Lido Pimienta is a Toronto-based, Colombian-born interdisciplinary musician and artist-curator. She has performed, exhibited, and curated around the world since 2002, exploring the politics of gender, race, motherhood, identity, and the construct of the Canadian landscape in the Latin American diaspora and vernacular.
Lido’s Polaris Music Prize-winning album La Papessa (2016) charts an evolution from her debut LP Color (2010), an album full of (as the title suggests) colorful landscapes and positive vibrations. La Papessa takes a more personal approach, describing how she has found her independence as a woman and as an artist who refuses pre-conceived notions of what a pop Latina artist ought to be. The album was written in multiple cultural and geographic settings — the desert of indigenous Wayuu land and the northern mountains in Colombia, as well as Canada, in both Toronto and London, Ontario — and the music, in turn, reflects these settings. The sounds on La Papessa take listeners on a musical journey from traditional Afro-Colombian percussion to global bass and darker avant-garde electronic sounds. Lido’s piercing, explosive, and heartwarming voice unites the compositions, beats, and harmonies, resulting in a perfect labor of love and sound that highlights the creative voice of this talented artist.
