Mingas of Imagination

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).