La Bonanza del Olvido (2017)
audiovisual media in stereo fixed media + video
created in collaboration with Nicolas Aguia (music) and Luis Fernando Gomez Allba (video)
“La Bonanza del Olvido’s idea comes from the researches and historical memory activities by sociologist and filmmaker Luis Fernando Gomez with the research group CESYCME (Centro de Estudios Sociales y Culturales de la Memoria), in the department of Guaviare, Colombia. In virtue of a documentary film that Gomez made entitled El Retorno de Las Gaviotas, I became aware with the history of the inhabitants of a small town called Gaviotas in the region of Calamar (located in Guaviare). A lot of its residents are part of the Afro-Colombian community of the Choco region—located in the Pacific Coast of Colombia—that migrated searching new job opportunities; leaving behind a land devastated by exploitation of mine labor and unemployment.
At the end of the 70’s, these families started to populate Calamar, region that was before inhabited by Colombian natives like the Carioca and Witoto. Around this time, cocaine made its unwelcome entry into the Colombian economy. A lot of them started to harvest coca on their small parcels of land, as well as the customary rice, yucca and cacao. As years went by, the Calamarenses found themselves in the middle of a conflict that has taken the life of 220 000 Colombian lives. In this piece for video and electronics (fixed media), two narrators tell the stories of some of the people remaining in Calamar and, more importantly, how they managed to survive as a community in the midst of a terrible and long civil war. The two narrators tell the stories that Luis Fernando Gomez has collected by interviewing the people that still leave there, and the video comprises the images that the filmmaker has taken in Gaviotas during the last 5 years.” - Nicolas Aguia