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An artistic research project developed during Alejandra Caicedo’s MFA at HFBK Hamburg, exploring migration, memory, identity, cultural displacement, and the emotional consequences of living between languages, territories, and social codes.

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Problemas en el paraíso – Premio o castigo is an autobiographical and artistic research project rooted in Alejandra Caicedo’s experience as an Afro-Colombian artist living in Germany. The project approaches migration not as a linear narrative of success, but as a complex emotional, cultural, and political territory shaped by memory, displacement, longing, adaptation, cultural clash, and the reconstruction of identity.

The work questions the inherited fantasy of Europe as the promised land: a place imagined from afar as freedom, safety, opportunity, and transformation, yet experienced through the body as rupture, distance, contradiction, and loss. In this project, paradise is not a destination, but an unstable image — seductive, wounded, and charged with unresolved grief.

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Through painting, writing, and visual storytelling, Caicedo develops a symbolic language in which tropical plants, fragmented bodies, fruits, braids, domestic objects, flowers, and suspended gestures become signs of memory, femininity, displacement, and resistance. Her work inhabits a third space between Colombia and Germany, a hybrid territory where identity is neither fixed nor fully translated, but continuously negotiated, fractured, and transformed.

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Rather than illustrating migration, the project materializes its emotional contradictions: the desire to belong, the pressure to adapt, the fear of disappearing, and the exhaustion of living in a constant state of translation — translating language, gestures, emotions, cultural codes, and the self. Between beauty and discomfort, tenderness and tension, Problemas en el paraíso asks what happens when the dream of elsewhere becomes real, and even paradise reveals its wounds.

 

What happens to the body, memory, and identity when the dream of elsewhere becomes real — and even paradise reveals its wounds?

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