MOUNTAIN
PASSAGE
Mountain Passage is an artistic action conceived as an exercise in retreat, ascent, and rupture. Performed in solitude in the eastern Colombian Andes, the act consisted of walking toward the perpetual snows of El Cocuy National Park without stopping or looking back—sustaining the sensation of leaving something behind with each step.
The march, through the natural synchronization of footsteps, breath, and repeated words, became a symbolic transit toward a summit or threshold—an attempt to move forward by shedding an exhausted paradigm and opening space for a new phase of life.
The drawing presented here was initiated a few days after the action. Executed in charcoal, stone by stone, it evokes another form of ascent: a way of inscribing, on the plane, the physical and mental experience of the journey. It does not aim to depict a location, but to condense a gesture—the rhythm, the effort, and the intention of a ritual walk.
Mountain Passage was not documented on video and was never conceived as a public performance. It is a solitary performative practice that leaves behind an image as residue: the trace of an invisible yet definitive crossing.
Details from the drawing. Each fragment reveals the texture of the process — rhythm, pressure, sediment. A landscape that is also a surface of inscription.
2019
CHARCOAL ON PAPER
38 X 22"