Kiuby Cave
2015 - 2016
Audiovisual Trance, Vibrational Body, and the Cave as a Healing Device
Kiuby Cave marks a turning point in my practice where the sustained inquiry into the document—city, archive, landscape, and intimacy—shifts decisively toward trance, vibration, expanded perception, and care. After destabilizing the image as a regime of truth (Deriva) and corrupting the affective archive (Love Affair), the central question changes scale: not what the image does to truth, but what the image can do to the body.
Developed during a period of geographical and conceptual displacement—from Bogotá to Cali and the Caribbean—the project reflects a transition from institutional documentary production toward practices grounded in rhythm, sound, ritual, and embodied experience. This shift was informed by collaborations within cultural and performative contexts, including Ciudad Móvil (Cartagena), Agencia Cultural Teléfono Roto (Cali), and artistic exchanges with musicians, performers, and sound artists. Kiuby Cave emerged from an artistic residency at Centro Cultural Ciudad Móvil, curated by Guillermo Vanegas, in collaboration with musician Michael Alfred Wagner (Biomigrant) and vocal performer Zarys Falcón.
The work takes the form of an immersive audiovisual environment conceived as a “cave”: a symbolic and sensory space where visitors encounter intrusive thoughts, nocturnal anxieties, and resistance to change. The cave operates simultaneously as refuge, enclosure, womb, and abyss—an ambivalent device that mirrors both protection and confinement. The KIUBY figures function not as moral entities, but as contemporary metaphors for psychic overload, emotional deregulation, and collective exhaustion shaped by structural violence, hyperproductivity, and historical trauma.
The experience induces a meditative state through abstract and fractal imagery, binaural sound, and the use of Solfeggio frequencies—not as spiritual belief, but as compositional strategy to facilitate concentration, introspection, and emotional regulation. Sound and image are inseparable: live vocal performance interacts with recorded layers, generating harmonic and spatial variations that transform perception and convert image into vibration.
The visual material was produced through a durational process, created frame by frame between 2:00 and 6:00 a.m. over six months—an interval associated with hypnagogic states between wakefulness and sleep. This temporal condition is integral to the work, situating its production within the same liminal zone it seeks to activate in the viewer. Creation becomes ritual, repetition becomes regulation, and the artwork functions as a somatic practice rather than a representational object.
Unlike documentary images of conflict, Kiuby Cave does not depict trauma directly. Instead, it proposes a post-image strategy: trauma is approached indirectly through sensory modulation and embodied experience. Installed in historically charged spaces—such as the Museo de las Fortificaciones in Cartagena, a former site of confinement, and the abandoned Estación de la Sabana in Bogotá—the work engages architecture marked by violence, transforming it into a space for symbolic release and collective recalibration.
Within the broader trajectory of my practice, Kiuby Cave represents a shift from critical deconstruction toward vibrational reconfiguration. If earlier projects questioned the authority of the image as proof, this work reorients audiovisual power toward care. Here, the archive is no longer a database but a nervous system; the document is no longer evidence but sensation. The cave becomes a secular ritual space where sound and image accompany processes of healing without abandoning the political consciousness that shaped their origin.