Paul M.

My work begins with a question: who decides what a nation remembers, and who is left out of the story? For more than a decade, I have worked across drawing, photography, video, installation, sound, and performance to interrogate the institutions that shape collective memory (museums, churches, cemeteries, and archives) and the hegemonic narratives they sustain through race, class, gender, and nation. I approach heritage not as a fixed inheritance but as a contested territory. My most recognizable strategy is the collective performative intervention: designers and models from historically marginalized communities inhabit the permanent galleries of Colombia's major museums, turning colonial portraits, devotional objects, and patriotic icons into sites of dissent. Projects such as Sistema Abierto at the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, Los Nombres de Dios at the Santa Clara Museum, and V & B: la aspiración de una nación at the National Museum of Colombia opened these collections to readings their original narratives had excluded. Across series like Reinas y Cadáveres, El General y su guateque, and Un lugar en el mundo, I return to portraiture, devotion, mourning, death, and the figure of the national hero: the places where power becomes image and image becomes memory. Dissident bodies, queer histories, and diasporic experiences are not footnotes in this work; they are the point of departure. My artistic, curatorial, and research practices are inseparable. As chief curator of the German Cemetery Museum in Bogotá, I work with death and commemoration as living cultural matter. Through the Queer Archives project, now integrated into Universidad de los Andes' BADAC, I build the records that official history failed to keep. Teaching at the ASAB Faculty of Arts of Universidad Distrital extends these questions to a new generation. My work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Colombia, the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, and the National Library, among others, and has been exhibited in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, France, and Italy, including the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. Ultimately, I make work so that those who were never meant to be remembered can take their place in the story, and change how it is told.