My name is Álvaro Andrés Cardona Gómez, journalist, fixer, photographer, and videojournalist. I belong to a generation of Colombians that grew amidst war, yearning for a day of peace, a gesture of reconciliation. For the passing years, I have dedicated my life, my job and my imagination to this purpose: exploring the construction of symbolic- images with enough power to ue the memory, and through art be a place for the grief and restructuring of the victims and victimizers of the armed conflict. Violence throws upon their acts a cloak of darkness, it requires courage and perseverance to give light to the truth that lies within it, in order to at last illuminate the faces of society. (Witness and accomplice) I seek thru the visual art the way to give a greater repercussion to this truth, including the communities in the creative process and giving them tools for the encounter with the other, for their education, to construct conditions of reflection over violence, product of the armed conflict in Colombia, in the context of Latin-American and the world.
2014 - Prize Memories of the future, 2013 - Finalist of the Iberoamerican prize, 2012 - National prize of photography, 2008 - Winner of the national prize
In the cosmogony of the Embera Indians and Afro communities in Chocó, Colombia, one of the main practices is "naveling", burying the navel after birth under a tree, when there is an illness or death lurks, the soul goes through the Steps to reach where the navel is, creating a vital union between the territory and its inhabitants. At the end of 2016, up to now, there have been multiple attacks on these middle and high river communities, paramilitaries living in their homes preventing free movement, antipersonnel mines planted, families confined and used as human shields and subsequently displaced. The exile for these communities not only produces an abandonment of the inhabited places but it is to obliterate their traditions, it is a forced resignation to that buried part that reminds them of the territory that saw them being born, where they left happy.
ARMED: We are all parts, dissociated fragments of ourselves and from the past. We are a union of genes, hair, and faces. We are united by the urgency of the days, armed with the seal of the years. Each one is told and tells us something of himself with his gestures, his eyes, and his face. Each face is an armed story. The fact of having as a contrast the image of the dead relatives, makes that the portraits unveil the suffering of each person, besides of putting in the same plane of space and time the pictures, showing the wonders of physical genetic inheritance which reaffirm that we are not where the body is but where you are remembered.
My gringo Luz Marina Bernál (Leader of the Collective Mothers of Soacha), Mother of Fair Leonardo Porras 26, missing on 28 Of January 2012. It was presented By the National Army As a fallen guerrilla in combat.