Over six months in 2023, I explored the plasticity of Fique fiber in my studio in Medellín. Fique is endemic to the Andean region and has traditionally been used to make coffee sacks and tools for agricultural labor. Today, it is slowly disappearing, displaced by synthetic materials and industrial efficiency.

At my grandfather’s funeral, my grandmother told me a story from her childhood. She grew up in a farming family that later migrated to Bogotá D.C. They had very little. Their mattresses were made from layered fique fibers: woven sheets stacked one on top of the other until they became soft enough to sleep on. I became obsessed with this sotry and started a search in archives and catalogues trying to find images of these mattresses. I found nothing. It was as if they had never existed.

This installation was my attempt to return to that absence. Not to reconstruct the mattress as an object, but to approach its feeling. Fique is rough, pale yellow, almost the color of dry sand under late afternoon light. By working with different thicknesses and densities, and introducing acrylic and light elements to intensify and refract its color and shades, I created a space that breathes, filters light, and holds the body.

Working with the fiber became a quiet act of mourning: for my grandfather, for my grandmother’s memory, and for a material that once sustained domestic life. Through repetition, stitching, and accumulation, the fiber creates intimacy again, becoming architecture.

The work asks whether memory itself can function as a form of construction. Whether a fragile, disappearing material can still hold space and quietly resist erasure.