Diana Ocampo Estrada

My work begins with a question that has stayed with me for years:

What traces do we leave on the places we inhabit?

In search of an answer, I brought together four paintings created at different moments in my life: one at the end of the twentieth century and three between 2023 and 2025. Rather than preserving them as independent works, I integrated them into a five-meter canvas, creating a wall inspired by the public surfaces where time accumulates posters, marks, memories, and new stories.

Rooted in Colombia's Coffee Cultural Landscape, I revisited each painting to engage in a dialogue with my own artistic journey and to recognize how my perspective, like the landscape itself, has changed over time.

This wall does not divide; it invites viewers to walk alongside it. Each layer preserves the memory of a different moment and suggests that heritage is not something fixed. It is a living construction, continually renewed through our actions, the traces we leave behind, and the way we choose to inhabit the world.

The Coffee Cultural Landscape, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011, carries within it a fundamental paradox: the permanence of a deep territorial identity coexists with the instability of a world in constant transformation. Diana Ocampo Estrada works from that tension. Her painting does not describe the landscape — it inhabits it. Each layer of pigment is an act of memory, a silent resistance against what Liquid Modernity, in Zygmunt Bauman's terms, dissolves without a trace.

«Liquid Geographies» is the installation that materialises this vision. Curated by Piedad Casas, the experience transforms Studio DOE into a habitable territory: painting leaves the stretcher, becomes atmosphere and envelops the viewer in the slow time of the coffee landscape. This is not a representation. It is a presence.

Diana Ocampo Estrada has been awarded an Honorable Mention at the international open call FLUID ECOLOGIES. Her work will be presented in audiovisual format at The BLANC Art Space, New York, from June 3 to 13, 2026 — a space that brings together contemporary artists whose practice engages with the flows of time, nature and collective memory.

This recognition places Diana's work on the international map of contemporary art and confirms the global relevance of an artistic practice rooted in the local — the Colombian coffee ecosystem — yet able to speak from the universal.