Final Project for the Bachelor in Design, Class of 2022.
El Alma Paisa is a printed book about paisas, a regional group of Colombians who live in the central Andes region of the country. The story told about paisas is extremely disjointed, with the most common associations to the group being to drugs and violence (due to infamous characters like Pablo Escobar) or magic and coffee (embodied in icons such as Juan Valdez). However, both narratives are distorted extremes that do a disservice to the richness of paisas’ idiosyncrasy. With the aim of proposing a more nuanced representation of paisas, El Alma Paisa explores their culture through three idiosyncratic traits they inherited from the territory they were forced to inhabit: “berraco”, “andariego” and “laborioso”.
This territory has been described as full of “abrupt” mountains, “unnavigable” rivers, and “broken soil”, which led paisas to develop separately from those in other areas of the country. In fact, the relative isolation forced upon them by these conditions resulted in a paisa “mini world” within the Republic, with its own language, beliefs, and values.
To explore the ethos of paisas, this publication invokes academic texts on the phenomenological, sociological, and geographical characteristics that define the regional group, as well as photo archives, blogs, recipes, memories, myths, and other forms of media that build a faithful but spirited description of who paisas are and why.
The result is a deep look into the paisas’ soul in a book that visually transmits the nature of its content by being a snapshot of paisa culture (playful and witty) and endearing (familiar and warm). This publication is a capsule of paisa culture that members of the group can identify with, and an open invitation to the world of paisas which, by geographic determinism, or luck, was born five centuries ago and remains alive to this day.
