Palimpsest
— Mass Graves of Memory

A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been erased and rewritten. What once carried meaning never entirely disappears; it persists as a trace beneath new layers of history. This work begins from that premise: an archive built upon repetition, erosion, and the accumulation of violence.

Using as a foundation the photographic archive of people who have disappeared in Colombia over the past seventy years, the images are superimposed in successive layers, generating a visual sediment where faces dissolve into a spectral mass. There is no single recognizable face, but rather a multitude of ghosts amalgamated into an image impossible to fix. The work functions as a mass grave of memory, where individual identity dissolves through accumulation.

To this visual construction are added threat letters from different eras, intervened under the same logic of accumulation and superimposition. Violence in Colombia has produced documents of intimidation that repeat themselves with different names, dates and contexts, but the same structure of condemnation. When words are piled one upon another, as occurs in this palimpsest, they become illegible, unintelligible — an echo of a history that repeats itself and loses its meaning in saturation.

Palimpsest is a work that explores violence not as an isolated event, but as an accumulation without closure. Through superimposed portraits of the disappeared and letters made illegible by time, the work constructs a symbolic mass grave where identity dissolves between layers of image and word. Here, violence does not erase — it overwrites.

The archive becomes a specter, and what was once a face transforms into an archaeology of the unresolved.

The project is built from the collection of photographs of missing persons, from the 1950s to the early 2000s. These images are layered over one another, accumulating facial strata like a history that refuses to close.

Each face or fragment of text is printed on a translucent sticker and applied to a sheet of acetate. Another sheet is placed on top, with a new image added, and so on — forming a vertical archive that cannot be read linearly. What the viewer sees is partial, interfered, fragmented.

A white LED light placed at the base of the structure shines upward through the layers, producing a spectral scanning effect. From above, the viewer peers into a vertical grave of accumulated images. The experience is intimate, almost archaeological: as though looking down into an excavation, or into a memory that never fully surfaces.