Deriva

2013 - 2015

Speculations on Landscape and the Corrupted Image

Deriva is a critical inquiry into documentary truth rather than a formal exploration of landscape. The project emerges from the collision between my practice—rooted in ethnographic photography, counter-archives, live cinema, and community video cartography—and the industrial production of “legible” national imagery.

Deriva consolidates three formative contexts that defined my relationship

to the audiovisual document:

Ciudad Latente & the Ministry of Culture (digital archive as public document).
Between 2010 and 2015 I worked at Ciudad Latente as a web designer and digital culture content producer, during the moment when the internet became a dominant archive of the public sphere. Platforms, databases, blogs, maps, online videotheques and repositories introduced new forms of documentation: non-linear, navigable, hyperlink-driven—documents structured by scrolling, indexing, and browsing rather than by the linear logic of the report.

Señal Colombia (television as national narrative).
For two years I worked as a documentary reporter for public television, particularly in Los Puros Criollos and Que el mundo lo sepa. There I began to see—inside editing rooms and through producers’ decisions—how a country is curated for the screen: which landscapes, bodies, and stories fit within the televised idea of “Colombian identity,” and which forms of complexity are softened to remain consumable and coherent.

Discovery Channel (landscape as transnational visual commodity).
In an international documentary production context, landscape becomes exportable merchandise: standardized through clarity, spectacle, and readability. The image is optimized for global circulation, and “place” is reduced to an easily legible aesthetic product.

These three regimes—digital archive of city, televised narrative of nation, and global commodity of landscape—form the concrete background against which Deriva appears as a rupture: not as a rejection of documentary, but as its internal sabotage.

Glitch as method: corrupting the document from within

In Deriva, the documentary image stops being a reliable measure of reality and becomes a contested field—between code, institutional mediation, and lived experience. The turning point is hexadecimal editing, not as a stylistic filter but as an ontological intervention: opening an image file as raw data—letters, symbols, numbers—and editing its internal structure directly.

This gesture treats “landscape” as a convention sustained by compression, encoding, and social agreements about what deserves to be seen. By corrupting the file at its core, the image enters a new present: a damaged present where documentary certainty is no longer guaranteed.

Within the broader genealogy of glitch as technical and aesthetic category—moving from accidental system failure to a critical language—Deriva adopts error as a deliberate procedure: an audit of the medium that produces the document. The landscape becomes the laboratory where representation fails, and that failure becomes knowledge.

Counter-archive, critical communication, and the image as a unit of reality

My formation in communication studies unfolded at the historical hinge where the 20th century’s mass media models met the expanding digital public sphere. Critical theory—Lippmann, Benjamin, Frankfurt School—did not remain abstract; it shaped how I understood that every communication device produces subjects, worldviews, and truth regimes.

Across earlier projects—Plaza de Mercado (as counter-archive of a city undergoing “hygienist” urban renewal), Acción documental de una obra (documentary without stable document), and Videocartografías Comunitarias (narrative sovereignty and first-person territorial mapping)—a suspicion intensified: the documentary image was never neutral proof, but a mediated construction shaped by institutional and economic forces.

Deriva translates that suspicion into a language of error. The “perfect” landscape—well-exposed, well-framed, beautiful—begins to feel politically suspect: too coherent, too exportable, too aligned with what television and global markets need to keep validating as “reality.” In that sense, the documentary image operates like a social unit of measurement—a standard through which a society recognizes and legitimizes itself. Deriva attacks that unit from inside the file.

Landscape as ontological test: perception, loss, and post-truth

Glitch in Deriva is not decoration. It is epistemic. When compression breaks, when fragments shift, when noise interrupts recognition, the viewer confronts a moment of perceptual instability: the trained eye can’t immediately say “this is a mountain,” “this is a river,” “this is a country.” That discomfort is the work’s true space: where the habit of visual truth collapses.

Technically and conceptually, the project insists that every conversion—every compression and standardization—implies a decision about what information is preserved and what is discarded. The corrupted landscape exposes that invisible violence over data, and extends it into a political metaphor: what appears stable is sustained by fragile technical and cultural agreements.

Position in my practice

Developed between 2013 and 2015, Deriva marks a biographical and methodological shift: from the camera as central device to the computer as a writing space, anticipating later explorations of file intervention, found archives, and digital production. It does not “solve” the documentary; it deconstructs it.

If Plaza de Mercado was a counter-archive of a city in transition, Deriva becomes a counter-archive of my own relationship to documentary truth—an insistence that working with images today requires confronting their instability, their institutional framing, and their susceptibility to manipulation.

At its core, Deriva leaves one question open—almost as a pulse:

If the documentary image also has a life—an apparition that defines it as a body—what happens when we damage it on purpose?