Contribution short abstract:

This film explores how collective reparation it is posible, or not, through documentary in the context of arm conflict at Bojaya, Colombia. The archives and the collaborative work are the keys to reach memories in order to repair.

Contribution long abstract:

Documentary has become a juridical way of reparation in Colombia, there are different films made by the State because sentences that demand to repair the victims through documentary. However, these productions seem assignment jobs very similar among them, they are made for a very small group of researches and filmmakers, with lack of participation from the communities.

This research and film proposal, in stage of development, try to create a process that involve the reparation of the victims at Bojaya, Colombia. Through a collaborative process from three years ago, I have been working with the organization of victims at Bojaya, place where at massacre at 2002 happened, with the responsibility of legal an ilegal arm actors. In this procces I have recorded the institucional act or reparation at 2019. I also recorded the local and communitarian ritual of reparation for the direct victims of the massacre, following the afro-colombian funeral rites.

Recently, I have been worked in a collaborative way with the communication committee of the organization. We have proposed a project about the audiovisual archives of the community, we had find exceptional memories and we are reflecting about them, in order to create one or some films for the "Memory Place" that the community asked to the State as a way of reparation.

I would like to participate in this panel because I considered this Conference as the right place to reflect, not only about the formal language of cinema, but about the complex proccess that this project involves.

Contribution short abstract:

Motetzahui is a multimodal co-production of immersive and multisensory storytelling technologies to evoke the alternate modes of perception afforded to the Nahuales of Milpa Alta, Mexico City.

Contribution long abstract:

Motetzahui explores the co-production of immersive and multisensory storytelling technologies to evoke the alternate modes of perception afforded to the Nahuales of Milpa Alta, Mexico City and trace the processes and implications of co-creating extended reality (XR) storytelling environment with indigenous knowledge guardians. Building on ethnographic fieldwork with the Nahuales of the Nahuatl-speaking cultural organisation, Calpulli Nahui Ollin in Milpa Alta, a rural municipality in the south of Mexico City, this practice-based research will experiment with emergent forms of immersive and multisensory storytelling technologies to co-create, critically negotatiate and activate speculative futures according to the lifeworlds, narratives and alternate perceptions of the Nahuales of Milpa Alta.

The Calpulli Nahui Ollin offer a decolonising lens through which to understand the Nahual, a trickster entity understood by contemporary Mexicans to be bad brujos, evil sorcerers or shamanic shapeshifters who can turn into jaguars or curse a lover. According to the Calpulli Nahui Ollin, a Nahual is a person of wisdom (or knowledge guardian) who acquires ancestral knowledge about their local environment and plays a political role by imparting cosmic wisdom to their neighbourhood.

Motetzahui is currently at the pre-production stage - I will go on fieldwork soon after March 2023. My project will benefit from the feedback and network of peers on the concept and narrative structure of the multimodal piece.

A link to a current set of images related to the project: https://josesherwood.com/mesoamerican-futurisms/

Contribution short abstract:

Not many Black women own a pristine piece of the Amazon rainforest in our protracted age of gendered and racialized extraction. This filmic meditation introduces audiences to one such person, Aunty Joan, who may not be just one person, and whose possession of 357 precious acres is far from settled.

Contribution long abstract:

Not many Black women own a pristine piece of the Amazon rainforest in our protracted age of gendered and racialized extraction. This filmic meditation introduces audiences to one such person, Aunty Joan, who in reality may not be just one person, and whose possession of 357 precious acres of land is far from settled. Informed by Afro-Indigenous Guyanese Spiritualist—or Komfa—philosophies and practices, Joan is also Dolly, an ancestor spirit known to be bassidy, a Creolese word meaning something close to “beyond normality.” A journalist and novelist now in her eighties, Joan has for decades struggled along with her guide Bassidy Dolly to secure legal right to occupy Yukuriba Heights, a once-self-sustainable organic farm and arts commune situated deep in the Amazonian Essequibo region of Guyana.

The meditation presents excerpts of memoir in conversation conjoined visually with layered archival and original footage portraying extraordinary and mundane facets of Guyanese life. Scenes of labor in the colony’s diverse industries stretching back over the past century are foregrounded as sights and sounds of the peopled landscape, along with the “work” of contemporary Komfa ritual. A key component of the story woven with Joan’s biography is Komfa’s role in supporting Guyanese—specifically as descendants of colonized, enslaved, displaced, and indentured peoples of mainly African, Indigenous, and Asian heritages—in challenging and redirecting the basis of their subjugation under Europeans’ regimes of production that endeavored to commodify people as possessable property. In Kriiyoliiz (or Creolese), Guyana’s lingua franca, Komfa is a term reductively recognized as “spirit possession.”