2022, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá

La Frontera y el Telar

Border Weavings

Negotiating being back together in the same space, we felt the cold. We felt it moving through us as an effect of the weather, but also as affect. Outside, members of the Emberá communities huddle in precarious conditions at the National Park, graffiti artists continue to confront and be confronted in the night as they move through the city creating traces, and young musicians leave their warm weather lands for the search of opportunities in the capital city.

The cold moves through us and we move through it, connecting and dispersing. Memories are woven together through a warm plate of food from the family recipe. So do life and death, or rather death and its invisibility are woven as we invoke the memory of 17 Venezuelan migrants who died quietly crossing the high mountain paramos of Colombia. We trace and follow the affective threads of cold movement through documents, discourses, bodies, hearts and minds, in roots of uprooted communities seeking to establish new roots in this cold city as much as in the generation of new ideas, choices and experiences of bodies, genders and affects. We felt the cold not as metaphor but as state of reality, lived experiences of movements that produce ruins and dreams, as an invitation to think and re-member and reassemble new lives, bodies, memories, resistances and imaginations as forms of interaction. The cold of Bogota keeps us awake.

Course Director: Juan Ricardo Aparicio

Project Supervision and Curation: Juan Orrantia

Graphic Design: Taller Agosto

With contributions from: Santiago Franco, Julián Barreto, Sara Lewis, Laura Ronderos, David Urrego, Cindy Rozo, Alejandra Torres, María José Heredia, María Ordóñez, Catalina Silva