Memory, as a theme, has been a constant in my work, running through it since the beginning of my career, from several of my own documentary works and video installations to most of the films I have produced. But it has been even more present in my work as a programmer and curator. I am obsessed with memory, especially in the context of Colombia, given the fact that it is almost non-existent, mainly because of an entire society’s pathological denial of specific events and their implications and, by way of this denial, merely submitting to the dominant discourse that changes meanings, omits by cutting off entire perspectives and sections or by making archives disappear or simply by diminishing the value of the very meaning of memory in the construction of a national narrative. In that narrative, which again does not exist, in which sadly the only communicating vessel we share, or seem to share, is violence itself, images can tell us much more than one might think. Beyond simple remembering, memory can interrogate, take us to another level of storytelling.
In 2017, I began developing a documentary project based on Colombian news archives from the 1980s (OUR FILM, 2022). During my review of these archives, I discovered the image of a body — covered by a white, blood-stained sheet — lying on a ping-pong table in the middle of a space filled with people whose screams expressed indignation.
Beyond simple remembering, memory can interrogate, take us to another level of storytelling.
I came back to this image some time later, sensing that I knew the place: it was the Universidad de Colombia’s León de Greiff Auditorium, the auditorium where my college graduation took place. The image stood out from the many other horrific images I viewed in more than 600 hours of footage because of its “rawness”, in the sense of not processed, which in turn suggests the idea of exposed, fleshless skin: “a thing stripped of its usual trappings and adornments”, as Rosset defines it.1Clément Rosset (1988): Le principe de cruauté (The Principle of Cruelty), Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1988. There were many others like it, but that image in particular had something that I couldn't stop questioning.
The León de Greiff Auditorium, EL LEÓN, as it is known within the university community, has also been a symbol of knowledge, community, and encounter; and it became a place where death and its manifestations, including its most solemn rites, threw into relief the paradoxical sense of this place of gathering. The relevancy of the auditorium has grown — beyond the original significance attached to its use — transformed by the violent circumstances from which no sphere of Colombian society was, or rather is, exempt.
The image stood out because of its “rawness”, in the sense of not processed, which in turn suggests the idea of exposed, fleshless skin.
That image, the one that inspired this film, surprised me not only with its rawness, but also because of its connection to my personal surroundings: that same space (the León Greiff Auditorium) where what seems like an improvised wake takes place on a ping-pong table, in a place where I had attended thousands of concerts and recorded music albums and seen many wonderful plays. The image reminded me that, in that very place, I had also attended two other funerals —also of murdered teachers— and how the imminent nature of violence in our lives became evident after I became aware of it. I remembered that it was sunny the day of Chucho Bejarano's wake, one month after the assassination of journalist/activist Jaime Garzón, and that I had only just started studying film at the Universidad Nacional. I also remembered, acknowledging the fragility of memory, that no one much remembered what had happened to Bejarano, and that I couldn’t recall ever seeing the news of Professor Alava on TV, that his death was just one of many.
Within this context, I was interested in working on two fundamental ideas: first, on the way in which the images created at the time were recorded and forgotten; and second, the way in which revisiting those images presents us with a new reading of the space where they took place; but, at the same time, of the meaning of that space as a “death zone” which, as Mbembe defined them, “are not remnants of a process of social decomposition, but rather the effect of violent forms of resource appropriation [that] have increased their complexity of action…”2Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture, Volume 15, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11–40.. This last point refers to the reinterpretation of the León de Greiff Auditorium space as a pantheon, as a place that houses the dead, to death and the symbolic level of such events and, in particular, to the normalization of the auditorium's new use, echoing those “death zones” that appropriate everything and turn the whole of society into a stage for their violent actions, leading to the total normalization of unspeakable events. The assimilation of “raw” events and “death zones” as “normal” and “everyday”.
Diana Bustamante
