University of the Underground

Francisco Mojica is a Colombian artist and researcher based in the Netherlands. His practice repositions local narratives about landscape and materiality to question broader gazes and categorizations through comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole. Francisco explores the intersections of different mediums such as video, sculpture, performative lectures, photography, audio, music, and writing. 

In 2020 Francisco graduated from the Master in Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute. His thesis Thus Spoke the Guaca: On Relationality, examines the communication events stemming from guacas, that is, buried treasures which agency and the capacity to interpellate humans.  They bear the faculty of being various things and concepts at the same time that respond to different temporalities. This research examines how guacas enfold various modes of circulation and interpretation and, more importantly, significant strands of conceptualization about modernity and boundary-making practices. The process expanded into an exhibition which was part of the 2020 show held at the art space Rozenstraat – a rose is a rose in  Amsterdam.  

During this year, Francisco has been part of several collaborations with Colombian-Dutch artist  Raúl Marroquín. Their last work together is Virtual Guided Tours. In this online multichannel live video streaming, guests from different backgrounds were asked to present their views on over  20 tourist locations, while Raúl and Francisco disrupted the main narrative with live visual interventions of their own material of the locations. Francisco has also been part of Raúl’s video platform LowTech OnLine ONLY from Nowhere and EveryWhere with a contribution called The  Fountain of the Great, a critical performative lecture on the dissonant monuments and architecture of Skopje, North Macedonia.  

Francisco was part of the Mission to Support the Peace Process in Colombia of the  Organization of American States MAPP-OAS, producing visual and textual documentation of the mediation work of MAPP-OAS with communities affected by paramilitary driven violence in  the country. His experience there has inspired his artistic practice, notably his photographic series The necessity for ruins, addressing grief and memory issues in the context of the country’s internal conflict, for which the Ministry of Culture of Colombia granted him with the National  Photography Prize 2016.