Despacito Art School with Camilo Pachón

26 + 27 May 2026
10am – 3pm
Open School East

This intergenerational project was a collaboration between OSE’s Associates, Despacito Art School and Columbian visual artist Camilo Pachón. Together, the group explored the mask as a technology of personal and collective transformation, using recycled card and garden waste from the verdant suburbs of Cliftonville to create part-human, part-more-than-human characters. This collaboration stems from Camilo’s longer-term project Carnaval Digital, a translocal and networked space for artists and carnival collectives from around the world. 

During workshops, Despacito worked with Associates to develop their own dances and movements to inhabit their characters with spirit, echoing Camilo’s commitment to treating ‘nature not as a resource, but as another spirit that shares this life with us like our ancestors’. These micro-performances were then filmed and edited by Camilo into a joy-filled moving-image work titled Kindling the Inner Light (2026), which was exhibited as part of OSE’s Summer Exhibition 2026 For Ways Below. 

This peer-to-peer project with Despacito formed part of the Associates Programme Social Practice Module, which explores and unpacks what it means to be working collaboratively with communities, and provides practical, artist-led training in the methods of social practice art.

Workshops were supported by 1-1 Support Facilitator Detchema Baptiste and Community Support Facilitator Vlasta Hozova.

Camilo Pachón is a Colombian visual artist and curator. His work explores community-based practices and the mask as ancestral technologies, serving as transformative entities within their contexts. Camilo creates actions, characters, objects, and community processes that might be commonplace in another dimension but challenge the hegemonic narratives of reality in this one.

He is the founder of several creative platforms. These include Crispr Bogotá, an artist-run gallery in Bogotá; AMA (Ambulante Más Allá), a nomadic filmmaking training program for underserved communities in Colombia; and Carnaval Digital, the first trans-local and networked space for artists and carnival collectives from around the world.

This workshop is part of Open School East’s 2024-26 thematic cycle Home is where the garden is –  find out more here: openschooleast.org/home-is