At 78, he has just won the Life and Work of Mincultura award. It is Jorge Alí Triana. A synthesis of a long and passionate conversation.
In my early childhood, I experienced the absence of my father, who left for Mexico when I was 2 years old. My sisters Gloria and Amparo went, very close to Ibagué, in San Bernardo, to the house of my grandparents Gabino Triana and my grandmother María Mejía, who had 9 children younger than us. My grandfather traded with panela. My father came back when I was 6 years old. Grandfather Gabino made a table with his 9 children, among whom were my uncles Miguel, Marialis and Alberto, and he made us a separate table for us 3. We returned to San Bernardo in 2019 to pay tribute to my father. My grandfather was a kind of Bernarda Alba in masculine, who bought clothes for my grandmother. One day we decided to escape from grandfather’s house and the three of us left, at dawn, on a train heading to Bogotá, to the house of aunt Ligia, mother’s sister. Dad appeared in Bogotá, we returned to Ibagué, until the family returned to Bogotá. Dad got a job as an architectural draftsman and my mother reproached him: “Did I marry a painter or an architectural draftsman?”
El Automático was the coffee of a very interesting Colombian generation. I always wondered since I was a child why the guys who went to the Cafe El Automático laughed so much. And the atmosphere was very humorous. My father had a group of very close friends there. They were Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo, Diego Montaña Cuéllar, Marco Ospina and Darío Jiménez.
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