First Audition for an upcoming project by Mobile Academy Berlin
May 26, 2018, Espacio Odeón, Bogotá.
In May 2018 first try-outs for a new project by Mobile Academy Berlin were shot in Bogotá. 10 candidates competed in a casting to become protagonists for a cinematic long-term observation between 2019-2029 with the title “A Chronicle of Some Future Events”. This cinematic long-term observation records the social and biographical changes following the Colombian peace agreement. It deals with descriptions of the future and with history’s ghostly repetition compulsion, employs imagination as a method for understanding reality and speculates on that which once will have been history. Right now, the past is unpredictable, much more unpredictable than the future.
The business-model of global casting-show was employed to generate an intense dialogue between the jury and the candidates. A dialogue, that dealt with the analytic and narrative capacities that are needed in order to describe the current societal transformations in Colombia.
Everybody, who can see her or himself being filmed on a regular basis over the course of 10 years, to open their private lives to the camera, can apply. Every age group, profession, origin etc. is welcome.
The planned auditions are public.
The project has been developed by Mobile Academy Berlin (Hannah Hurtzig and Karin Harrasser) based on numerous research-conversations with a wide range of Colombian intellectuals, artists and activists in the last three years. The producer is the German-Columbian company ODRADEK-FILM.
ODRADEK FILM stores missed moments of happiness.
The audition in Bogotá was produced by the Goethe-Institute Bogotá. With kind support of Espacio Odeón and Más Arte Más Acción Foundation.
First Audition Marta Ruiz
Journalist and member of the Colombian Truth Commission.
First Audition Luis Cermeño
Fantasy and science fiction author.
The authors
Founder of the Mobile Academy Berlin (MAB) in 1999. MAB makes experimental academies, theatrical facilities, speech acts on science and not-knowing, and builds units for analog and digital archives. Since 2009, she has made several art projects, congresses, and films.
Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Art in Linz. Since 2009, she has been working at the National University of Colombia and has also been a guest lecturer at Universidad Javeriana. Her research areas cover colonial history, historiography, and violence. She has been a member of the Mobile Academy Berlin (MAB) since 2008.
The jury in Bogotá
She was designated Director of the Humboldt Institute Colombia in 2010. She is thus Colombia's representative in several international environmental organisations, for example in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). In addition to her work at the Humboldt Institute, Baptiste has had an impressive academic career. She was a professor of ecology at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá for more than twenty years and was involved in environmental management policy and the conservation of rural landscapes. She was also a Fulbright Scholar and Russell Train Program Fellow at the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF). Furthermore she is also an important voice for LGBT rights in Colombia.
He was born in Bogotá in 1985. Sebastián is a Colombian TV actor who has starred in various national productions. Since his school days he has been interested in art and is still very devoted to it. He has painted, danced and worked intensively with the theater. He made some drastic decisions and left Colombia to make his biggest dream come true: to become a great actor and win the Oscar. Currently he is working on a film about his father, the toreador Pepe Cáceres, who was killed in a bullfight when Sebastián was two years old.
Professor at the Department of Social Work at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and researcher at the Center for Social Studies (CES). She studied social work and was a consultant for the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). She advises the Colombian Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation (CNRRR) on behalf of the UN Women's Organisation. From 1998 to 2001 she was coordinator and founding member of the Program of Initiatives for Peace and Coexistence (PIUPC). She is currently head of the research group Igualdad Racial, Diferencia Cultural, Conflictos ambientales, y Racismos en las Américas negras (IDCARÁN). She was an active member of the International Scientific Committee for the Slave Route of Unesco (2014-2016). She is currently researching processes of ethnic self-determination in the Colombian Caribbean.
She was born in 1951 in Cali, Colombia, came to Bogotá in the early 1970s and, like thousands of young students, became infected with the political unrest at the Universidad Nacional. She began working in political groups until she entered the semi-secret guerrilla warfare of the uprising M-19 in 1974. One of the first insurgency fighters, she fought with the most emblematic M-19 commanders, she was a militia soldier in urban combat and part of a guerilla in the countryside. She was involved in actions such as the "rescue of the sword of Simon Bolivar" and the "salvage" of five thousand army rifles. She was also present at the takeover of the Dominican Republic Embassy in Bogotá in 1980, which lasted 61 days. Maria Eugenia was a professional revolutionary for almost 20 years, 24 hours a day. With the M-19, she laid down arms in the 1990s and is since then involved in the Red Nacional de Mujeres Excombatientes de la Insurgencia to take into account the special role of women in conflict.
