“I see myself as a means for ‘others’ to exist. I’ve been
fantasizing about being ‘anything’ but myself.”

Juan Pablo Echeverri

A Cultural Translator: Pop and the Bogotano Body

Juan Pablo Echeverri belongs to a generation that came of age in Colombia during the 1980s and 1990s, a time marked by profound cultural yearning for the North: for Hollywood cinema, British and American rock bands, MTV music videos, and Madonna. It was not an innocent or passive admiration—it was an act of desire, identification, and imaginative survival. For a young gay man in Bogotá, growing up surrounded by those images meant finding in them a vocabulary that his immediate environment did not offer.

What Echeverri does, from very early on and in a completely original way, is introduce that pop universe into the Colombian context: he contaminates it, subverts it, and translates it with humor and pain. It doesn’t matter whether the reference is to Madonna or to Superman, the process is always the same. Echeverri brings that image to a specific body, his queer Bogotano body, taking on the attributes of the pop persona and making them his own. This is not a naive appropriation of pop. Echeverri is a cultural translator working in both directions. To outsiders, he brings Latin American anxieties onto an international visual scene. To insiders, he makes global icons seem strange, things of a kind that Colombians had never seen before. His work is, in this sense, one of the most lucid gestures of negotiation between the local and the global in recent Colombian art, and which, in turn, from its historical perspective, establishes a space for the affirmation and consolidation of the multiple, open, and non-binary identities that must (despite fear) inhabit the world today.

We Are All Constructions: Identity, Consumption, and Flow

Juan Pablo Echeverri’s work is deeply rooted in the visual culture of the second half of the 20th century. In a prescient manner, however, Echeverri raises questions that mark some of the most pressing anxieties of the present: What constitutes a being? How do we allow ourselves to be affected by others and by the images that surround us? How is an existence sustained through multiple, contradictory, and constantly shifting identities?

His photographic and video series serve as visual evidence that the self is not an essence but an accumulation: a layering of cultural references, emotions, disguises, and masks that consumer society—a ceaseless flood of products largely inspired by Anglophone popular culture—has disseminated to even the most remote corners of the planet. Echeverri does not denounce this process from the outside. He inhabits it from within, with a lucidity that can only come from someone who has experienced it as both a contradiction and a resource simultaneously.

We could say that Juan Pablo Echeverri is a fragmented being whose existence is built upon multiple fictions. But that fragmentation is not a pathology—it is a method. It is the very condition of a generation that learned to be through what it consumed. That generation found in Echeverri someone capable of transforming the consumer condition into a coherent artistic language, someone who managed to make a trashy obsession sophisticated through his infinite rigor. His apartment in Bogotá—which is at once a studio, archive, wardrobe, and personal museum—contains entire decades of the pop culture that shaped his imagination: costumes, accessories, and production materials accumulated with the logic of the obsessive collector, the hoarder who understands consumption not as waste but as the archaeology of the present. That archive is not secondary to his work: it is the work itself in a latent state, a repository of possible identities waiting to be summoned before the camera.

The Eternal Teenager and His Rebellion

There is a question that runs through Echeverri’s entire body of work—one that the artist never articulated in abstract terms but always conveyed through images: What becomes of the creations made by a young man who will remain an eternal teenager until his death at age 43? For there is a sustained energy in his work that resists aging, not through denial but through insistence—the insistence that play, transformation, and curiosity have no expiration date.

That perpetual adolescence, however, has a specific and painful biographical root. Echeverri attended a conservative, Catholic all-boys school. From the age of seven, he was hounded for being a sissy. That experience—the early stigmatization, the violence, and the insults—did not disappear in adulthood. It became the driving force behind a practice that looks back with humor, irony, and a sensuality that does not ask for anyone’s permission.

Echeverri’s response to that violence was neither silence nor assimilation, but rather strategic exaggeration: amplifying what was pointed out to him and transforming it into images, series, music videos, and archives. There is in this a legacy of “camp,” a style of queer performance that satirizes gendered conventions and turns bad taste into sheer refinement. This influence goes beyond aesthetics—it is a pedagogy of resistance and a way of saying: if you’re going to look at me, let it be on my terms.

On the other hand, rebellion is also a universal theme. Picture frustration in love, a sentimental education in Latin America, and a gay man who enters a dramatic existence buoyed by the American dream and by the popular soap operas that provide a script for his emotions—all of this is present in Echeverri’s works with a clarity that requires no theoretical interpretation. It is the wound speaking directly, with humor and without asking permission.

Being “Marica”Is not the Same as Being Queer: Dissent From Within

Queer theory, born in Anglophone cultural studies departments in the 1990s, proposes a position of dissent against linguistic and representational norms. It proposes that gender is not an essence but a repeat performance, a copy of copies that are never perfect and that, for that very reason, can be subverted. For Judith Butler, identity does not preexist its expressions: it is constituted within them, and in that constitution, there is always a margin for error, for deviation, for possible re-signification. An insult, by this logic, can be appropriated and reversed—transformed into a title by which one proudly names oneself.

“Marica” is a difficult term to translate. It is not simply the colloquial version of “gay” nor the popular equivalent of “queer.” It is a lived, embodied category with its own Latin American genealogy, as studied by theorists such as José Fernando Serrano and the sexual dissidence studies collective in Colombia. In the Latin American cultural tradition, what historically mattered was not the object of desire but the role—active/passive—and “marica” designated a position within that economy of desire that transcended any imported classification.

