Day 2 // Exchange
What connects the Amazon and Chocó? Two territories geographically separated by Colombia’s three mountain ranges. But in millenary times they were one. Today they maintain connections, albeit almost invisible, but present in the water. The rivers, streams, the threads of water that link the Amazon with Chocó through aquatic arteries and veins are traces of the ancestral memory that its inhabitants still defend, recover, re-interpret, re-signify and re-appropriate.
Two projects: Diálogos Posibles and Atrato Colaboraciones, presented us with their work, struggles and constructions from stories, objects, memories, dance, body, nature and harmonisation, thrown towards clear objectives: the defence and recovery of living spaces.
“Invisible matter transforming the visible”
The world of objects that we have constructed from everyday uses acquire great relevance on the second day of the Lumbung Nuquí. Each person gave us a key to open the doors of their heart, represented by an object with which we present ourselves from the material and spiritual.
Jewellery, food, diaries, keys, ceramics, illustrations, seeds, backpacks, clothes, among others. We begin to weave ourselves from the encounter with listening and affection.
“Sometimes one weaves, unweaves, makes and unmakes and makes again”. “I am the product of a mixture of cultures”.
Photo by PaulaOG
Diálogos Posibles/Possibles Dialogues
The knots that unite us in this great entanglement began in the lands of Vaupés, a territory within the Amazon region. The stories of Yuri, Alexis and Marley from the National Organization of Indigenous People of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC) and the Más Arte Más Acción team took us to the ancestry that the Amazonian youth want to preserve through active participation in their communities and intergenerational dialogue.
We have become disconnected from nature, understood as a disharmony, a physical and spiritual illness. Disharmony with nature has led to the exploitation of natural ecosystems, the suicide of many indigenous youth, dispossession and the loss of ancestral culture.
Posible Dialogues invited us to reflect on the importance of technology, a challenge in ethno-educational processes within the communities; the sustainable development models of indigenous people, which is not something new but something that goes back thousands of years; indigenous inheritance; territorial conflicts and the colonial wound. Let’s get together! Let us defend and appropriate the Amazon to fight the extractivist model that has slaughtered our territories.
Atrato Colaboraciones / Atrato Collaborations
What do we feel in the Atrato River, how do we feel the Atrato River, how do we live the Atrato River? Thinking in and from the river is part of the construction of new realities.
The territories bathed by the Atrato River, so badly hit by systematic violence, contamination by mining, assassinations, disappearances, structural racism and Afro-youth murders, have also been places for the birth of local resistance, dignified rages and significant actions towards the autonomy of their territories. Processes of reading and writing, film, dance, soundscapes, podcasts, performances, ethno-pedagogies and a re-valorisation of the Atrato River as a living, sentient body and a fundamental part of the lives of its inhabitants.
There are still questions about the legal and political figures that are only flannels in the face of the situation of violence and dispossession. Declaring rivers as subjects of biocultural rights cannot remain just an affirmative action, a dead letter. We must look at all the relationships that make it complex, because the Atrato River is the people and the people are the Atrato River.
Posible Dialogues and Atrato Colaboraciones are united by the struggle against climate change and extractive relations in their territories. The projects have exchanged knowledge with Europe and today they have come together in this meeting to consider future actions.
