In January and February 2019 I worked in a hotel, cleaning rooms and emptying wastebaskets. What struck me was how the guests consumed: many products were thrown away with plenty of life left, and the waste was absurd and unnecessary. It exposed cultural, social and political positions. I found a culture of the disposable, of things used once and then discarded, marked by a total unawareness of what is consumed. How we consume, and what we throw away and when, is shaped by cultural construction and social dynamics; consumption is one of the main forms of intercultural construction we experience in daily life. I photographed the contents of the wastebaskets with my phone: an inventory of what guests discard and what workers touch but never own.

Our lives are marked by actions that repeat systematically. Because they are periodic and frequent, our daily actions become rituals that define how we relate to one another and how we inhabit a space, and over time they shape the space around us until person and surroundings become a single image. I call this process domesticating a space: modifying its primary characteristics to suit human needs. Some people follow patterns that repeat to the limit. People living with obsessive-compulsive disorder perform repetitive actions to relieve the anxiety of recurring, tormenting thoughts, and their daily life depends on places with precise, invariable conditions. Working with them, I photographed six interiors organized to the point of absurdity, where extreme order and the repetition of form and colour produce a sense of unreality and fiction.

Everyone has a particular way of inhabiting the space around them, of using it and arranging objects within it. I like to imagine how each person lives through the objects I see in their windows. I think of windows as display cases or stages, and of the curtain as the theatre curtain that reveals a scene set by whoever occupied the space. The windows I find tell me that upper floors are often used as storage. From the street you see only stacked boxes, dust and old objects. The image reinforces the window as a stage, as fiction, as an uninhabited space, which is precisely another way of inhabiting: the extreme occupation of space. This idea is the start of a series of reflections developed across photography, installation and sound.

Everyone has a particular way of inhabiting the space around them. In places of commercial exchange, in markets, inhabiting is conditioned by the dynamics of buying and selling, and a natural order (in the middle of chaos) emerges for arranging objects. The occupation of space serves the need to exchange products. I love walking through markets: they are stages full of visual and auditory sensations. Some markets are itinerant, appearing and disappearing within a day and transforming the urban landscape. These ephemeral spaces must rely on simple, practical resources to occupy a street, and I am drawn to the structures of tarps and cloth that roof the vendors, which have a great plastic richness. The photographs are an abstraction of the market seen from above, from outside the tents. The sound represents what cannot be seen, what is happening on the other side; it complements the image and tells a story, while the photograph becomes a veil that does not let us see what goes on inside.

Food and the act of eating play a vital role in human development, not only as nourishment but as a matter of economic, social, political and cultural exchange. Our eating practices define our daily life and bind us as a community. In this project I address two contrasting aspects of the sale of food in Latin American markets. First, I show the richness and variety of what is grown in Latin America. Second, because of market dynamics and the mismanagement of resources, much of what goes unsold ends up in the trash while still in good condition. It is ironic that in countries so abundant (the photographs were taken in Bolivia and Colombia) resources are so poorly managed and hunger reaches such high levels. Exceso de abundancia calls for responsible, conscious practices in the sale and consumption of food, aimed at real food sovereignty. The amount of food wasted each year could go a long way toward ending hunger. Access to quality food is a fundamental human right.

My residence in Rome, after winning the XII Premio IILA Photo, was a few streets from Campo dei Fiori, one of the city's most popular and visited markets, where you find fresh fruit and vegetables, typical Italian food, clothing and souvenirs. Markets are fascinating places where the main dynamics and social interactions of a city's inhabitants become visible: who visits, what is eaten and how, what is bought and sold, who buys and who sells. During my wanderings of observation through Campo dei Fiori I looked for the visual elements that made it particular. Almost all the vendors transported and stored their products in banana boxes, which they left beside their stalls all day. The boxes could not go unnoticed: they were everywhere, forming an installation of modules in the shape of bananas that repeated endlessly across the space, with great aesthetic and plastic richness.

I think of everyday objects as carriers of great symbolism. An object is never just an object; there is a whole history in the things around us and in how people use them. It is striking to think that these boxes were first in some Latin American country, crossed an ocean of 9,000 km with 20 kg of bananas inside each, and are now used by the market's vendors (mostly migrants) to carry bottles of limoncello or Italian olive oil.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, US companies, the most symbolic of them the United Fruit Company (today Chiquita Brands International), began planting bananas in series and created modern enclaves in the republics of Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the FAO, half of the bananas exported worldwide are grown in Latin America (mainly Ecuador, Costa Rica and Colombia), where 8 out of 10 are shipped to other countries. As a low-value-added product, the banana allows large profits only for big companies, while farmers and small vendors have gone on working in poor conditions for over a hundred years.

My father works selling bananas in a market in Manizales, Colombia. Selling fruit and vegetables has sustained my family for decades. Seeing fruit boxes in the markets felt familiar, because I grew up watching those same boxes when my father took me to work, yet it also makes me think about the precarious working conditions of primary-sector workers in developing countries. Why, if Latin America is a powerhouse of production, are poverty rates so high? How can we rethink the dynamics of the market and the distribution of food and wealth?

Food and the act of eating play a vital role in human development, not only as nourishment but as a matter of economic, social, political and cultural exchange. Our eating practices define our identity and unite us as a community, from the most popular and everyday, becoming our closest intangible heritage. In Acarreo I address two aspects of the sale of food in Bogotá's wholesale markets. First, I show the richness and variety of what is grown in our territory. Second, the transport of food to restaurants, shops and small retailers, a fundamental link in the food distribution chain and therefore one of the goals of achieving food security. Acarreo calls for responsible, conscious practices in the sale and distribution of food, aimed at real food sovereignty. Access to quality food is a fundamental right that every community should enjoy.

My work is a critique of product photography as an advertising tool. When I walk down the street and see all the ads, I cannot help thinking about the hours photo editors spend in Photoshop, trying to create an altered reality full of smooth surfaces and perfect curves. Advertising turns everyday products into banal objects which, having no traces or marks of use, become unreal and memoryless. We are immersed in a cult of banality, an ode to the superfluous and the fleeting. Tensión superficial is a photographic series that critiques advertising by ridiculing what is already ridiculous: a double game of the absurd. After choosing the most transparent bottle, using meticulous lighting, the whitest and smoothest background, interminable takes and endless hours of Photoshop, I obtain the image of a perfect bottle of water. But amid so much exaggeration, it seems I have forgotten a small detail: inside the bottle a long black hair floats. Something socially unacceptable, impermissible, dirty and disgusting.

Espectacular Vacío is an ode to a place with no room left for more images: a city in which advertising has been altered and presents a dystopian, distorted reality. An empty reality. A glitch. For this project I walked through Mexico City, a city full of images and information, and came across many abandoned billboards, a sign that its inhabitants can bear no more visual stimuli. In my photographs the billboards appear large and imposing but empty, and through exaggerated digital editing I invent a fictional city inhabited only by forgotten images. Isn't visual silence spectacular? It is my answer to the need to create silent images.