Miss Colombiain 2015 after Steve Harvey misread his cue card during the Miss World pageant and incorrectly awarded the top prize to Miss Colombia, instead of Miss Philippines. “I was not expecting the Colombian diaspora to be so upset,” Pimienta says of the backlash that followed Harvey’s mistake. “It was too much, they were really taking it out on Miss Philippines and calling her all kinds of racial slurs. It was just shameful.
Ahead of the release of Miss Colombia on April 17, Lido Pimienta told i-D how the sounds of Colombia and her own personal history shaped one of the year’s most reverent albums.and you said, “sometimes I feel like I’m not Colombian anymore. But I know that I’m definitely not Canadian, either.
You see the way I have positioned myself on the cover? I want it to look like the virgin having her first communion, but also being baptised, having her quinceañera and getting married -- all the pivotal points of being a lady, the Colombian women. That’s what my obsession with my country looks like. For ten years I had to figure out how the fuck I was going to live in Canada. I didn’t get this country, I didn’t feel like I belonged here.
You recorded some of the songs in San Basilio de Palenque, a place that is hugely important to African people, especially the descendants of people who were enslaved in South America. But it's also a place that has largely been white washed from Western history. Can you tell me what that town means to you and how it's connected to your own personal history?