Tower of Silence I

Artist Statement

The idea of the Tower of Silence was born in 2006, following a collaboration with Olivier Goulet to create a wearable skin made of molded faces from the initial members of my artist collective. The anthropomorphic lines of the concave masks and the ghost like illusion cast by their convex perspective evoked a haunting duality—presence and absence. This tension inspired me to imagine an architectural sculpture embracing both.

For nearly two decades, that vision stayed with me: to scale my practice into the built environment inscribing memory into the landscape of the city. This concept matured slowly, rooted in time, space, and the deafening echos of my silenced ancestors.

The first iteration of the Tower of Silence took shape in Colombia, during a visit to an artisanal clay brick factory. There, the wooden molds for sun-dried bricks recalled ancient Mesopotamian methods and opened a pathway to reimagine the brick not just as a unit of architecture, but as a vessel for identity and remembrance.

Once again, I invited Olivier to collaborate —this time to sculpt a facial mold shaped like a brick. I brought the piece to South America, where a local metal workshop fabricated concave and convex molds for artisanal production.

The initial proposal: to build a Tower of Silence in remembrance of the enforced disappearance of the Chitarero.

The Chitarero were the indigenous inhabitants of Hulago—now known as Pamplona—in the Northen Andes. Part of the Chibchan linguistic family, they revered plural nature deities and practiced ritual cosmology. Oral tradition speaks of Cariongo, a Chitarero warrior who stood against the Spanish conquest. Despite their fierce resistance, the Chitarero were displaced, enslaved and ultimately extinguished—a people erased from their own soil, but not from memory.

Tower of Silence I was constructed at Hotel Cariongo, on the very ground where, once stood the Convent of San Francisco. It was here that in in the 1550's Spanish envoys Pedro de Ursúa and Ortún Velázquez de Velasco, accompanied by Franciscan and Eudist priests, enacted Queen Isabella the Catholic’s mandate: to extract the wealth of the mountains and convert the native population to worship a single god—dismantling spiritual plurality and extinguishing ancestral cosmic knowledge.

Drawing inspiration from Zoroastrian funerary architecture, Tower of Silence reimagines the ritual space— not as a site for decay, but as an artwork for the resurrection of memory.

It stands as a sacred vertical monument, an act of transgenerational mourning suspended between acknowledgment and oblivion. A place to confront cultural erasure within a wounded landscape, where the echoes of the native population are not meant to ever fade into silence.