Emilio Barriga is a visual artist interested in generating contents and reactions from still and moving images, sounds and original or imported ambiences.

Born in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia in the late 70s, Emilio grew influenced by the scope of arts to which he was exposed by his parents and grandparents in areas such as photography, literature, film, video, music, design and painting.

In his teens he began to take photos and play in rock bands. This gives him the elements to decide studying Social Communication at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá. There he begins his relationship with the production of video which blends the areas he is most passionate about: photography, music, narrative and aesthetics.

The emergence of new technologies and the possibility of producing high quality audio and video with a low budget from home, allows him to venture into the electronic music production world creating musical and visual contents for his Dynamicrón project. An electronica project with the self-named genre “tropi-dark”. Dynamicrón becomes part of the emerging electronic music scene of Bogotá of the late 90’s. This associations will be helpful later in the photographic world. Subsequently he releases his solo project “TV Told Me To” (La TV Me Dijo Qué in Spanish) in which explores a more experimental and less “dance” side of his music.

In parallel to his commercial television work (fighting the enemy from within, according to him) he starts developing a photographic and audiovisual documentary process with the colombian cult punk bands “Ultrageno” and “1280 Almas”, and some video clips with different musical projects from Bogotá (Tan Tan Morgan, La Ettnia, Kontent).

From there on, he has been interested in finding samples of vanguards, undergrounds or just argumentative exercises in the areas of music, new technologies and street art.

In early 2009 he spends a short season in New York, balancing his time between a film course at New York Film Academy, the production of some short-films and a lot of documentary photography. From there, he goes back to Colombia to work on Reality TV programs and then to an artistic residence in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The purpose of this trip is to meet and photograph the local rock/punk underground movement of that city.

… there is always a small segment of individuals who do not swallow whole, are restless and
want to go further. Those are the characters I want to go shoot.