What motivates you to go to your workshop?

Well, the truth is that going to my workshop is very easy because it is next to my house. So, I almost had to roll out of bed and I'm already in my workshop. But for me, entering my workshop… it is my favorite place. Because it is a space where dreams come true. And many phases are necessary for that to happen. Let's say that, you go from the drawing to a model and from the model to a larger model and then you start to build, to make a sculpture. And that process of the incubation of each piece or each project is really very satisfactory. Because seeing an idea grow and seeing how it can materialize from a very vague intuition, that is one of the most satisfying things one can experience. 

How do you define your creative process?

My creative process often starts with books. When I work on some kind of project, I always try to surround myself with as many books on that subject as possible. And in those books, I find examples, precedents, references, resources that will nurture my process. And that's very nice because working on a project is also an opportunity to study. 

It varies completely. For example, if I am creating a play, I might read history or philosophy. If I'm making a sculpture, maybe I would read references to ancient sculptures or to other sculptors before me who solved those kinds of problems. If I am looking at a social project, I read tools that I can use. And that's always the beginning: having stacks of books to help me take notes, draw pictures, and write too. And little by little that accumulates, sometimes it takes a long time. And when you're ready, ideas seem to spring up spontaneously. But in reality, they've been there for a long time. 

So, it is very important to surround yourself with physical books because the Internet… It is useful for doing research, but it does not occupy a place in space. There is something that has to do with the materials being there, physically, that reminds you of their existence. And much of the process of concretizing something has to do with the physical obstacle of the object. In other words, you have to try to crystallize those intuitions. And that physical presence will grow and grow and grow until, in the end, it takes the shape of a work of art.

Can you share a happy anecdote about creating a piece?

Well, yes, there are many happy anecdotes. Let's think… For example, there is a piece that I have that is a flute, but the flute is made out of a shotgun. So, it's a shotgun. And what I like is that it is a shotgun that has a series of perforations which transforms something that had been designed to kill into something that now produces music. In fact, there is a verse by a poet named Rumi that talks about how when making holes in a reed, when making a flute, the soul of the man or the person… sings. Therefore, the breath... something that before took your breath away now receives your breath, and you produce music. 

That, in fact, was an intuition that I had a long time ago, that I received thanks to one of my mentors, Antanas Mockus, who is a Colombian mathematician and philosopher and was the mayor of Bogotá. Once I told him that I had this intuition of doing something musical with weapons. At that time, I had the idea of ​​making some wind chimes, like those little bells that the wind blows. And he told me: "It would be nice to make some whistles, a kind of whistles that you blew so the bullets would no longer be the ones creating the sound but the barrel would." And I didn't implement that whistling pun right away, but when the opportunity arose, I worked with an organization called March for Our Lives, which is a very inspiring movement that emerged two or three years ago, created by some teenagers who survived a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. 

And the whole movement in the United States became very beautiful (which also inspires me a lot, precisely the fact that some teenagers created it). And in Cincinnati there was a section of March for Our Lives where we made some flutes, and those flutes were used in a march and the young people who played them carried a banner that said: we made holes in the rifles before the rifles made holes in us. I feel that it was a very transcendental act, very beautiful, having turned an agent of death into an agent of life, and that creativity would conquer that apparently unrivaled, indomitable force that weapons are.