Photos of Medellín’s raw, tender and fearless skateboarding culture

“The ground in Colombia is magical,” says skater and creative director Ronal Sanmartin, also known as WTF Ronnie. “Things here grow in places you never expect them to grow.” He’s speaking both literally and figuratively: Medellín, his hometown since childhood, is carved like a bowl in the mountains, filled with flowers, trees, and greenery. But the city’s cultural roots run equally deep. “We know we have a difficult story, not everything is happy here,” he adds, “but people feel so proud about their neighbourhoods, their families.”

Alongside the photographer and director Lauren Luxenberg, Sanmartin has spent the last several years documenting that pride as it blooms throughout the city’s skate scene. The result is Touching Ground, a sprawling project that spans photography, film, and more.

Luxenberg has been closely tied to Medellín for six years, she tells Dazed, after she ended up there “by accident” on a South American horseback riding trip. The first person she met there was the rapper Sr Pablo, and she soon found herself immersed in a community of musicians and graffiti artists. “The way people collaborate and create there, and come together as a community to be part of something bigger than themselves, shocked me quite a bit,” she says, “and I really wanted to start capturing that.” A couple of Colombian exhibitions followed, one focused on bringing the vibrant community of Medellín together, and a second that showed those same artists and more alongside their families – their roots.

It was during Luxenberg’s second Medellín exhibition that she met WTF Ronnie, a central figure in the city’s skateboarding scene. This subcultural crossover was likely to happen sooner or later, she suggests: “Skating is so present in Medellín, more than any other city I’ve been in. It’s a huge part of youth culture. It’s a huge part of art, and the graffiti scene. It’s a huge part of the design and filmmaking scene. Almost everyone I work with there, even if they’re not skaters, skating is part of their life.” But it hasn’t always been this way. “The first time I saw skateboarding was in a movie on television,” says Sanmartin. From the age of six, he also listened to rock music and began to see skateboarders pop up in music videos on MTV. “I always said to my mum, ‘I want to be like these guys when I grow up.’”

Skateboarding helped me to find another world, to make a life” – WTF Ronnie 

Sanmartin was raised in Manrique, one of the barrios that swelled on the hillsides of Medellín as people fled paramilitary violence in the countryside. Growing up, he played football – a national passion – but longed to be friends with a group of “punky kids” who skated around his barrio. “Back in the day, skateboarding was a marginal thing,” he says, and skaters were often regarded as outcasts or looked upon with suspicion. But Sanmartin tells a very different story: those “punky kids” welcomed him with open arms, and one even let him borrow a board. “I quit playing football,” he remembers. “A new world opened to me, and everything started to make sense. I started learning about life, about skateboarding, about new possibilities.”

More than just community, though, skateboarding offered Sanmartin a sense of escape. Despite its beauty and creativity, he adds, his neighbourhood was one of Medellín’s most dangerous throughout the 1980s and 90s. “It was almost 15 years of raw violence. Skateboarding helped me to find another world, to make a life.” 

To shoot Touching Ground, Luxenberg and Sanmartin travelled around various barrios to watch friends and other skaters hang out, land tricks, or perform daring hill bombs. What they found was a city of stark contrasts, Luxenberg says. “The weather changes very quickly. The energy of people changes very quickly. The city has a lot of beauty, but there’s a lot of pain as well.” She was left with an acute sense of the fear that’s intertwined with the history of Medellín and the struggles of its people, but skateboarding also became a symbol of their willingness to stand up to danger and uncertainty.

“Skateboarding is an opportunity to reframe fear and face it,” Luxenberg explains, even if that means throwing caution to the wind and, occasionally, sustaining some pretty severe injuries. As the photographer says: “Beauty comes at a cost.”

There’s a softer side to skating that emerges through the project as well though. Between skate sessions, the book’s subjects pose with bouquets of flowers, share a kiss in the street, or lounge around in cafes and bars. “Mostly, the things that you see about skateboarding are people [performing] gnarly tricks,” says Sanmartin, “and I love it, of course.” But, for him, Touching Ground is just as much about community and healing. Going back to a core theme of the project, the process of documenting friends and chosen family in Medellín made him feel more connected to his own roots as well.

“At points in my life I was trying to escape, but in that process I forgot where I came from,” he admits. “I needed to reconnect... with my city, with my ancestors, with the story of my family, of my country.” On the other hand, he adds: “This project is kind of an excuse to explain to my father what I was doing all these years, outside in the streets from 10am to 3am in the morning.”

The first proper shoot for Touching Ground began in January, and spiralled from one day into ten as the word spread and more people started showing up, often drawn in by Luxenberg’s openness and genuine curiosity. “The thing you learn here [is] you have to be strong to survive,” says Sanmartin. “So I was in silence a lot of my life. Now, Lauren gives me this opportunity to speak, to tell my story.” The same went for many others who became involved in the project. “All of them opened their lives to Lauren,” he adds, “because she is talking to them, asking about their lives, about their dreams.” 

This local community will continue to be involved in the project as it rolls out in book form on December 3, with a film set to follow in the new year. The official launch will take place at the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín, but it will culminate in Sanmartin’s own neighbourhood, with a huge party featuring local food, drink, and cumbia. “People are going to get crazy,” he says, with a grin on his face.

Proceeds from the book launch will also go back to the community, on top of a gift collection for the neighbourhood’s kids in December, which is especially important in a place that has been “abandoned” by authorities for many years. “The government never do shit for the neighbourhood,” Sanmartin adds. But even more importantly, he says: “A lot of people are going to get inspired, kids are going to see it and want to start a new life. I feel like they’re going to heal too. They’re going to know the barrio is important, and that somebody is watching out for them.” 

Made by Lauren Luxenberg and Ronal Sanmartin (also known as WTF Ronnie), Touching Ground is printed by the Bogotá-based Estudio Dust, with production led by Bill Abner, and design by Felipe Gonzalez, one of Medellín’s most acclaimed visual artists. The film is edited by Ronny Xavier and scored by Nathan Coen alongside Medellín’s Daniel Obregón in collaboration with musician Pablo Sepúlveda. Production design is by Laura Henao.