María Fernanda Carrillo Sánchez (U Autónoma de la Ciudad de México)
& Isabel Restrepo Jaramillo (U Nacional de Colombia, Medellín)
Magnetic Bojayá: Audiovisual Memories of the Atrato and Colombian Pacific Archive (1994-2008)
Juana Suárez (NYU) moderator / translator
From Session 2 of 16 — Black Atlantic/Black Pacific: Archives, Restitution, Activism — at Orphans 2022: Counter-Archives, Concordia University, Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. A moving presentation by documentarian-archivist-scholars working with archives of Afrodescendent and Indigenous communities in western Colombia. Bojayá magnetica refers to the hundreds of mini-DV and VHS magnetic tapes in the collection. Key fact: The town of Bellavista in Bojayá, located in the Pacific coast state (departamento) of Chocó and in the Atrato River region, was the site of the “Bojayá massacre.” On May 2, 2002, more than 100 people were killed by a bomb launched at a church in which they had taken refuge amid the civil war. Building a community archive of local video documentation (a counter-archive) and producing new works from it are means of generating counter-hegemonic memories, of performing reparation. These actions require an ethical commitment to return recordings and memories to the communities they document, to allow for self-recognition and the reinforcement of cultural identities.
Within the presentation (at 19:16) is the 15-minute documentary Memoria Audiovisual del Atrato y el Pacífico Colombiano 1996 – 2008, completed in 2020 by director and editor María Fernanda Carrillo, featuring interviews with the collection managers Jesús O Durán and Dianne Rodríguez. Project Coordinator Isabel Restrepo. New English subtitles added for this screening.
Click to enlarge, or watch at vimeo.com/731125880
Q&A for all panelists followed, which you can watch here.
María Fernanda Carrillo Sánchez is a filmmaker, sociologist, and Lecturer at la Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México. She has a master’s degree in Documentary Cinema and is a PhD student in Arts, Documentary Cinema, UNAM. Director of Cantadoras. Musical Memories of Life and Death in Colombia (2017) and other ethnographic works using of audiovisual archives.
Researcher and historian Isabel Restrepo Jaramillo is leader of the research line in Archives, Ethnography and Audiovisual Historical Sources, as well as Coordinator of preservation project for the archive “Memoria Audiovisual del Atrato y el Pacífico.” She is a member of the Research Group of Social History (GISH) attached to the University of Antioquia and the National University of Colombia, Medellín. She holds a master’s degree in History, with an emphasis in audiovisual patrimonial management and film preservation. She is author of the book Narrativas de la historia en el audiovisual colombiano (2019) among others publications. Isabel is also the agent for the personal archive of filmmaker Carlos Álvarez.
See also . . .
La historia se repite (History Repeats Itself, 2005) [link to stream] 48 min.
Collective creation: Grupo de teatro de Bellavista (Bojayá)
Three years after the Bojayá massacre, the Atrato communities are once again experiencing a serious conflict situation in the territory. The advance of the paramilitary project in the region, the constant guerrilla take-backs, the absence of the State as guarantor of the rights of the communities, and its presence as a promoter of an extractive economy, exacerbated the violation of human rights and the installation of a development model that does not obey the perspective of well-being, ethno-development and collective property, for which the different social organizations of the Atrato and Chocó rivers have fought. In Bellavista, the municipal center of Bojayá, the tragedy of exile is once again experienced and the indigenous and black communities of the Bojayá River are directly affected by the advance of the Elmer Cárdenas bloc of the paramilitary AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), some displaced and others suffering forced confinement. To denounce this situation in the commemoration of the third anniversary of the Bojayá massacre, the Bojayá theater group created La historia se repite (History repeats itself), in which the actors represent the resistance of the people, the insistence to defend the territory and stop the war, as well as the territorial control of the armed actors, the broken promises of the politicians, the violation of human rights, the arrival of the extractivist companies, the cattle ranching and the oil palm crops. After its first presentation on May 2, 2005 in the rebuilt church of Bellavista, La historia se repite was presented in Quibdó, Bogotá, and Medellín.
The audiovisual record of this work was made by the Communications Team of the Diocese of Quibdó during a presentation on the Quibdó boardwalk in 2005.
- For more about the project, see the Corpografías website, especially the page for the 20 Bojayá project videos and Audiovisual Memory of the Theater in the Atrato.
- Memoria Audiovisual del Atrato y el Pacífico YouTube channel.
#Orphans2022
