The Program and Curatorship

The Artecámara Tutor program by the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce—conceived in its origins and co-founded by master, curator, and cultural manager Franklin Aguirre, who served as its main figurehead in 2016—is an initiative designed to bring together artists from the city, optimize their creative processes, promote their work, and insert them into key local, national, and international spaces. Through intensive workshops, portfolio reviews, and discussion panels, the laboratory addresses production dynamics, conceptual development, and the circulation of art in both official and non-conventional settings.

In the 2016 edition, the curatorial line proposed a critical reflection on the intimate sphere as a trigger for the social and political realm. As Aguirre highlighted in his curatorial text:

“Violent responses to problems of all kinds are born at home, the place where the necessary social strategies and skills to interact in the social field are established. For this reason, it is difficult to establish restrictive and coercive strategies to control criminality at different levels if the individual is unable to self-regulate. Every conflict, no matter how small it may seem, must be resolved in time before it escalates to larger dimensions. These solutions, learned at home, are the ones that will shape not only our domestic environment, but also our macro environment at a national level…” — Franklin Aguirre (2016)

This laboratory wasn’t just about hanging a piece on a wall; the real power of Artecámara Tutor lay in its long-term mentorship model. Over the course of several months, the program operated as an intensive incubator through artwork clinics, workshops, and conceptual debates. It was a space designed to test our creative processes, pushing us to deconstruct our initial ideas and build a much more solid, reflective narrative.

For Colombia’s emerging art scene, this program represented—and continues to represent in its evolution as ARTBOTutor—a key platform for professionalization and visibility. Beyond teaching us how to structure a project or defend a proposal within the institutional circuit, the most valuable aspect was the human fabric: a space for horizontal dialogue and collective learning that connected us with curators, cultural managers, and fellow artists with whom we still share common quests.