I grew up among stoves, pots, and neighborhood restaurants. My father worked as a cook, and before the image came food: smell, exchange, the minimal economy of gesture. That early connection to the everyday made my first encounter with Pereira’s market square feel strangely familiar rather than foreign. It was an expanded extension of my childhood: bodies, colors, shouts, weights, bartering. A living world.

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In this context, photography became my first laboratory—not as an aesthetic exercise, but as an act of recognizing the other. At the time, I did not yet know that these images would become embedded in one of the most profound and violent processes of urban transformation in the city’s recent history.

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Between 2008 and 2012, Pereira underwent the demolition of its historic central market as part of the Ciudad Victoria Project, an urban renewal operation that replaced the market with a shopping complex, a hard concrete plaza, and new cultural infrastructures. This was not a simple architectural modernization, but a symbolic reconfiguration of the city’s economic, social, and affective center.

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Founded in 1923, the market square had functioned throughout most of the twentieth century as a central node where coffee-based economies, rural–urban mobility, popular sociability, prostitution, transportation, leisure, and labor converged. It embodied what Raymond Williams describes as a structure of feeling: a shared way of perceiving and inhabiting the city.

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With the coffee crisis after 1989, economic liberalization, rising unemployment, migration, drug trafficking, and the earthquakes of the 1990s, this structure fractured. The market began to be publicly narrated as a degraded, dangerous, and undesirable space. Local media and institutional discourse consolidated a symbolic devaluation that prepared the social ground for its disappearance. What changed was not only material conditions, but what the city considered worthy of existing.

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The new city center was no longer meant to represent the producer or the rural worker, but the consumer, the tourist, the investor. The city stopped recognizing itself in those who produce and began to recognize itself in those who buy. It is within this historical fissure that this photographic project is situated.

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This work emerged during my studies in Communication and Educational Informatics, within a humanist academic environment where the question of the other was central. Communication was understood not merely as transmission, but as relationship, power, and representation.

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Through this process, the camera ceased to be a technical tool and became a symbolic weapon: to aim, to capture, to edit, to exhibit. What right did I have to look? What right did I have to show? Who was I within that operation?

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The project was developed in collaboration with Leidy Yulieth Montoya under the title The Market Square: Portraits of a Reality. From the outset, portraiture became a site of friction. Not everyone wanted to be photographed. No one likes their image to be used. It took me almost six months to take my first photograph. Photographing without consent has always felt to me like a form of violence.

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That waiting period was not unproductive; it was a process of ethical maturation. I came to understand the difference between seeing and looking, between observing and recognizing. I understood that images do not merely record reality—they position it. That photography is not innocent. That every image implies a power relationship. That conflict remains unresolved to this day.

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The Counter-Archive: Image, Displacement, and Memory

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These photographs do not simply document an economic activity. They register a process of structural displacement. After the demolition of the market, those who were meant to be erased did not disappear; they fragmented into mobile stalls, informal markets, and peripheral spaces without stable legitimacy. The relocation was neither inclusive nor fair. The market ceased to be a center and became a constellation of dispersed peripheries.

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In this sense, the images operate as a counter-archive. Opposed to the official archive of progress—renders, institutional photographs, inaugurations—this body of work preserves what the discourse of modernization needs to erase: surplus bodies, economies that do not fit, gestures that do not produce market value.

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The photographs inhabit this fracture:

 

between a city that once was and a city that seeks to appear as something else.

 

 

Between embodied memory and the desire for modernization through consumption.