Illusion, the Document,
and the Politics of Suspicion

Des-aceler-acciones operates as a pivotal work within my practice, marking a moment in which photography moves beyond being a destabilized document or an intervened archive to become a critical device that questions the very construction of truth. While previous projects challenged the image through territory (Plaza de Mercado), event (Acción Documental de una Obra), landscape (Deriva), or intimacy (Love Affair), this work shifts the inquiry to a more abstract and radical level: truth as a stabilized fiction sustained by visual regimes.

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The project is grounded in a speculative premise: what is collectively accepted as reality is not an ontological given, but a narrative architecture maintained by visual, economic, and symbolic dispositifs. Photography—historically invested with the authority of evidence—is used here in its most recognizable form, the document, precisely to expose its condition as a technical and political fiction.

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Des-aceler-acciones proposes a pause within the accelerated circulation of images that defines contemporary visual culture. Deceleration is not a moral stance but an epistemological gesture: an interruption of evidentiary flow, a suspension of automatic consumption, and the opening of a critical interval where the image no longer confirms reality but destabilizes it. The work engages directly with thinkers such as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard, situating truth within a regime of simulacra where images do not merely represent reality but actively produce it.

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Formally, the work is structured around a tension between two regimes:

— Documentary photography as legible proof and historical evidence.
— Subtle digital editing that introduces internal fissures into this regime of truth.

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The editing is almost imperceptible and deliberately non-spectacular. Its function is ontological rather than aesthetic: to activate suspicion, revealing that what appears as neutral documentation is shaped by invisible decisions of framing, selection, and circulation. In this sense, the work aligns with critical traditions from Walter Benjamin to Vilém Flusser, exposing truth not as denial, but as version.

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A central axis of the project is the photographic documentation of the San Pacho festivities in Quibdó, Colombia. These images register a territory marked by excess and contradiction, where celebration, spirituality, abandonment, and precarity coexist without resolution. Here, the document reaches both its maximum intensity and its point of exhaustion: rather than stabilizing meaning, the image becomes ambiguous and unstable.

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The installation extends this inquiry through a large reflective aluminum surface engraved with the phrase “Nothing is what it seems.” The spectator’s distorted reflection collapses the distance between observer and image, transforming truth from an external object into an embodied experience. The work thus shifts from speaking about images to addressing subjects produced and trapped by them.

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Within the broader genealogy of my practice, Des-aceler-acciones reintroduces the document not as a promise of truth, but as a scene of structural deception. Deceleration becomes a form of perceptual disobedience—a right to interrupt, to fracture visual certainty, and to reclaim movement against the imposed velocity of the visual economy. The work asserts that today, the right to life is inseparable from the right to disrupt regimes of visual truth.

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