bamboo and united nations…

…so now the space that was studio to our artists is changing again, now we are deep into installation territory, as our open studio event takes place this Saturday…a challenging time i will admit…its not easy dealing with 15 individuals all trying to show…some are easier than others, but always at this time of year i feel a little like a one woman united nations…a  Kofi-Boutros-Ban Ki trying to resolve territorial and personal disputes…however it is always a learning experience…and in between there are nice moments…like Cai Weidong and his bamboo for his installation…with which he took over the studio for an afternoon…

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…and his impromptu tea house…

torino street art in biella…

…so back in Biella… a couple of our residents, Aastha Chauhan and Raphael Franco invited street art collective URBE from Turin to work on some external walls at Cittadellarte.

Together they came up with the idea of  drawing on the walls using a high pressure water jet to clean away the accumulated dirt and expose the true surface below. The technique was hugely effective…

Below they used a more lo-fi technique of wiping away the dirt again using a stencil. Anyway, beautiful work i think…and kudos to Aastha and Raphael who are always very generous in sharing possibilities through collaborations…

drunk cowboys and Jerico…

There was a fiesta in the small mountain town of Jerico…the town is beautiful…said to be one of the prettiest in Antioquia, there was a lot of drinking and there were a lot of cowboys…and there were a lot of drunk cowboys… i even saw a few tumbling off their mounts…

These horsemen and women were parading up and down the streets at will showing off their skills. Watch the end for some great drunk cowboy singing in a little side-street bar…unfortunately i was dragged away before i could film too much…

kites’n’jesus…

A photographic post on Colombia, still in Jerico and still in that same weekend… there was a kite festival and it was so beautiful…up on a hill looking down onto the town…

…and so strange, this huge Jesus statue on top of the hill the repository for lost and dying kites…

escape to mountains…

There was very little chance to leave Medellin as we were working Monday to Saturday on the workshop, however we did have one possibility, escaping the city up into the mountains deep into the heart of coffee country…

The landscape of the Cauca valley with the tail end of the Andes viewed from up high…Click on photo to get the full effect…

traditional construction for the processing and drying of coffee beans…

Was told by a grower up there that colombian coffee beans have an exquisite aroma but not so much flavour so that generally the growers create a blend mixing them with other varieties of coffee…so there you go.!

So the weather is hot and steamy, every morning, a heavy mist starts from the ground and raises up through the trees as the day heats up. The result the fertile, abundant flora of the rainforest.

The trees are covered in a multitude of parasitical plant species…you will recognise a myriad of house plants but here on another scale completely…

The fauna is also incredibly diverse. We found this stick insect (?) at least 40-50 cm long on our car. It stayed there for hours, we could not get it to leave…in the end we had to help it back to the folliage!

There are around 18,000 different species of butterflies in the world, Colombia has around 3,500 of them…