Artist-in-residence

Francisco Camacho Herrera (b. 1979, Colombia) currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His projects often experiment with communitarian and participatory approaches to generate social change and trigger the collective imagination of the future of society. Such endeavours include fulltopia.com (2015-ongoing), a web platform that articulates a desire to facilitate the exchange of services and ideas within local communities bypassing monetary economy. His works have been presented in several group exhibitions including the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2018); The Welfare State, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Netherlands (2015); and The Museum of Rhythm, Museum Stucky, Lodz, Poland (2016). Camacho Herrera was a resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam in 2008-9.

For the past several years, Francisco Camacho Herrera has been speculating on the possibility that Chinese sailors might have reached the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century. This inquiry resulted in Parallel Narratives (2015-18), a film that follows hidden trajectories and charts unexpected similarities between iconographies, utilitarian items, and ritual objects produced by geographically distant cultures. During the residency, Camacho Herrera will re-orient his research to explore connections between Southeast Asia and South America, especially in light of past and recent instances related to the economic exploitation of tropical nature. Understanding trade, migration, and natural resource economics as main propellers of development and cross-cultural encounters, the artist ultimately seeks to generate alternative narratives that challenge spatial, temporal, and geopolitical categories institutionalised in official accounts.