The candidates in Bogotá
He was born in May 1940 in Pupiales (Nariño). His parents were farmers from the Andes region. He studied at the Universidad de las Américas in Bogotá and later worked in the Ministry of Economic Development. In the 1970s, he completed a master's degree in administration in Monterrey, Mexico, as well as a formation in industrial standardization and quality control in France. His activities for the Ministry took him to South Africa, among other places. He was Professor of Administration at the Universidad Nacional, EAN and Universidad de Piloto in Bogotá and at the Universidad de Cundinamarca in Facatativá. Since his retirement in 2000, he has had more time to devote to his passion, music, so he began to learn the guitar. Although he suffered two heart attacks, he is in good health thanks to his sporty activities.
He is a fantasy and science fiction author. Cermeño publishes articles, stories and interviews in various print and online media, e.g. in the Chilean magazine Cinosargo. He explores cybercultures and develops models and practices of future thinking. He founded the storytelling contest "I am the robot!" in Lima. Together with industrial designer Camilo Cantor he participated in the fourth edition of the Campus Party Colombia and coordinated a workshop for short stories with QR codes. With Noches de Oriente (2009), he has published a selection of Thousand and One Nights for Children. Together with Andrés Felipe Escovar and the legendary Julián Andrés Andrés Marsella Mahecha, the main character of the story, he published the novel Tríptico de verano y una Mirla.
The communication scientist works at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. She was born 57 years ago in Bogotá and has a 28-year-old daughter, Camila Borrero García. Her main research interests are: communication and development perspectives, communication strategies in the field of human rights and endangered communities, environment, health and nutrition, evaluation of communication strategies and cultural projects, epistemology, theories and methods of communication science, narratives and text forms, culture and memory. She was scientific coordinator of the Social Communication course at the Universidad Javeriana and head of the Department of Communication for Social Organisations.
She studied industrial design. She also graduated from the Black Maria Film School with a diploma. She is active in collaborative learning projects and is a cultural manager for activist and free art and culture projects. One of her projects is Radio Vallena, a collective radio station that travelled the Pacific coast of Colombia to Panama City and told stories about migration, resistance and the struggle for land. She is interested in South American futurisms. She is currently director of the cultural foundation Más Arte Más Acción.
She is a historian and documentary filmmaker. Alejandra founded the organization H.I.J.O.S in 2005, "because society should know who our parents were, because if we do not know the pain and life plans that this conflict has cost, it will not change". Her father, Francisco Gaviria, a student leader, would have become a journalist if he hadn't been executed in a political murder campaign between 1985 and 1994, like 4,000 other members of the Unión Patriótica party. In the 8 years of its existence, H.I.J.O.S. emphasizes the need to remember the victims in the face of media manipulation and the omnipresent aftermath of war. The organization works with artistic interventions, social networks, videos and documentaries. The distorted and interest-led image of victims as potential guerrilla allies was corrected by aesthetic means.
He was born in Bogotá on 2 May 1963. As a child he was very playful and had a passion for football, a sport that he still pursues as a fan of Millonarios FC. He has three children and a little granddaughter who enlightens his life. Carlos remembers the 80s as the most violent time he had to live through. At that time, he witnessed one of the bombings in the city up close. In his spare time he likes to cook, his specialty is pasta. He loves dogs and likes to remember his shepherd dog Rex and his pit bull Kaiser. In his work as a driver of the Goethe-Institute he has travelled through large parts of the country. In Bogotá he knows every corner and its history. He enriches the city, whose traffic chaos he sometimes still doesn't understand, with his relaxed and calm driving style. For 13 years now he has been crossing the streets for the Goethe-Institut.
She is a writer, researcher and activist. For over thirty years, she has supported local cultural heritage and, as a human rights activist, supports the victims of the armed conflict, especially women and young people. With an intercultural and historical perspective, she coordinated the activities of more than 50 women's organizations in Ciudad Bolivar (Bogotá), Villavicencio (Meta) and Valledupar (César), as well as in Santiago de Chile. She was nominated for the National Peace Prize in 2001. Her literary works include: Crónicas locales: poblamiento en Ciudad Bolívar, Mujeres, tierra y memoria, Historias en sepia y negro, Narrativas culturales and Palo del ahorcado.
She is a member of the Colombian Truth Commission. Marta is a journalist and studied political science at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She has worked as a television reporter for investigative and discussion programs of Caracol TV, Canal Capital and Señal Colombia, but her main activity has always been writing. She worked first in Cromos, then for ten years with Semana, where she was an editor for security and conflict. As a columnist she has written for the cultural magazine Arcadia. She also led the VerdadAbierta.com portal. She has twice won, in collective works, the IAPA Prize for Journalistic Excellence, the King of Spain Prize, the IPYS Prize for investigative journalism and the Simón Bolívar Prize. She was also a professor at the Universidad de los Andes and a teacher at the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo.
