Cero Plumas (Zero Feathers)

From a very early age, as an Indigenous child and adolescent in the Colombian context, the violence directed at my effeminate expression shaped the way I inhabit the world. This project in progress is born as a response to that wound, a gesture of care and repair rooted in affection and imagination. Through interventions on my family archive, the rereading of power apparatuses and the staging of fragmentary memories, I work with the body as a living archive where memory is sensorially activated and the personal becomes political. Drawing on critical frameworks such as María Lugones’s coloniality of gender and José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification, Cero Plumas (Zero Feathers) questions the binary, hierarchical regime imposed by colonialism and proposes, following Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s formulation of ch’ixi, inhabiting mixture, ambiguity and affective contamination between cuir/queer and Indigenous symbolic languages. Confronting plumophobia and the disciplinary injunction to “not have pluma,” the project chooses to expose and subvert it, restoring its potency as a sign of difference and disobedience. I reclaim the right to inhabit the anomalous, the strange; to repurpose normative aesthetics for reinterpretation; to celebrate sexual and gender dissidence against the politics of death and the narratives that constantly tell us we do not deserve to exist. To tell this story is to seek belonging, not in the place that was denied me, but in the language I build from cuir/queer affirmation.