personal branding: Dan★

Heritage. 7° 53' 21.0696'' N72° 31' 5.8332'' E

Inside the Taogong Temple in Changshá, China, there is a painting of a woman breastfeeding her elderly mother. For the Taoists, the ancestors are the only reason for our existence, our creation. That is why they honor them, take care of them, protect them, even after death. For them, our identity is linked to our ancestors and our future.

Our surnames are a strange burden of blood and inheritance, they are the clues of an immense map to an impassable place: the past. Maybe that's why they give us names, so we can draw our own maps into the future. I am -like many Latin Americans-, a person who loses the trace of their ancestors beyond the second generation. However, when I travel, I feel that a part of my grandmother or father travels with me, in my blood.

Traveling has taken me to places I never thought I knew, to meet people I never thought existed. I feel that at every kilometer, there is a third map to travel: the present. My present loves a globalized world, looks at it with hope rather than with nostalgia. In each kilometer, in each coordinate, I find more people, from any other place, other wandering points like me, bodies that move around the planet, which in itself, is a body that moves through the universe.

When I travel I spend many nights watching the stars. Celestial bodies that dance in a vacuum, slowly falling among themselves, emitting light that takes years or centuries to reach our eyes. A map of the past completely in front of our present. As a child, I saw Orion in the sky and knew that my birthday was coming. When the Southern Cross was coming on the horizon, I knew that Mother's Day was coming soon. The constellations always give order to time and the apparent chaos of heaven. What is the most accurate we have, the clearest origin that exists?

Structure. 14° 20' 54.096'' N 100° 34' 34.572'' E

The big problem of building a profile was that I felt a disorder in my order: a creative and anxious person, with scattered and messy works. What do you do? It was that question that disarmed my apparent structure. I was one "there" and I was other "here". It was not until I began to see my work as a result of a connection of people and actions through a timeline, that I began to contemplate that, my life, as well as the stars in the sky, are those same constellations of people and actions.

I designed a structure that allowed me to organize my work, my occupations and my passions in a clear way. The answer? The constellations. Since I made the conference "83 Hojas de Vida" (Colombia, 2018), I have begun to use this structure to put an order and a function to each of the profiles that I have as a professional and as a person.

I decided to separate my profiles into three main points: As a nomad, as an architect, and as an artist. Each one, responding to what I do, why I do it, how I do it, where and when. Each of these three points is subdivided into actions, and each action encompasses precisely a spectrum or a trade.

The result is a large constellation created with the three constellations of each profile. Finally, a clear structure.

“Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return; and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

Carl Sagan.

Identity. 24° 4' 31.98'' N 120° 32' 42.252'' E

We have as many identities as people who believe in our existence. Like a star in the sky that doesn't care how many names it has had or how many constellations or astronomical systems it has belonged to.

On February 4, 2011, I changed my name legally. The reason? I never liked my first name. I decided to shorten it and simply be Dan. One of the things that most caught my attention, as I traveled the world, was the way my name changed so that people could memorize it. In South Korea, for example, he was identified as danji, by the vase where the kimchi is fermented. In China, I'm dan, the same word for egg. Even more unique, the writing. In China, Dan is no longer "dan", now it is 旦. The six traces he was used to now are three. In Algeria, four. In Thailand, two. My identity was in those traces and in the way he read my name. It was the way I was being communicated to others because it was the easiest way for them to understand who it was.

The sound is the same: ['dan] but the traces changes in every country I go to.

In how many ways could I write my name? In how many countries have I been so few traces? Was it, then, that nomadic identity that simply conformed to the place where it came to work? Because I have always entrenched myself in my resilience, in that constant personal quarrel of being able to settle anywhere in the world and learn from anonymity as an awareness mechanism.

There is a constant, like the same star in the sky that has belonged to many constellations without knowing it. And the name, however, changes, depending on who sees it, when and where. That's how I built a logo, a visual identity. Partly constant, partly moving.

The constant is structured. The movement is the identity.

Now, the one there is nowhere. The one here is now there.