Image Mingas

Between 2016 and 2020, a network of peers and collaborators has been formed around artistic and cultural themes and practices of native peoples that seek to broaden the academic horizon, provide critical and practical tools to students from indigenous nations in Colombia. We identified these young people through programs in university institutions (in which we have participated), through their own networks and thanks to information from the Indigenous organization of Colombia (ONIC) and sister organizations. Most of them have currently studying at university in Bogotá and other capitals of the country (Medellín and Popayán, for example). Through bi-annual calls we create bridges of solidarity with these and other young indigenous (and non-indigenous) students and graduates, we hold meetings with academics, practitioners, artists, writers, activists and share - in minga - enriching experiences for all. Our objective has been to return to ancestral sources of knowledge transmission (oral narratives, production of material culture and the bonfire) in urban contexts, open horizontal and participatory spaces where they share skills that can complement their academic process and finally where they can share their experiences as young migrants, in many cases uprooted by the multiple violence in the country, in universities and with other young people (from similar communities as in the case of young Afro-Colombians).

Audiovisual Minga March 2016

The audiovisual production workshop was held between March 14 and 16, 2016. Based on a theoretical-practical framework on the fundamentals and basic knowledge of audiovisual production, the aim was for participants to establish familiarity with the production of audiovisual narratives of a documentary nature.

In only three days and collectively, three short documentaries were produced, which have become emblematic pieces of a committed, situated and reflective work on the possibility of working in an intercultural way. Our intention to revert the dynamics from consumer of cultural products to maker (producer) of them began and has remained one of the lines of work.

These are the descriptions of these first short films produced:

NONUYA nonuya

Mogaje Guiju (Don Abel Rodríguez) arrived long ago in the city from the Aracuara (Colombian Amazon). Don Abel tells the story of displacement, his people (the last Nonuya), his encounter with the city, his livelihood and knowledge. Don Abel is now a renowned artist who lives between two worlds, the memories of his home (the rainforest) and the concrete jungle that is Bogotá.

Spinning Memories

Tirsa Chindoy is an Inga performance artist from southern Colombia. Through this action that interrupts the flow of time and urban space (in a university in Bogota), voices of young indigenous leaders are heard, who tell what they bring with them when they arrive in the city.

Minga Urban Art September 2016

For September (6 to 8) 2016, the second minga was organized with the theme collective experiences of training in graffiti and mural painting. In the preparatory conversations around the bonfire and a community meal, we discussed about the central mural that would be made in La casa Misak, a key place for the indigenous movement in Bogota, as it has hosted young people from different communities in their intercultural training trips. For this minga we had the support of graffiti artist Lorenzo Mashna (from the AP collective with StinkFish, one of the most important artists of the Latin American scene). We were also accompanied by the artist Jeisson Castillo and had the support of Benjamin Jacanamijoy Tisoy (Inga) and two young indigenous painters (one Nasa and one Kamëntsá).

In the academic spaces of the minga at the Javeriana University, film-mingas and discussions were organized with the active participation of young people from the Afro community of the university, we saw the film Los hongos by Oscar Ruiz Navia. Finally, we had the very active presence of Professor Federico Luisetti, Director of the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who gave a lecture entitled: Anthropocene, political animism.

COCA Minga April 2017

The themes proposed in the work with community critics were: food sovereignty, life histories and epistemologies of the coca leaf.

On the first day, the approach was based on pictorial and audiovisual languages. Miguel Rojas Sotelo presented his book Irrupciones / Comprensiones / Contranvenciones. The reflections that this book articulates on works in tension such as those of the Nonuya painter Abel Rodriguez, helped us to reflect on the place from which each one of us tells our personal and collective stories and to ask ourselves for whom and how we are communicating them. Abel Rodriguez, a survivor of the genocides caused in the first decades of the twentieth century due to the exploitation of rubber in the Amazon regions, resituates and resignifies through his paintings the trees and fauna of his early years. He also rearticulates in part the incarnated knowledge, as Rojas would say, that the extractive process displaced the migrant memory after the loss of traditional territories.

