Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá

Traspasos

trazos y pasos

This is the result of an ongoing dialogue through screens and across continents, experiences, writings, sensorial expressions and reflections. We have been inspired by many lessons learned from lives lived within, across, and entangled.

This was, and is, a year of ambivalences and contradictions that invite us to imagine how to live beyond borders. Considering the fluidity of frontiers, we sought ways of how to move beyond different forms and discourses of confinement. Yet, we also remain vigilant to experiences and meanings of forced displacement at a times like these of world restrictions, lockdowns and prohibitions. Thus we asked ourselves what movement and connectivity mean as they seem to have become an illusion that only takes shape through zoom calls, the staring out a window or by holding tight a memory. To think of movement and connectivity as feelings of loss, absentia, despair and impossibility become catalysts if not at least surrogates for a much needed vulnerability, pushed us to search for points of connection with others; with that other that lives and cuts across a society and a city that resists to homogenize as it awakes to the fractures of its own history. Because this year also took young folks to the streets as their government told them not do so for the sake of others. But they still did it because they needed to, because life’s barriers, borders, walls and structural chasms cannot be truths we must continue to accept under mandates of those that believe that critical thinking corrupts and artistic expression is a neoliberal product tainted orange.

For us, this first time experiment with this research-creation class shared with students at Bard Berlin meant that we embarked on a journey open to surprises and bruises but most all, the feeling of cool air against rugged skin. Nourished by critical readings and artworks our conversations were uplifted by the echoes of chanting, drumming and voices of protest and the crumbling of colonial symbols emanating from the streets of Bogota and across the country, despite facing violent police repression. In that same spirit of refusal this journey meant the possibility of taking a risk to engage the affective registers of lives—ours, theirs and others— shaped by acts of xenophobia, colonial mentalities, inequality and privilege, as much as the weight and exhaustion of movements that inhabit our everyday paths, spaces, soundscapes, imaginaries and structural materialities. At this point we can say, and believe, that this process of reflecting on, and more so artistically working with materials, sounds, stories and memories of such lives opened up a space for reliving, exploring, unveiling and imagining. Of facing the very real implications of everyday life in a society built on so many types of borders that encroach us but still we continue to refuse through the possibilities of collective thinking and artistic practice.

Course Director: Juan Ricardo Aparicio

Workshops and Curating: Juan Orrantia

Graphic Design: Taller Agosto

With contributions from: Tania Vanessa Álvarez Alvarado, Ana María Cortés Madiedo, Valentina Becerra Salazar, María Andrea Campo Santos, Ana Catalina Cantini Monsalve, María Camila González Trian, Sofía Gómez Quevedo, Michelle Carolina Jácome, Linda Mychell Lamprea Parada, Sofía Sánchez Bello, Laura Valentina Sánchez Benavides, Manuel Alejandro Torres, Nataly Irene Galindo Perilla, Juliana Alvira Herrán