Returning to You

Portrait with my mother in her room, a contemporary re-reading of Michelangelo’s Pietà. As an Indigenous son of the Pasto People and a queer person, I surrender myself to her embrace, transforming the religious gesture into an iconography of care and resistance. Between the crucifix and the Bible, I confront the coloniality of gender, a concept developed by Argentine philosopher María Lugones to explain how colonialism not only imposed racial hierarchies but also established a binary and hierarchical gender system that degraded and dehumanized Indigenous peoples, erasing preexisting sexual and gender diversity. This photographic act disobeys those impositions and reclaims tenderness as a political force, a territory from which I return to my mother as one returns to the earth, to the memory of my foremothers, and to the possibility of being reborn. From the project Cero Plumas (Zero Feathers).