Nicolás Bernal
Colombia
ARTIST BIO
Indigenous Pasto and queer, he was born and is based in Ipiales, Nariño, Colombia. He is a photographer, artivist, and political scientist trained at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. His work brings together artistic and documentary photography to explore colonial legacies, subaltern memory, Andean Indigenous cosmologies, the persistence of marginalized bodies under biopower, and sex–gender diversity across Abya Yala. His photographic practice is grounded in visual anthropology, shaping his commitment to long-term, co-authored processes. He has been part of exhibitions in international museums and festivals such as Melkweg (Amsterdam), Pride Photo 2024 (Netherlands), Africa Foto Fair 2023 (Ivory Coast), and Trastevere Museum 2022 (Rome), as well as in other photography-focused spaces worldwide.
PROJECT STATEMENT
“As an Indigenous child and adolescent, I endured constant harassment because of my delicate, swan-like poses. That violence deeply affected my emotional well-being and shaped my way of inhabiting the world from a very early age. Zero Feathers (Cero Plumas) emerges as a response to that wound: a gesture of repair, care, and the rewriting of memory through dissidence, affection, and imagination.
This personal narrative unfolds through interventions in my family archive, the rereading of dispositifs of power—such as colonial and military archives—and the staging of fragmentary memories from childhood and adolescence. In this process, the body becomes a living archive: a site where what was erased reappears, where memory is activated sensorially, and where the personal is transformed into the political.
The project engages with the concept of the coloniality of gender, developed by María Lugones, to reflect on how colonialism imposed a binary and hierarchical regime that erased the sex-gender plurality of many peoples. It also intersects with José Esteban Muñoz's notion of disidentification, understood here as a practice of escape: not a frontal rejection of categories, but rather their twisting, inhabiting them improperly, and generating spaces of ambiguity. In this sense, I find affinity with ch'ixi, as formulated by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: the coexistence of contradictory elements that do not seek fusion or resolution. I do not pursue purity, but rather the power of mixture, crossing, and affective contamination between queer and Indigenous languages.
Plumophobia—violence against effeminate expression in men—constitutes a central axis of the project. Naming it Zero Feathers (Cero Plumas) ironizes the disciplinary demand to "have no feather": exposing it, subverting it, and restoring its power as a symbol of difference. This gesture intersects with Adrienne Rich's critique of compulsory heterosexuality, making visible how the hetero-cis norm has domesticated childhoods and bodies, confining them to obedience. In response, my interventions claim the right to inhabit ambiguity and to reappropriate normative aesthetics in order to dismantle them from within.” – Nicolás Bernal
