Date: Tuesday 22 March 2022
Time: 6:30pm
Venue: ICA, Cinema 1
Films: Fu, María Rojas Arias, Andrés Jurado, Colombia, 2018, 16mm transfer to digital, 9 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles
The Rebirth of Carare (El renacer del Carare), Andrés Jurado, Colombia, 2020, 16mm transfer to digital, 21 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles
Open Mountain (Abrir monte), María Rojas Arias, Colombia, Portugal, 2021, 16mm transfer to digital, 25 minutes, Spanish with English subtitles
This programme brings together works by María Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado, founder members of creative laboratory La Vulcanizadora. Focusing on rural communities in Colombia, the three films retrieve and reimagine peasant past histories and mythologies, starting from material traces and oral narratives. The filmmakers work around silences, absences and open wounds existing within official history, and they project possible futures by interweaving personal, family and collective memories into their imaginative vision.
Exploring the importance of affection and intergenerational transmission, these works experiment with ways of giving the voice back to those remote and sometimes extinct communities. Rojas Arias and Jurado draw inspiration from the villagers and workers whose existences they reanimate, and honour manual labour and artisanal methods of production by rewriting them through image and sound. Dealing not only with the villagers’ lives, the filmmakers research their co-existence with the local flora and geomorphology.
In Fu (2019), the god of dreams from Muisca cosmogony offers its name to the Fúquene lake, whose biodiversity is threatened by industrial development. Fu seems to take shape in a dummy made from textiles and regional plants, and moved by the wind, in a revealing integration of material and immaterial dimensions.
The Rebirth of the Carare (2021) brings to life a script created by the Association of Rural Workers of Carare (ATCC) in the 1980s, resorting to the technologies at the basis of the ATCC audiovisual production: slide projectors and audio cassettes. Addressing the Colombian armed conflict and its impact, the film revisits the association’s strategies of resistance.
Open Mountain (2021) focuses on the short-lived existence of a guerrilla group founded in the 1920s, called Los Bolcheviques del Líbano, whose revolution lasted only one day. Matriarchal voices channel the initial urge of that aborted rebellion and its legacy, simultaneously reflecting upon its everyday details and its transhistorical dimension.
The screening will be followed by a conversation between the filmmakers and Professor Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Birkbeck).