The Colombian capital provides the starting point of the project "The Future of Memory". Under the curatorship of Mapa Teatro, artists and experts from different disciplines will reflect on the pain, remembrance and oblivion faced by the victims of the armed conflict in the country. At the same time, a performance action will open the dialogue between the participants to rethink those conflicting memories and their territories. Thus, the story, the imprint left by it and its poetic reinterpretation will be the central outcomes of this meeting which seeks to create a space for artistic exchange away from official discourses and practices.
Chat Radio / Frontier House
Laboratory
Mnemofilia and lotofagia II
Radio Chat
Frontier House
Live radio shows in collaboration with different communities.
October 22nd - November 19th
Bogotá and Buenaventura
A text that refuses to be told as synthesis, to be “recovered” in its content, to be subsumed into a single voice. It’s in that concert of voices, made to dialogue there where they might have never met, where stories begin to emerge as a true identity laboratory. Nothing is defined beforehand, not even the beginning of the story. No identity is fixed, invariable, here or there. Instead, there are drifts of a discourse, hesitation, sudden discoveries, reactive forms of self-affirmation “there,” or transvestisms of assimilation (“being like them”), emphatic—and sometimes late—acknowledgments of “us.”
Leonor Arfuch
"Chat Radio" (Radio Conversa) is a radio space that promotes meetings, stories, and conversations about memory and territory, social fabric, and culture. Its interest lies in preserving and disseminating the memory of various communities in Colombia using the voice of the people and social leaders of the regions; therefore, it travels around and is broadcast from different places. The possibility of conversation opens the way: it means spinning words and listening carefully to advance in the demonstration of affection, acknowledgment, and thoughts.
A wooden house, 3 meters wide by 6 meters long and 2.5 meters high, is the scenario where the conversations take place. This house incorporates the sculptural processes of the “Frontier House” art project, inspired by some spatial and material characteristics of progressive self-construction houses, which are built by families living in the first stages of forced migration, having just arrived to the peripheries of the big cities.
Built by Juan and Manuel Bermúdez—inhabitants of the Bellavista neighborhood in the municipality of Soacha—, the house has wooden beams, shelves, and tongues and grooves enclosing a single space, zinc roofing, a door, windows, and an adapted mounting-dismounting system enables its transfer to different sites.
“Chat Radio / Frontier House” is, therefore, the aesthetic device chosen for the second action of the “Mnemofilia and lotofagia” lab, created by Óscar Moreno Escárraga with support from the Observatory of Social Poetics of Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano. This activity will give continuity to some elements explored in the first encounter led by Mapa Teatro in Bogotá.
Archive
Ancestral Citizenships
“Ancestral Citizenships” discusses citizenship as a process of recognition built by communities over time and in connection with the territory. This configures various forms of collective action and appropriation of public space as a common good.
The second show, “Chat Radio: Cultures of Memory,” recorded in the district of Ciudad Bolívar on November 5, focuses on artistic and cultural practices as living memory processes in their capacity for poetic and political agency, from different communities.
On October 28, the house was moved to the district of Usme, in Bogotá, to record the first show, “Chat Radio: Territories of Life.” This program addresses the logics of the growing urbanization and capitalization of life regarding forms of social organization rooted to ancestral memories and a different use of natural resources.
A journalist of the Arcadia magazine accompanied us in this action, and her article “Memory in Four Walls” is a good summary of what happened that day.
Plastic artist Leonel Vásquez and some inhabitants of the Bellavista Parte Alta neighborhood in Soacha conducted the recording of various sounds from domestic and common neighborhood spaces to create a sound piece that was shared with the community of the area and the attending audience last October 22.
Inside the house, there were several chairs and a center table with tea. People entered the house in groups to hear the 45-minute long recording, so that it could be reproduced several times throughout the evening. Additionally, a live radio broadcast was conducted for the people of the neighborhood.
General production: Óscar Moreno Escárraga.
Production of the sound piece: Leonel Vásquez.
Voice of the presentation: Ivonne Martínez.
Music of the presentation: Dany Ledesma (voice and percussion) y Marvin Posadas (saxophone) from the Mache Mache musical group, and Daniel García (vibraphone) from the UNAL Music Bachelor.
Mnemofilia and Lotofagia: Consumption of memory and drivers of oblivion
Wednesday 29th and Thursday 30th March
Mapo Teatro, carrera 7 No 23 - 08
After listening to the testimony of one of the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia, under Experimenta/Sur, five Latin American experts from different disciplines, a Brazilian-Argentine anthropologist (Ludmila Da Silva); a Caribbean writer (Roberto Burgos Cantor); a Colombian judge (Gloria Guzmán); a Brazilian psychoanalyst (Suely Rolnik) and a Colombian political scientist (Iván Orozco), will present their respective proceedings of memory: anthropological memory, poetic memory, judicial memory, memory of trauma and historical memory.
The testimony, collected as part of the Colombian Women’s Truth and Memory Commission, will be introduced by Alejandro Valencia Villa, a Colombian lawyer and expert in truth commissions, accompanied by philosopher Adriana Urrea.
Subsequently, specialists and artists will jointly activate these proceedings through five apparatus of memory/oblivion, designed by Mapa Teatro. The objective is to spatially, temporally and poetically restore the inaugural story in order to visualize and problematize the large and complex mechanism of memory, particularly in the context of violence such as that experienced in Colombia. Twenty artist fellows, six experts, invited artists and curators and ten witnesses will participate in the laboratory. At the end, the public will be able to experience this authentic and collective exercise of symbolic elaboration on stage.
Curators
Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden are scenic and visual artists. Founders and directors of Mapa Teatro art lab, headquarters for Experimenta/Sur in Colombia. For the past 30 years, the curators of this artistic and academic platform have developed their own notion of the live arts on the continent. Since 2009 they have also been the managers and teachers of the Interdisciplinary Master in Theatre and Live Arts of the National University of Colombia.
