Alberto Baraya is a multimedia production artist from Bogotá, Colombia, where he currently lives and works. He began his career creating ironic self-portraits from appropriated iconic paintings or by forging provocative scenarios. In 2003, he initiated the ongoing series Herbario de Plantas Artificiales, in which he delved into and critiqued the practices of 17th and 18th-century European travellers. Baraya assumes the role of the traveller, replicating the tradition of botanical and anthropological expeditions carried out in Europe in the name of science and colonization. Throughout his travels, Barraya collected and catalogued artificial plants, questioning the traditions of scientific categorization and taxonomy, as well as the Western fascination with its colonies.

During his residency at El Espacio 23, Baraya drew inspiration from local influences and found objects gathered throughout the Allapattah community, as a part of his long-running Herbario de Objetos project, in which he appropriates and parodies the methods of 17th- and 18th-century European botanical expeditions. Here, Baraya creates a visual archive of the neighborhood, using plant-taxonomy strategies to classify the objects he collects. By applying scientific labeling to everyday items, Baraya critiques Western traditions of imperial knowledge, systems of classification, and the mystification of local fauna and resources. His cataloguing process resists reductionism, instead foregrounding the encounters and stories that emerge through his engagement with residents. Barraya creates a map of the local community through a visual catalog that, rather than focusing solely on the purely cartographic or ethnographic, gives presence to the people and motifs that make Allapatah what it is.