Luis Cobelo
Zurumbático
[ EPF 2017 – SHORT LIST ]
ZURUMBÁTICO
Someone who acts in a foolish way. A ninny, bewildered, slow, somber, melancholic, enig- matic, half-drunk, half-mad, and with bad temper. A trance-like sensation.
Zurumbático is an endless journey to the place where “One hundred years of solitude,” the literary work of the writer Gabriel García Márquez, was born. A story full of extraordinary essence, contained in thousands of Latin American villages, roots of a gigantic empirical hemisphere, passionate, forgotten, fickle, violent, improvised and above all, happy.
Aracataca is the writer’s native town where the inspiration for his unique Macondo originates. This place and its surroundings, close to the Caribbean region of Colombia, is my starting point. The leitmotiv was the book, and the result, was a great series of unique and spontaneous images; an intimate process of self-exploration, poetic, magical, dreamy, ocasionally painful, charged with symbolism and enigmatic stories, connected with being a continent and that, for me, meant a rebirth as an individual who has nourished himself with that bleeding Latin American spinal cord.
Zurumbático is a tunnel of feelings, sensations, impressions and especial events, in which I enter and leave as I wish. Immersed in this dimension, I understood and reconfirmed that the unusual, the everyday, the comic, even the tragic, has no explanation, neither asked nor sought. It is what it is.
Short Bio
Born in 1970, Cobelo earned a degree in Philosophy from the University of Zulia, Venezuela. From 1993 to the present, he has participated in numerous art exhibits and photography festivals worldwide, like Generation 2000, PhotoEspaña, Fotonoviembre, Getxophoto 2011 in Spain and Latin American photography Prize in Mexico. Individually, he has shown his work in Venezuela, France, Spain, Germany, Ecuador and Argentina.
Since 2001, he has worked independently and is dedicated to the production of various projects of documentary photography in Europe, America and Asia that were published in international journals and magazines like El País Semanal, RollingStone, National Geographic, Esquire, La Nación Argentina, Etiqueta Negra in Peru and VICE México and Colombia, among others.
In 2011, he was nominated for the UNICEF Picture of the Year and in 2012 received the Hasselblad Latinamerican Photographer in documentary category.
He is currently developing several projects in Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Cuba and Venezuela.
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The Emerging Photographer Fund is supported by generous donors to the Magnum Foundation
