Independent Research
On Identity and Belonging
Strategic Narratives in Personal Research
My independent research examines identity as a shifting process, using visual storytelling to structure chaos into meaning. Through personal projects, exhibitions, and gallery commissions, I explore how external forces—bureaucracy, digital evolution, migration, and material decay—shape self-perception and cultural narratives.
This mirrors my branding work under the following guidelines:
✶ Identity as a Dynamic Process
Just as people and cultures evolve under external pressures, brands must adapt to shifting markets, technologies, and societal expectations.
✶ Symbolism as Strategy
My work decodes cultural cues and archetypes, a method I apply to brands seeking deeper audience connections.
✶ Transforming the Mundane into Meaning
Whether in discarded objects or overlooked details, I find new significance—an approach I use to reframe brand narratives and revitalization strategies.
These explorations are not separate from my brand strategy—they reveal how I think, deconstruct, and rebuild narratives to create impactful, resonant identities. Enjoy :).
From my perspective, daily life lies between the real world and fantasy, they both look imperceptible for us, we are not conscious of it until something happens and breaks this state, triggering an emotion and symbolic relations that blurs the limits of what we are and what we belong to: We become part of a whole.
This broken state goes beyond what the photographic language can capture. To fill this gap, I mix digital techniques that expand the semiotics of the image, to the point of merging fantasy with reality, interpreting the image of our vulnerability facing our surroundings and the inexorable passing of time in each one of my portraits and self-portraits.
Bound Matter (2023 – Present)
Stillness between order and chaos
✶ Keywords:
Tension and balance, material constraints, controlled disorder, structural fragility.
✶ Project Description:
A study of control and impermanence, Bound Matter assembles found objects into fragile, deliberate still-life compositions. After years of navigating legal uncertainty, these works became a way to impose order on chaos—carefully structuring hierarchy, balance, and tension. Each piece captures the push and pull between constraint and creative agency, where spontaneity itself becomes a tool to reflect identity’s instability under external pressures.
✶ Research Statement:
"When balance is imposed, stillness is an illusion. Every structure holds a breaking point, and the beauty of order is knowing it won't last".
Burocrazia (2022)
Paint by Emotions
✶ Keywords:
Bureaucratic control, systemic exhaustion, emotional coding, narrative chaos.
✶ Project Description:
A visual deconstruction of bureaucratic systems, Bureaucratia translates complexity into stark, visceral clarity. Using basic colors to symbolize emotional states, the exhibition distilled the dehumanizing rigidity of administration into a fanzine, a red-tape installation, and a two-meter long drawing coded by feeling rather than function. The result: a didactic yet subversive interpretation of institutional control, offering a way to engage with systemic oppression through form and color.
✶ Research Statement:
When emotion is reduced to paperwork, order dissolves into exhaustion. A system built to function becomes a system designed to frustrate—endlessly coloring inside the lines, only to find the picture unchanged.
Estallido Social | DDHH (2019)
Symbolic Infographics
✶ Keywords:
Protest visuals, statistical abstraction, civil unrest, descentralized news, eye trauma.
✶ Project Description:
As Chilean authorities suppressed news of police violations amidst the 'Estallido Social' which took place in Chile between 2019 and 2020, independent social media accounts became direct sources for the world to witness de unraveling of massive protests as consequence of inequality prevalent in the country.
Taking visual storytelling into an infographic angle, these weekly infographics, rooted in research and collaboration with journalists, condensed overwhelming statistics into clear, symbolic images—injured eyes, the Chilean star, protesting students—turning data into advocacy. These works circulated globally, informing media coverage and amplifying grassroots resistance beyond digital platforms.
✶ Research Statement:
When data replaces memory, violence becomes a number. A system that counts its damage in statistics will always underestimate its cost.
Digital Flesh (2017–2020)
The hidden body of the mundane
✶ Keywords:
Hyperreality, digital distortion, sensory transformation, everyday surrealism.
✶ Project Description:
A speculative study on organic forms in digital environments, Digital Flesh distorts everyday textures into anatomical abstractions. Through a process of capture, manipulation, and reassembly, the work reveals human-like structures—blood vessels, tendons, organs—embedded within the mundane. It questions where the physical ends and the digital begins, exploring transformation as both a process and an aesthetic language.
✶ Research Statement:
When the mundane is examined closely, a new body unravels. Reality is not what it is, but what we choose to see—and digital tools only make that choice more explicit.
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EKEKO | SAIFFF (2016)
✶ Research Keywords:
Cultural accumulation, modern rituals, Andean traditions, overconsumption
✶ Project Description:
Commissioned for the Santiago Fashion Film Festival, Ekeko reimagines the Andean god of abundance through the lens of contemporary anxiety. Rather than carrying material wealth, weightless, shape-shifting dancers navigate the burden of modern survival, wrapped in discarded materials that transform into abstract, fluid forms. The accompanying installation reconstructs these elements into a sculptural symbol of migration, questioning how cultural traditions evolve under capitalist acceleration.
✶ Research Statement:
When identity is built from excess, meaning becomes weightless. The things we carry define us—but how much of it is truly ours?
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Insula | SHOWstudio (2015)
The body expanded
✶ Research Keywords:
Digital prosthetics, bodily abstraction, glitch aesthetics, self-perception, remote teams
✶ Project Description:
Debuting at PULSE Contemporary during Art Basel Miami, and a finalist at the SHOWstudio Film Festival, Ínsula examines the body’s dissolution into digital existence. In a world where digital devices act as prosthetics, the film constructs a visual language of avatars, altered silhouettes, and fragmented selves. Created in collaboration with Daniel Ramos Obregón through a remote creative process—exchanging ideas entirely via digital platforms—the project itself embodies the shift from human presence to digital being.
✶ Research Statement:
When the body is no longer fixed, identity becomes fluid. Digital tools are not replacements, but prosthetics—amplifying what is already there.
MAPAS (2014)
Tracing the Self Through Ancestry
✶ Keywords:
Genealogy, inherited memory, visual cartography, visual testimonial.
✶ Project Description:
A redefinition of self-portraiture, MAPAS explores the concept of self through those who shaped it. Instead of photographing myself, I documented my family, layering their portraits with abstracted lines drawn from my own body—transforming veins into roads, personal memory into collective geography. This emotional cartography visualizes the tensions between personal identity, belonging, and inherited narratives.
✶ Research Statement:
When identity is mapped through others, the self becomes a collection of heirlooms. We are not just who we are, but who we remember.
Self Portraits (2005 – Present)
The Ever-changing Body
✶ Keywords:
Self-image, modern diary, emotions as avatars, visual metamorphosis, still drama
✶ Project Description:
A two-decade archive of self-exploration, these portraits serve as a living document of identity’s evolution. Through shifts in character, digital manipulation, and external interventions, each image captures my body as a site of transformation—shaped by time, technology, and experience. More than documentation, these works act as visual timestamps of internal landscapes through symbolic characters, marking the intangible through photography.
✶ Research Statement:
When identity is captured, it marks a pinaccle between the outdated and the new. The self is not a fixed image, but a shifting process—always in motion, never complete. This is a life-long research.
Strategic Narratives & Personal Research
Portraits
All images by Jon Jacobsen
· Visual Strategy
· Creative Consultancy
· Digital Illustration
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