Part of the extensive COPOS (Flakes) project—a long-term artistic investigation comprising over 500 works created between 2008 and 2019—COPOS Bogotá represents one of the series’ most radical entries: a one-hour, durational film shot in the historically conflicted district of Los Mártires, Bogotá. Working within the project’s conceptual frame of "hyperplastic compression"—a method that decomposes and recomposes urban fragments into cinematic matter (Lloveras, 2018–2025)—this film constructs a dense visual field where informal labour, transport infrastructures, and choreographed interventions collide. The neighbourhood is not simply a backdrop but a sentient urban entity, where spectral stillness and kinetic overload coexist: vendors wrapped in textiles, buses maneuvering through narrow lanes, surveillant gazes, and the residual architecture of collapse all participate in the image. Crucially, the shoot was marked by a real-time police threat: following a Sunday dawn action with a dancer, the filmmaker was pursued on foot by armed officers into adjacent barrios, embedding lived risk directly into the film’s epistemology (ibid.). Rather than abstracting the violence, the film embraces it through an aesthetic of embeddedness—offering no narration, no closure, only sustained exposure. Echoing Harney and Moten’s (2013) notion of the undercommons, COPOS Bogotá resists extractive seeing by foregrounding opacity, proximity, and discontinuity. In this way, the film becomes both document and defiance, enacting a visual grammar where each flake is not only a fragment of the city’s surface, but a rupture in its narrative logic, capturing Bogotá as a volatile, wounded, and irreducibly living archive.
