Projects

This section brings together my most extensive research projects, particularly those that engage broader audiences through media, visual work, and public-facing formats.

Vidas en la periferia

The exhibition emerges from my book Esto es el boro, a reworked version of my doctoral dissertation based on a long-term ethnography of youth navigating violence in the urban peripheries of Cartagena. This research was revisited in 2024 through a research grant awarded by ICANH, which allowed me to return to the field and trace how the lives of the protagonists have evolved over time, as well as how patterns of violence have transformed in these neighborhoods. This longitudinal perspective underpins the central hypothesis of the project: that the experiences documented are not isolated, but rather point to broader processes of systematic violence affecting racialized youth—what I conceptualize as an ongoing form of afrojuvenicide.

• Vidas en la periferia: A Decade of Resistance on the Margins of Cartagena. Retrospective photographic exhibition. Presented at the Cartagena Historical Museum (MUHCA), July–August 2025. The curatorial approach and visual narrative were developed from ten years of ethnographic research with racialized youth in contexts of urban violence. Project supported by the Observatorio del Caribe Colombiano and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Minciencias) of Colombia.

• Vidas en la periferia: A Decade of Resistance on the Margins of Cartagena. Collective photographic exhibition, invited artist, Photography category. District Incentives Program for Artists, Mayor’s Office of Barranquilla, Colombia, November 2025.

An Anthropology of Terror: Migration Through the Darién Gap

This project emerges from long-term ethnographic research conducted between 2021 and 2024 along one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world. Based on immersive fieldwork across border zones and jungle crossings, it documents the lived experiences of migrants navigating extreme conditions shaped by violence, abandonment, and informal systems of control. Building on this material, the project brings together ethnographic writing with visual and narrative forms to examine how terror operates not only as an exceptional condition, but as an everyday structure embedded in the governance of mobility. By following migrant trajectories over time, the research explores how individuals endure, adapt, and produce meaning within these environments, while advancing the broader argument that contemporary migration regimes generate sustained forms of suffering that exceed conventional humanitarian and policy frameworks.

• The Migrant Body: Embodied Experiences and Bodily Strategies in South–South Migration. Global Development Institute (GDI), University of Manchester. Collective exhibition featuring award-winning photographs from an international competition. Curated by Verónica Castro. Manchester, United Kingdom, 2025.