Cindy Muñoz

Each image is an attempt to bring us closer to our absences, it is a reminder of the importance of telling our indigenous and peripheral history, it is the need to connect with my children. I have three childhood photos, two photos of my mother, a photo of my father hugging me as a baby and a photo album of my paternal grandmother in which we are not in. Looking for my mother’s figure is a vital need. To trace her cartography is the desire to explore ancestral sounds and plants through a living map that calls us to feel-care for the earth and the waters, it is a yearning to walk on flat roads and release my songs that will take me to the Amazon to give it life and burn the mourning of the absence of her grave, of her body. 

I walk the paths of my first memory, again and again and as often as possible. I build altars and shelters. I wish to articulate the tensions and psychological complexities of motherhood, which runs through me, just as it did for her. I search for the city that my father, my grandmother, their relatives and close friends went through. Our stories are invisible among red newspapers, sensationalist press where the normalization of bodies destroyed by violence is part of everyday life, where nobody’s life matters. 

Finding myself in the family archive, objects and stories that speak of my family’s background, have gestated tissues and forms of micro-existences of a way of being-making that is in the thin line of oblivion by not being made visible. 

Estela grew up in Villavicencio, Estela is my mother, she died when I was 6 years old, she is the absence of my days, I have been looking for her presence in the path she walked, I do not know everything about her existence, I only have a couple of facts and my father’s story of what she was. I seek to build our first territory, the house, the first refuge, to weave from my presence the absences she left behind. 

My work is marked by personal and family work that connects with my place of enunciation (indigenous, woman, autonomous and peripheral mother). My mother, in my early years, went in search of her mother, and I have been searching for a connection with her presence for ten years now. I am interested in all the gestures that help to transform the micro pains into bursts of life. 

Instagram: @cindycolores