País Resistencia

A long-term photographic project made in Cali, Colombia.

What does resistance mean once the word stops belonging to anyone?

I started País Resistencia in the last stretch of Colombia's 2021 social uprising, when "resistance" had been pulled between opposing sides until it stood for little more than which flag you carried. I wanted the word back. Not as a slogan, but as something people actually live.

In Cali, one of the centers of the uprising, resistance is not an event. It is ordinary. It is staying inside a system built on inequality and refusing the ceiling it hands you. It is waking up and imagining another future anyway.

I did not tell anyone how to pose. I invited each person to build their own image. Some fictionalized the conflict to speak about what they wanted and what they feared. Others answered with dance, with gesture, with the body. The work does not make violence beautiful, and it does not turn struggle into a story of heroes. It makes room for people to narrate themselves.

País Resistencia is not spectacle and it is not propaganda. It is the quiet force of people who carry daily tension and, through imagination, move the ground beneath them.

In Cali, resistance is the daily decision to stay, to create, and to keep going.