This residency, coordinated by Susana Vargas in collaboration with Proyecto Binario, centred on exploring pedagogical approaches to art and how these practices can shape artistic and creative processes.
From February to May 2025, Colombian artists Raquel Moreno and Daniel Blanco developed public pedagogical activations as part of their artistic research practices. These activations created a platform for practice-based inquiry, inviting critical reflection and public engagement.
Raquel Moreno’s research focuses on women’s experiences and their representation through creative practice. Her residency project, Playing with the Shadow, explores the significance of having a space of one’s own for introspection and self-connection. The project investigates the intersection of presence and introspection—spaces to pass through, to encounter one’s desires and fears. Drawing, shadow play, and spatial installation are used to construct intimate environments that provoke dialogue around embodiment and emotional presence.
Daniel Blanco’s work explores ecological thinking through the lens of construction tools and materials. His project, Mountain Marsh, engages with the hydrological history of the Bogotá savanna—from its prehistoric condition as a Pleistocene lake to the socio-environmental impacts of colonial and contemporary interventions. The project includes field visits to river basins, the creation of maps, and the design of devices for imagining alternative forms of water coexistence. His research prompts reflection on how ecological narratives can be activated through artistic methods.
Both residencies contributed to the broader aims of the project by situating artistic practice as a method of inquiry into social, environmental, and pedagogical questions.
Public Activations
Artists Daniel and Raquel jointly led a workshop at CASASELVA to develop a public programme that would also inform their own creative practices.
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Raquel hosted a series of five public encounters with women to explore intimacy within her creative approaches to drawing and embroidery.
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Daniel facilitated a series of six open walks in various geographical locations in Bogotá and its surroundings to engage with and reflect on water, aiming to deepen our understanding of human–water relationships.
During the residency, Susana and Federico coordinated a range of encounters and think tanks with curators, artists, and cultural practitioners to discuss and reflect on Raquel’s and Daniel’s creative processes.
While the artists’ practices evolved alongside their public activations, Federico developed the curatorial framework for their projects. The residency culminated in an exhibition at Proyecto Binario, showcasing both the processes and outcomes of their work.
On the Residencies
This exhibition represents an ongoing process stemming from the artistic residency held between February and May 2025, featuring the work of Raquel Moreno and Daniel Blanco.
Part of a broader research project, this residency aims to create spaces that challenge the conventional isolation often associated with artistic practices. Instead, they propose a shift toward more collective and participatory ways of understanding art and creativity.
Throughout the residency, Raquel and Daniel engaged the public through walks, workshops, clubs, secret- sharing gatherings, and explorations through the city and the mountains. Each of these activities was rooted in their most honest and genuine interests, and open to all. It was within these shared spaces—and through a deep desire to relate to others—that the works in this exhibition took shape.
What is presented here are the processes and traces of those shared experiences—spaces imagined by Raquel and Daniel and shaped collectively, with the collaboration of Federico, Alejandra, Andrés and all participants. Together, they created meaningful moments where pedagogy naturally emerged through the act of encounter—both with others and with oneself.
Text by Susana Vargas
On the Exhibition
If you were to close your eyes at different points in this space, you would surely hear a murmur. A murmur that is a noise made of many noises, of many things that sound.
Those many things that sound have already sounded. That is to say, this space, rather than making noise, holds noises that have already been made, and that emerged in other spaces. Daniel and Raquel, before anything else, gave and received spaces, and that gesture caused the noise to emerge, because if noise needs anything to be noise, it’s air, distance between things.
The noises that emerged in those spaces are those of the metabolism of these months: those of the people, entities, cadences, and materialities that encountered each other. They are noises concave and broad enough to be made from other noises, and at the same time, they are so inevitably relational as to be one.
Raquel and Daniel, besides giving and receiving spaces, cared for that noise that emerged in them, the murmur. They listened to it generously. Then, they digested it, which is the same as saying that they held its vibration within. Afterward, they turned it into the world, made it space in this space that is, therefore, a sounding board, and that is made so that those who inhabit it traverse the distances between things and remain in the air, like noise.
Text by Federico Reyes
Download here the wall text of the exhibition.
Photos by Gregorio Diaz.