Master in Visual Arts and Master in Cultural Studies from Universidad Nacional de Colombia; doctoral candidate in Social Studies at Universidad Externado de Colombia. His artistic proposals address the relations between the body, poetics, and everyday life, and they draw near other disciplinary and cultural practices that involve aspects such as autobiography, ethnography, psychogeography, collective memory, and cultural representation. Moreno has participated in several national and international art exhibitions, and has organized different cultural and academic events. Since 2006 he is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts program at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, where he coordinates the Observatory for Social Poetics.
Invited guests
Teacher and researcher and currently the director of the Museum of Anthropology at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina. Da Silva holds a Doctor’s degree in cultural anthropology as well as a Master’s degree in sociology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research explores topics such as violence, extreme situations and memory. Among her publications are No Flowers will grow on the tombs of the past. The experience of reconstruction of the world by relatives of the disappeared, and The archives of repression: Documents, memory and truth, a compilation in collaboration with the sociologist Elizabeth Jelin.
Writer and lawyer. Author of novels such as The Patio of Lost Winds, The Flight of the Dove and The Ceiba Tree of Memory; the latter won the 2009 House of the Americas Narrative Award and was Rómulo Gallegos 2010 finalist, for addressing issues such as slavery, colonialism and American identity. His work also includes seven collections of short stories, among which are Lo Amador, Of Joys and Sleeplessness and Child’s Play.
Judge and prosecutor. Over the past 25 years she has participated in the dismantling and prosecution of criminal gangs (bacrim) in Colombia, as well as in the fight against the violation of international humanitarian law and human trafficking. A university lecturer and author of Investigative Techniques for Sexual Exploitation of Children, Guzmán launched the first action model for child and adolescent victims of sexual crimes in the country.
Psychoanalyst, curator and art critic and associate professor of Clinical Psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. In her work, Rolnik mainly focuses on the politics of subjectivation in different contexts. She is the creator and director of "Archive for a work-event", a project to activate the body memory of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, composed of 65 video interviews. Rolnik is also the author of texts like Manifeste Anthropophage: Anthropophagie Zombie, and Sentimental Cartography. Contemporary Transformations of Desire.
Lawyer from the Pontifical Javeriana University with a specialization in Constitutional Law and State Theory of the University of Mannheim and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Mainz (both in Germany). As an academic, Orozco has taught at the University of the Andes, The National University of Colombia, Kassel University, Augsburg University and the University of Notre Dame. A former adviser to the High Commissioner for Peace during the negotiations in Havana, Orozco has made fundamental contributions on human rights and justice in Colombia.
Lawyer. Currently working as a professor and consultant on human rights, humanitarian law and transitional justice. Villa was a member of the interdisciplinary group of independent experts of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights on the case of Ayotzinapa in Mexico. He has worked as an expert before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as well as a consultant to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He also worked with the Truth Commissions of Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Guatemala.
Philosopher. Professor from the Pontifical Javeriana University and director of the Master’s Programme Theater and Live Arts of the National University of Colombia, Urrea has combined her academic life with work in publishing, arts and culture. Her theoretical work was developed in the field of aesthetics and poetry, philosophy of art and politics and its relationship with literature, with special attention in the literary work of the writer Roberto Burgos Cantor. Founder of the first literary agency in Colombia, La Bicicleta Invisible (the invisible bicycle), Orozco was also deputy director of Fostering the Arts and Cultural Expressions of the former District Office for Culture and Tourism.
The Factory of the Common: Conflictual memories and territories
31st of March
Mapa Teatro, carrera 7 No 23 - 08
"The Future of Memory" will culminate in Bogotá with the presentation of The factory of the common, conceived and directed by the art collective Kom.post. Conflictual memories and territory are put into a performative arrangement of conversation, in which those interested in discussing this dimension of memory can participate.
The scenic arrangement consists of heterogeneous meetings at several tables, where different interlocutors exchange knowledge and practices to create a common experience. "The Factory of the Common" is written from singular words and languages, since gestures, bodies in movement and peoples’ demeanor also "speak". This cycle, proposed in the framework of the France-Colombia year, was inaugurated in late January in Cartagena and will now pass through other cities such as Bogotá and Barranquilla.
Artists
This collective was created in Berlin in 2009, bringing together artists and researchers from different countries and various disciplines. Their project, "The Factory of the Common", was released in 2010, in the artistic center Le 104, in Paris. It has since been presented at various international events such as the International Festival of Buenos Aires (FIBA), the Moscow Biennale, the Avignon Festival, the Berlin festivals Tanz im August and Transmediale, the Eleventh Plateau in Athens and Island of Hydra, among others.
French playwright and philosopher living and working between Brussels, Paris and Athens. She teaches at the Universities of Paris 8 and 7. As a playwright she worked with different international directors and choreographers, among them Pascal Rambert, Robert Cantarella and Rachid Ouramdane. In 2010 she obtained the "Villa Medicis Hors les Murs" and also won a scholarship for a 36-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. During the 2016-2017 season, she has worked as an associate playwright at the La Bellone art center in Brussels. For the cycle of "The factory of the Common", Louis collaborates with Amalia Boyer.
Philosopher. She has spent her life between France, Colombia and England, where she completed her studies at the University of Warwick and Anglia Ruskin. She has resided in Colombia since 2001, and has worked as a teacher and researcher in the field of contemporary French philosophy, political philosophy, feminist philosophy, Caribbean thinking and aesthetics. Currently a professor at the University of Rosario, she also coordinates the inter-institutional group for research in aesthetics and politics between the universities Rosario, Los Andes and the National University.