fact that shook us all, and more importantly, called us into action.
Not reaction, but proactive action.
The great challenge of our time is this:
How do we conspire and act from love rather than hate?
Unity.
Telemission
Telemission is a visual excerpt from a durational performance that unfolded in a loft in Amsterdam. Two close friends and dancers entered a shared state of immersion, engaging in a happening shaped by light and darkness, presence and suspension.
The work explores the body as a site of intimacy and possibility—fully present, attentive, and responsive. Movement unfolds slowly, allowing gestures to emerge from care rather than urgency. Time is stretched, softened, and reclaimed as a material in itself.
Within this shared space, intimacy is not performed but cultivated. The dancers listen to one another through breath, proximity, and touch, negotiating closeness with consent and attunement. What takes form is an aesthetic of radical care—one that honors slowness, vulnerability, and the ethics of being with another.
Telemission privileges process over outcome. Creation happens in the making: in the act of staying, of remaining present, of allowing the body to think alongside another body. The camera bears witness to this unfolding, offering a fragment of a longer temporal experience—an invitation into a space where attention, trust, and togetherness become the choreography.
In & Out
TransFormations Trans Film Festival Berlin 2018
“As to the actual representation, the image is always, partially, phantasmatic.”
— Peggy Phelan
This proposal took the form of an action conceived to be experienced online.
The body is its central axis.
The body in relation to other bodies—
entering dialogue with itself, with others, with the camera.
The political body.
The social body.
The human body.
The action unfolded inside a house: a space charged with heat, containment, and the promise of release. A domestic architecture that holds an uncertain intimacy—one that does not remain private, but instead extends outward, addressing a dispersed field of viewers. Those witnessing the experience remotely, through their screens, are drawn into a shared temporality with those physically present. The experience exists simultaneously across distance and proximity.
Six artists—friends—were invited to inhabit the space together and undertake multiple actions at once. These gestures alluded to intimacy, vulnerability, and embodied relationships. The body appears not only as an individual entity, but as part of a collective—an aggregation of presences coexisting as a single living system, a social organism in motion.
I assume the role of the camera.
The camera moves toward the margins, seeking corners, textures, and fragments.
It drifts through space, grazing surfaces, approaching the details produced by bodies in movement. It transits through bodies.
Here, the camera is not a neutral observer.
It performs.
The videographer becomes a body among bodies, moving within the action rather than documenting it from outside.
What emerges is not a fixed representation, but a fleeting encounter—
partial, embodied, and phantasmatic.
H in Mars
This performance unfolded over thirteen minutes in a darkened room at the Academia de San Carlos, Mexico City. It was an exploration of simultaneity—a play between overlapping actions, shifting intensities of light and darkness, and the unstable boundaries between presence and perception.
The camera functioned not as a neutral recording device, but as an active participant. Moving through the space, it responded to the unfolding action, becoming a performer in its own right. The work was not conceived for the camera, nor was it staged for documentation. The performance existed first and fully in the room, in real time, and in the bodies present.
Only afterward did I choose to engage with the visual material—treating it as a residue, a trace, a fragment of the experience rather than its translation. The resulting video does not represent the performance. It is not the performance itself, but an echo: a parallel articulation that emerges from what was lived, felt, and shared in darkness.
Love Will Make Us Free
Battery Park, New York — 2017
This action brings together multiple dimensions: a communion of visions, the dismantling of the obsolete, and the opening of space for renewal. It is an invocation of rebirth—where what no longer serves is released to make room for possibility.
At its core, the work affirms the transformative power of love and reunion beyond borders. It imagines love as a force that opens gates rather than erects walls, welcoming all worlds as integral expressions of Earth’s diversity. Just as the planet holds countless species of animals and plants, humanity holds a vast plurality of cultures, cosmologies, and ways of seeing. All are equally worthy of existence—not by permission, but by the simple fact of having been born here.
The work asserts not only the right to live, but the right to move freely—across lands and boundaries—with our bodies, our ideas, our visions, and our love. Love appears here as an unlimited substance: a universal force that sustains motion, connection, and transformation.
She emerges as a symbolic figure—the wise one—capable of transcending and dismantling imposed structures that are no longer functional, structures designed to serve only a few. In their place, she opens the gate, liberating the human spirit from narrow frameworks of thought. She envelops him in the subtle, graceful freedom of love—a force that does not merely embrace, but restores memory: the remembrance that all beings are part of a greater wholeness, where everyone comes from, belongs, and ultimately returns.
This is the eternal motion of the cosmos.
El amor nos hará libres.
(Love will make us free.)
By Carol Montealegre & Eric Hoegemeyer
Reminiscence of a Battered Field
Four women find themselves excavating the remnants of war at Forte Marghera, in Venice. The action unfolds within a space marked by catastrophe: a former explosives storage room that detonated during World War I, killing many of those stationed there—primarily soldiers and nurses. The room bears the weight of that rupture, even in silence.
Within this charged site, the women move through layers of memory, absence, and residue. Their gestures are acts of excavation—physical, emotional, and symbolic—probing what remains after violence has passed. The performance does not reenact history; instead, it listens to it.
Their attention turns toward those left behind by war: the widows, the displaced, the unseen lives shaped by loss. In considering them, the women give form to grief that persists beyond the battlefield, grief that lingers across generations and geographies. Any war leaves such traces.
Here, the body becomes a vessel for remembrance. Movement becomes a way of holding space for what cannot be repaired, yet must not be forgotten.