The colombian artist Marcos Avila Forero, born in 1983, trained at the Paris École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts under the aegis of Giuseppe Penone. Through his studies he discovered an attraction for imprints and impressions, in their graphic, photographic and even more in their ethnographic senses.
Born in 1983, Marcos Ávila Forero lives and works in Paris and Bogotá. In 2011, he stayed in Amazonia with members of the community Cocama to realize the work A Tarapoto - a Manati. With this work, he obtains the Multimedia Prize De Fondations De Beaux-Arts. He travels in 2012 to the Algerian-Moroccan border and collaborates with illegal migrants to make Cayuco. In 2013, after receiving the Discovery Award From Tokyo Palace, he moved to Colombia where he worked with populations displaced by the armed conflict in a slum named Suratoque. He then creates a work and an eponymous exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. In 2014, he will receive the Loop Award. His work Atrato, made in one of the epicentres of the Colombian armed conflict, is exhibited at the 57th Venice Biennale. In 2015, he created Estenopeicas Rurales with an organization of peasants victims of political genocide. In 2016, he managed to join a FARC guerrilla camp and did the work Desde Las Montañas. After three years of interviews with more than thirty social organizations throughout the Colombian territory, in 2018 he directed La Lumière des Balles - The Darkness of Forgetfulness, a documentary on armed conflict and the construction of peace. At the same time he participates in group exhibitions - Museum of Immigration, The Abattoirs, Museo Nazionale di Torino, Museo de la Republica de Colombia - and other personalities - The Grand Café - Center for Contemporary Art, Pori Art Museum , Kyoto Art Center. In 2019 he was nominated for the Ricard Prize and became vice-president of the Citizens for Peace organization.
The projects he carries out often involve communities in Colombia, France or Morocco. The point, on a metaphoric level, is to manage to transcribe the spatio-temporality experienced both by the community and by himself as he discovers it, dedicates himself to it, collaborates with it. This is not just a matter of transcribing an “inhabited volume” (the way in which such a community for instance organises a village, often including the positioning of ritual objects and sacred places) into an “inhabited surface”, which would almost seem to appeal to the esoteric character of photography. But it is also a cogitation on the relationship between past, present and future. As though time and space were fluids, waves, the aim being to catch their shadow, notably their political shadow.