The idea of the Tower of Silence was born in 2006, when I commissioned Olivier Goulet to create a sculpted manifesto for the artist collective I had founded a year earlier, composed of the molded faces of its initial members. The anthropomorphic lines of the concave masks, and the ghost-like illusion created by their convex perspectives, evoked a haunting duality: presence and absence. This tension became the seed of a larger vision, an architectural sculpture capable of embodying both.

The idea to scale my practice into the built environment and inscribe memory in the landscape of the city stayed with me for nearly two decades. This artwork in gestation matured slowly, rooted in time, space, and unknowingly, in the deafening echoes of my silenced ancestors.

The first iteration of the Tower of Silence took shape in Colombia, during a visit to a small artisanal clay brick factory. There, the wooden molds for sun-dried bricks recalled ancient Mesopotamian methods, revealing a pathway to reimagine the brick, not just as a unit of architecture, but as a vessel for identity and remembrance.
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Once again, I invited Olivier to collaborate— this time to sculpt a facial mold shaped like a brick. I brought the prototype to South America, where a local metal workshop fabricated concave and convex molds for artisanal reproduction.

The 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 Northern Andes. Members 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 soil, but not from memory.
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Tower of Silence I was constructed at Hotel Cariongo, on the very ground where the Convent of San Francisco once stood. It was there, in the 1550's, that 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. In doing so, they scarred the identity of my people, dismantled spiritual plurality, and extinguished ancestral cosmic knowledge.

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

It stands as a sacred, small-scale monument study—an act of transgenerational mourning suspended between acknowledgment and oblivion. A place where the echoes of our vanished native population are never meant to ever fade into silence, exposing the colonial legacy of cultural enforced disappearance as an open wound—unhealed, inherited, and deeply embedded in our national identity.

Over the course of two years of independent research in Art, Design, and the Public Domain at  Harvard University Graduate School of Design, I had the privilege of working under the mentorship of:

• Krzysztof Wodiczko— the monument and the principle of protest in public art
• Malkit Shoshan— interdisciplinary practices and art activism
  
• Nathan King— robotics and ceramic material systems in architecture
• Joanna Aizenberg— biomimecry and material engineering
• Douglas A. Johnson— human rights and the case of torture post 911

And other internationally recognized faculty whose work bridges theory and practice. I also benefited from unrestricted access to Harvard's and MIT's academic libraries and cutting-edge research facilities. Immersed in a unique tradition of innovative methodologies and critical inquiry, this intellectually rigorous environment allowed me to significantly advance the Tower of Silence.

Art, Design and Public Domain refers to an interdisciplinary field that bridges art, architecture, technology, and design to engage critically with the public space and social realms. It reimagines the city not simply as a built environment, but as a collective urban organism— one capable of shaping civic experience and catalyzing social transformation.  

Within this context, the Tower of Silence emerged as a form of urban activism and constructive experimentation, challenging the centralized authority— and at times the very absence— of institutional art spaces by relocating artistic intervention into the public domain. In doing so, it redefines the role of the artist as an engaged citizen in the pursuit of the common good.

Urban Activism

The Tower of Silence became an architectural monument honoring spiritual presence and physical absence. A memorial that seeks to restore agency to Los Desaparecidos, the vanished victims of Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance (EID)— a global human rights crisis that has deeply scarred my native city throughout Colombia's six-decade armed conflict.

Yet the trauma it addresses seems to run deeper, echoing the colonial-era enforced extinction of entire indigenous communities. An inherited wound silently passed through generations that has shaped collective memory and national identity.

According to the United Nations General Assembly, EID occurs when individuals are arrested, abducted, or otherwise deprived of liberty by state actors or their affiliates, followed by a refusal to acknowledge their fate, effectively placing them outside the protection of the law.

Since 1980, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) has officially documented 61,626 cases across 115 countries, yet only 2% have been clarified. Statistics are “just the tip of the iceberg … many cases are never reported because families are afraid of prosecution or retaliation ... It is estimated that millions of persons have been direct victims of enforced disappearance worldwide".

In Colombia, the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition, created under the 2016 Peace Accord, concluded in its 2022 final report that over 121,768 families were affected by EID between 1985 and 2016— a figure that only partially reflects the true scale of the phenomenon. Today, violence persists, and EID remains a deliberate, systematic tactic of counterinsurgency, oppression, and impunity.

Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance robs not only the victims of life and recognition, but also their families of justice and mourning, opening wounds that never heal.

Could urban activism intervene in this legacy of trauma—reclaiming silenced memory, awakening erased cultural pride, and challenging the normalization of human delition, while reaffirming the most fundamental right to life?

Could the Tower of Silence carve collective grief into the open air of the public domain, transforming absence into presence, and igniting a healing dialogue toward truth, memory, and change?

Constructive Experimentation

Particularly interested in merging anthropomorphic forms with experimental clay fabrication in architecture, my research began by analyzing the opportunities and constraints inherent to both artisanal techniques and computational design methodologies.

In collaboration with architect Patricia Lopez Cabeza, we used Rhinoceros to digitally sculpt a self-supporting facial brick designed for architectural deployment. The prototype was 3d printed in PLA: a master mold with a convex face on the front and a concave negative on the back.  

At Harvard’s Ceramic Studio, I worked alongside resident artists to develop a six-piece plaster mold capable of reproducing solid, double-sided facial bricks. We further explored slip casting techniques for hollow variants and used ceramic contour 3d printers to produce small-scale porcelain studies.

Expanding into robotic fabrication, I tackled the challenge of extruding a porcelain-based anthropomorphic geometry using a six-axis robotic arm.

With the support of architect Sulaiman Alothman, we designed a continuous parametric toolpath in Grasshopper. Starting from the most archaic shape—the circle— we coded five measurable variables: thickness, pressure, speed, weight, and internal architecture. The result was a stratified, abstract, algorithmic human head— a compelling example of how robotic fabrication can inform morphological design.  

My clay research culminated in a hybrid sculpture. I sliced the original digital facial brick into 45 flat patterns, laser cut them, then hand-slubbed and hollowed each in terracotta. This final piece reasserted the presence of the artists’ hand guiding digitally driven fabrication processes.  

In parallel, I participated in a cross-disciplinary biomimicry research project at Harvard SEAS, in collaboration with Buse Aktas, Shirin Amouei, Maharshi Bhattacharya, and scientists from the Wyss Institute. We studied chromatophores in squid skin to prototype a responsive, bioinspired material with potential applications across micro to macro scales.

This research opened the door to biogenic design, suggesting new possibilities for introducing living organisms into the material ecosystem of a symbolic monument designed to resurrect memory and presence. A turning point, as I began to recontextualize the project and resume the development of the Tower of Silence beyond Harvard’s institutional framework.

Could sculpted matter hold memory, clay breathe grief, and stillness grow into life?

Could the Tower of Silence become a vessel infused with cultural, emotional, and biological intelligence—an architecture that embodies a living gesture of healing, rising from remembrance?