Chivas – Les bus psychédéliques de Colombie

Chivas – Les bus psychédéliques de Colombie – “Chivas” means “goats”. This word refers to the buses that operate in Colombia’s remote Andean rural areas. They are used to transport people and crops (coffee, bananas, avocados…) to small towns. The engines come from trucks imported from the USA, then the chassis are crafted in workshops to enable the vehicles to drive on the country’s worst tracks. Those in the Caldas and Antioquia regions have the particularity of being covered in psychedelic paint. This singular tradition was born in the 50s and 60s, when a young letter painter from Medellín, who was a bit of a junkie, was asked by a bus driver to decorate his bus. At the same time, the discovery of Buddhism and a book on intuitive geometry led the young Alejandro Serna to develop a unique and unlikely style that a small number of painters continue to perpetuate today. This book and the accompanying video documentary are a compendium of the atmospheres and works we’ve discovered on our travels on these buses over the past five years.
The coated fabric cover was screen-printed (Atelier 2000/Toulouse), and the contents entirely bound by our own little hands.