About

This is a space to reconnect the stories of separation and fragmentation that organize our lives and societies:

Humans/Nature
Mind/Body
Us/Them
Science/Spirituality
Personal/Political
Rational/Creative
Inside/Outside
Reality/Imagination

I will share stories to take us inside that /, inside that rajadura (the wound), as Gloria Anzaldua called it: to open it, inhabit it, explore it, question it, and little by little, transform it.

The world we see is the result of these separations, and the future we build depends on our ability to reconnect them.

What happens when boundaries become porous?

How is the crack, the wound, a promise of possibility?

What worlds can we build when we step outside of the box?

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Everything I can offer comes from who I am. For years, as an inquisitive woman, a traveler, and a questioner, I came up against the walls of the world as it was presented to me. Rebuilding a version that makes more sense has been a challenging process, painful at times,  but profoundly transformative.

Today, reading apocalyptic headlines, grasping the gravity of the crises we have caused, frightened by the ruthless forms of power, and seriously confused by the changes ahead of us, I ask myself what my place is.

That’s how Afuera del Cuadrito (outside the little box) was born: from the suspicion that my work in reconnecting can help others do the same.

Here you will find my writings and some suggestions of ideas, voices, and more that feel like beacons for the times we are living through.

About me (Juliana)

One day I'm going to do everything differently
I'm going to fix the back window
I'm going to sing the songs without lyrics
And everyone will be able to imagine
Translated lyrics of song "Un día" by Juana Molina

 

Outside the box. I have always felt like the one who is outside the box. In a non-place. Without complete belonging. I’ve been many versions and none of them fully: economist, musician, artist, feminist, traveler, artisan, lesbian, employee, activist. And of course, that has brought me many questions, doubts, fears, and insecurities.

It has been hard for me to find “a” place: my place. A great friend recently told me: “in the end, the only option left is to self-construct. And you have to do it like the houses in Peru, where when they build and finish one level, they leave the beam for the next floor exposed, to continue building”.

I’m the beam always exposed to the air. The search for an identity from strangeness. The unusual mix. I am the square and the point that escapes it. I’m an Excel spreadsheet disintegrating into colors on white canvases. I am many things and the love of sharing them: my travels, stories and their protagonists, my curiosity, dedication and ambition always present, the purest feeling towards music and the desire, rarely fulfilled, to write it all down. I am the mental search for an explanation and the deep feeling that not everything has one. The psychonaut, still undercover, in growing spiritual reconciliation and constant falling in love with nature. The woman with her privileges and her people skills as raw material for continuous restlessness and social activism.

I am the instinctive conviction of the volcanic power of women. I am the unanswered question about the meeting of my facets. I am my tattoos and especially one: “always unfinished”.

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This text (which I wrote in 2021) was a preamble to the journey to here.

I am Juliana and I am interested in the intersection between people and societies (or what we would call the humanities and social sciences). I have worked in peacebuilding and gender equity in Colombia (mainly), but also in Ecuador and Chile, from public institutions, the third sector, and research centers.

In recent years, my work has focused on dialogue. Since 2023, I have been doing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, and in my research I critically explore dialogue and its role in building societies from the different ways of existing and seeing the world.

I studied economics, and hold Masters degrees in Economics and Public policy. I am a traveler, writer, nature and music lover, group facilitator, and part of dialogue processes (in Colombia I am part of Valiente es Dialogar and in the United Kingdom of a Bohm Dialogue group). Recently, meditation, Contact Improvisation dance, and Cards 4 Life came into my life, wonderful tools with which I also blur boundaries and about which I will surely write.

This is me, happy about whatever is going to begin from here.