Johanna Franco Zapata (1985) is an Instituto Buena Bista (IBB) alumni. She started IBB as one of our first students and was our first to also finish the course and go study in The Netherlands at an art academy. After finishing her preparatory course at IBB in 2007, she attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in The Netherlands. Concluding her studies there she returned to Curacao where she now works at IBB as a student councilor and independent artist.

Dirty Laundry: everything is a cycle

A Cycle could be described as an interval of time, that once it ends, it starts again. Also one of its characteristics is that it possesses phases, fairly allusive to our existence. Something that has remained immutable during my different phases was that I was, am and continue to be both a student of life as of art. Doubtlessly, my authority figures left their teachings stained on me, to the point I made them my own. I feel the time has come to create my own convictions and rebel myself against that part of me, as I fell that by doing so I can truly reinvent myself. How will I accomplish this? By reorganizing, reuniting and adding new remnants with which I will reconstruct every fiber of my being, thus creating a newer and uncontaminated version of me.

To me, the act of showcasing my work is similar to showing myself completely naked. Meaning, it’s the most honest physical and documented version of me.

I invite you you all to enjoy my clothesline, to the deepest corners of me, to the depths of my soul. But, above all, I invite you to questions yourself, to question those boxes in which we all live and question that infinitesimal framed window from which we perceive the world. I invite you to not only question everything, but to also pay attention, observe and talk freely among yourselves about all those things you couldn’t and fear to verbalize.

Johanna Franco Zapata
2018