People
Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano
PreDoc
Vibrating Bodies of Water
Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano is an artist, writer, and educator born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. With a background in film, cultural studies, and contemporary art, his research dives into the relations between water, technology, ecology and telepathy, which he weaves in the form of essays, video and sound installations, and participatory workshops. Juan Pablo has done extensive research on submarine infrastructures such as fiber optic cables, which he approached from a poetic, fractal, and non-linear lens. He has also worked with fermentation and urban gardens as an extended practice of techno-ecological transformation.
Juan Pablo worked as one of the program managers at Plataforma Bogotá, the only public media lab in Colombia’s capital, between 2017 and 2019. Amongst several projects, he co-created an exchange program for media artists between Colombia and South Africa, an initiative led by TriasCulture, a Senegalese association. Juan Pablo also worked as a cultural programmer at Espacio Odeón in 2019 and 2022, a contemporary art space where he co-created an urban garden, a community kitchen, and dance lessons along with local cultural organizations. He has been a professor of artistic research at the Javeriana and Andes Universities in Bogotá (CO) and at the Royal Academy of Arts The Hague (NL).
The working title for his thesis is “Vibrating Bodies of Water”, a project that seeks to regenerate coral reefs through a poetic and material experimentation in bioacoustics, developing participatory design methods with coastal communities. Coral reefs, one of the most biodiverse and fragile ecosystems on the planet, are built by symbiotic beings that have a particular, yet under-studied, relation to sound. Anthropogenic activity, such as sound pollution, is having a negative impact in these ecosystems. In collaboration with marine scientists, artists, and coastal communities, Juan Pablo plans to design submersible non-invasive sound prototypes to record and reproduce sound as a method of marine restoration. Juan Pablo’s approach uses theoretic frameworks and participatory methods that aim to decolonize science and conservation practices, and engage with sound as a powerful medium to learn from the polyphony of coraline lifeworlds.
@jppachecob