The Birth of the Night (2023)
francisco hernando fuentes zarate's Afro-indigenous ancestry and digital and manual techniques come together to stitch together vivid memories across time.
"As a visual artist I consider myself a creator of images, a process that, for me, arises from the interaction between art and design and my Afro-Indigenous ancestry. I am also interested in the relationship between digital and manual techniques and a constant swaying between these approaches characterises my work.
In The Birth of the Night, these qualities come together from two memories. The first is from my childhood in Buenaventura, a small port town on Colombia’s Pacific coast. I remember sitting in front of my house observing the palm trees in my neighbourhood: the movements of their axial bodies clinging to the ground, the shapes that they generated in relation to the wind and storms, and the ways in which their enigmatic bodies became shadows with the night and acquired a metallic appearance in the moonlight. The palm trees were like entities in themselves, trying to speak to me in a language that, although I didn’t know, I could feel."
—francisco hernando fuentes zarate