What lends political urgency to this term is its origin as a reclaimed slur. Like “bollera” in Spain or “loca” in the Río de la Plata region, “marica” was one of the heteropatriarchal system’s preferred slurs, and it was reclaimed—with both pain and pride—by those who were called by that name. Echeverri operates precisely within that gap. When he constructs Mariconna—an alter ego that blends Metallica’s bombast with the gay and trans world’s devotion to Madonna—he isn’t applying a theoretical category: he is narrating a childhood, a sentimental upbringing, a cultural genealogy of the figures who shaped him. “Papi soy gay,” his deeply political cover of “Papa Don’t Preach,” is not an abstract declaration of fluid identity: it is a coming-out in Spanish, filmed in one room, with the tools he had at hand. It is an intimate manifesto.

In Echeverri’s work, “mariconería” differs from “queer” not because it is less theoretically sophisticated, but because it is more biographically dense. It encompasses dimensions of class, territory, a Colombian childhood, and hemispheric pop culture that the academic category tends to dissolve. He knew this from the start and worked with such unique precision that his work could be an archive of layered multiplicities, one that helps us understand contemporary coloniality as a set of accretions that are difficult to separate.

Image Protocols: Between the Archive and the Body

The history of photography offers many examples of artists who have turned their lenses to political identity and marginality. Echeverri’s practice employs strategies with clear genealogies: the use of the self-portrait as an exploration of an intimate emotional landscape in the tradition of Nan Goldin and Duane Michals, for example, and also the use of repetition as a method of knowledge and the reliance on the grid as a device that organizes time without hierarchizing it.

Cindy Sherman is a key figure in demonstrating that the body can be both the subject and the object of representation, that the self-portrait does not require a fixed identity but can instead be the space where that identity is problematized. Decades earlier, Claude Cahun had also posed the same question from the margins of Surrealism. What Echeverri does with this legacy is situate it within a Latin American, middle-class, queer body. He then adds the dimension of time: it is not a singular transformation but a daily, cumulative one that only acquires its full meaning as an archive.

miss fotojapón—the backbone of his entire body of work—is, in this sense, the most radical precursor to the selfie. Before cell phones turned self-portraiture into an everyday, universal practice, Echeverri would visit a Colombian photo shop and darkroom called Foto Japón every day and take photos of himself in the booths used for ID photos. The result was not a spontaneous image but a rigorous protocol: same format, same framing, same neutral background, same distance. Everything changed except the structure. And in that repetition, what was recorded was not identity but its impossibility: more than eight thousand photographs that demonstrate, one by one, that there is no stable self to document.

This apparent simplicity conceals considerable technical and conceptual complexity. Echeverri’s work is filled with protocols, production rules, and a relentless pursuit of materials for costumes, sets, and characterizations. The extroverted and flamboyant personality everyone knew—that constant flirtation with the camera—coexisted with a technical rigor and production discipline that is rarely mentioned. The apparent disorder of his archives hides away structures carefully designed to reveal time and how it affects existence.

The Legacy: An Archive That Lives On

Juan Pablo Echeverri’s apartment in Bogotá is now an unintentional museum of the decades that changed the world. The costumes, the accessories, the pop culture references accumulated with the logic of a hoarder—that obsessive collector who turns buying into a form of identitarian anxiety and emotional memory—are the material flip side of his work. There are the superhero costumes, the wigs, the magazines, the vinyl records, the objects that at some point became images. It is an archive of the generation that experienced both horror and tenderness through songs, movies, and TV shows; that saw the world opening up and closing in at the same time; that learned to be free, in part, through the fantasies sold to it by global capitalism.

The clarity with which Echeverri understood the defining aspects of the 1980s and 1990s allowed him to craft a narrative of that era that goes beyond nostalgia: it offers a glimpse of freedom and openness regarding gender, while confronting the violence, discrimination, and oppression experienced by gay people in Colombia during those decades. His work is also a testament to resistance in that context—proof that art can be, at the same time, celebration and denunciation, play and argument, and perhaps most devilishly, a disguise.

Juan Pa, Mon Amour (A Personal Note)

I met Juan Pablo Echeverri in the early 2000s, when we were both working in museums. He was a tour guide and workshop leader; I was learning to read art from the inside. In this deeply conservative country—that was the word we used for years to describe the moral rigidity and Catholic conservatism that permeates everything—Juan Pablo simply brought a breath of fresh air. He would show up for every tour with outrageous red hair, holes in his clothes, suddenly wearing makeup, and even if he’d just spent the night at a police station after being detained for being different, he’d keep his appointment to serve as a guide and a wonderful art historian: he shattered every prejudice, from the most base and commonplace to the most sophisticated, effortlessly and without condescension. Audiences adored him.

I was twenty-three years old, and he was my gateway to an understanding of diversity and freedom. I feel like I experienced a little bit of the miss fotojapón lifestyle through him: those daily photographs that predate the selfie and quietly remind us that we are, above all, projections of the multiple identities thrust upon us by consumer society.

Years later, when I helped put together Wolfgang Tillmans’ show at the Banco de la República Museums in Colombia, Juan Pablo was the only Colombian in the artist’s inner circle who carried out the delicate installation, which is itself a process of translating photographic work into an installation. It was during that installation that I found out I was pregnant. And Juan Pablo was the first person I told. I felt an immense intimacy with him—the kind that’s spontaneous and candid—a loving and transparent trust.

I watched as he built his own archive: daily photos from photo booths, a collection of costumes, music videos filmed by lamplight, lip-syncing, and a camera pointed at his face.

He died on June 15, 2022, at the age of forty-three, from a misdiagnosed case of malaria he contracted in Lagos. At the hospital in Bogotá, they wouldn’t let him take photos. Until his very last day, he wanted to continue his work.