On the second day we walked from the University to the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, where we held workshops with Xaverian students and indigenous students from the Externado and other universities. We continued working on the vegetal materiality of the writings, specifically on and with coca leaves. The workshop began with the collaboration of Fredy Chikangana, Yanakuna oralitor, and Jorge Cadavid, Colombian poet and editor, who shared readings of short contemplative Japanese poetry. From these simple but profound structures we assembled small texts in Spanish and in indigenous languages such as Damana, Quechua and Namtrik. Then we proposed to combine the texts with the coca leaves or to produce new texts or images from the coca leaves. This is how leaves on leaves and texts where vegetal fibers and multilingual alphabetic traces were interwoven emerged. When visiting ONIC's radio station Dachi Bedea with the whole group, we shared some texts, voices and greetings that were replicated digitally and sonorously for some media and community radios. In this way, the social projection of the results and internal work was sought.

Luz María Lepe and Teresa Dey, who remotely proposed exercises based on methodologies such as the exquisite corpse, as they tell it in their text published in this same book. The writing exercises were combined with telling us some of our stories, sharing translations and sharing mature experiences such as those of the philosopher and amazonologist Fernando Urbina, who shared the reading of some of his poems. In fact, Urbina is the author of Las hojas del poder, a book where he combines poems and stories about the coca leaf, as well as the ritual preparations of the mambe murui/uitoto, transcending the conventional border between philosophy, poetry and ethnography.

Students were asked to choose kintus or groups of three coca leaves and to arrange them on the ritual table located above ground level. The dialogues first revolved around the collective prejudices about the coca leaf, which is actually a medicinal plant central to the food, religious and intellectual sovereignties of the peoples. Its curative uses, nutritional properties and ritual functions were discussed. The problem of its by-products and industrial deformations was addressed in the particular case of cocaine and Coca Cola. In fact, the Nasa collective that works with the Coca Sek energy drink, told us about the process opened by the Coca Cola Company of Atlanta against the collective for using the word coca in a soft drink that, according to their version, was the property of the company.

JAMU_HAMBRE.MP4

Finally, the Wayuu writer Estercilia Simanca talked with the students, from whom she received recognition for her literary career as well as for the relationship of her work with processes of justice and social reparation among the Wayuu. Here she reads her short story "Jamú" (Hunger).

Mingas Chumbe and Oralitegrafies August 2017

On August 3 and 4, 2017 we gathered around collaborative works on music, chumbe weaving and oralitegraphies. At the headquarters of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia we worked the first day around some of the graphic proposals of Benjamin Jacanamijoy, connoisseur of Inga textile art. We started with the image of the uigsa, or belly, in the form of a rhombus, to build some more complex ideas based on the visual codes that are usually captured in the long woven chumbes sashes. We worked with colored threads and with poems alluding to the act of weaving on which we experimented with some visual translations.

GP020059.MP4

The Tumtaquimba family and their group Ayllu, Kichwas (Otavalo) in Bogotá shared their life story of urban transhumance. They affirm their identity in music, traditions, food and clothing, in addition to the sporadic return to their ancestral territory (Otavalo in Ecuador). Thus, they are part of a nomadic tradition of weaving merchants in the world.

Kallfv Mingas | Blue Mingas. October 2018

Convocatoria Mingas Oralituras 2018.pdf

The special guest of these meetings was precisely Elicura Chihuaialaf, a Mapuche oralist from the Wallmapu, or Mapuche country, divided after its occupation at the end of the XIX century between the current republics of Argentina and Chile. Kallfv is the word for blue in the Mapundungun language. Kallfv evokes and invokes the infinite celestial blue from which descended the first spirit of the people of the earth: the Mapuche. Kallfv is also the place where the spirits and the vital and pristine force of life, beauty and spirituality go.

Chihuailaf presented in 1999 his famous book Recado confidencial a los chilenos (1999). The Mapuche oralist has been characterized since his first publications in the midst of the dictatorship and repression of the communities, such as El invierno y su imagen (1977) and En el país de la memoria (1988), for establishing a critical tone, although measured, mature, and above all conversational. This is clearly expressed in Recado when he invites readers to sit down and listen to the conversation he establishes with other people to tell us in his ear about the impact of the occupation of the ancestral territory, to help remember what the official history does not tell, and to argue in a sensitive and situated way for Mapuche, indigenous and blue sovereignty.

These mingas were rounded off with a cineminga and community forum where the documentary Ushui, the moon and the thunder (2018), made by Pablo Mora in collaboration with the audiovisual wiwa collective of the Sierra Nevada, was screened.

Mingas of languages and traditional knowledge. April 2019

In these mingas we collaborate with teachers and speakers of native languages from different nationalities and communities of the country. The opening was performed with a concert of guitar and songs in Otavaleño Kichwa of Ecuador by Luis Enrique Tuntaquimba and his son Sergio. The sensitization, the taste for the language, was the best starting point. Many people know that native languages exist, but they are usually seen as a matter of misnamed "minorities", often exoticized and of interest to anthropologists and linguists. Until the 1990s it was common, if they were known, to speak of them as dialects.

In Colombia, there are 65 indigenous languages, 2 Afro-descendant Creole languages, the Romani language of the Roma or Gypsy people, and the sign language, as well as many other languages spoken by migrants or foreigners with permanent residence. The group of young sign language speakers, coordinated by Hilba Milena Jiménez, first made us understand the structural discrimination of educational spaces designed only for those who hear with their ears or speak with their vocal cords. As they spoke to us with their hands, gestures of the face and the whole body, we understood our own expressive limitations, especially in a world marked by the dispersion in touch screens and virtualizing hyperconnectivity.

These mingas were the ideal moment to collaborate again with the poet-philosopher Carlos Miguel Gómez. After close collaborations in the late 90s and early 2000s, Carlos Miguel had spent academic seasons in Australia, England and finally obtained a PhD in Germany with the book Interculturality, Rationality and Dialogue (2012). Thus it was that the Cineminga of these days revolved around a series of short documentaries directed by him in conversation with yagé doctors, trainees and patients.

Finally, the linguist and singer Jitomañue (bird song), Murui from the Amazon, rounded off these mingas with one of the quintessences of language in movement: a dance in which students and attendees, following the traditional chants and the rhythm of feet and legs, formed an immense canoe or ancestral serpent, which left the room, crossed the aisles and marked a gesture of union and understanding between our peoples, knowledge, histories and languages.

Flags Mingas, ideographies and recyclable stories. August 2019

Between August 15 and 17, 2019 a series of meetings, conversations, screenings, recitals and creative workshops on own stories, recycling, flags and ideograms took place. Celebrating the creation of the Center for Eco Critical and Intercultural Studies, the crumb focused on a collective action of contextual type in which we visited the recycling area of the Javeriana University, where we learned about the life processes of the materials around us.

Translation talk by Wendy Call

Tribute to Humberto A'Kabal

Offering to Master A'kabal

We had the participation of Fullbrigh professor Wendy Call (Lutheran University, United States) with a presentation entitled: Ecological images in the poetry of Irma Pineda (Zapotec) and challenges in translation; in addition to professor Dalia Patiño Echeverry (Duke University) who gave a presentation on the life cycle as a potential for change to face the environmental challenges of the present. A workshop was held on the translation of an environmental commitment document.

In a creative workshop a number of flags were made symbolizing autonomous bodies and territories, as nations where the discourse of acceptance, commitment to others and the environment are the drivers of thoughts and actions.

As a central event we present the anthology of the poetry of poet K'che Humberto Ak ́abal, No permitan que el ayer se vaya lejos. Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana, 2019. As part of the posthumous tribute to his name, a collective poetry reading of his work was held.

Finally, a minga discussion on indigenous and intercultural studies: art criticism and literary criticism in the international year of indigenous languages was organized at the Caro y Cuervo Institute with the participation of Miguel Rocha Vivas (Universidad Javeriana), Juan Duchesne Winter (Director of the Ibero-American Magazine, University of Pittsburgh) and Miguel Rojas Sotelo (Duke University, National Prize for Art Criticism).

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