Catalina Muñoz, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)

Catalina Muñoz, Daniel Ruiz-Serna, Ana Luisa Ramírez and Jenry Serna

Abstract

This project is a collaboration between two afro-Colombia social leaders from the Chocó region, a collective of documentarians, and a history professor. Together, we aim to explore the potential of storytelling and collective research and creation to empower communities that have been victimized in the context of the Colombian armed conflict, but who have also resisted and persevered on living dignified lives in their territories. We research and produce reparative counter-histories that contribute to community organizing generating knowledge about the local past and cultural identity, while also amplifying voices of underrepresented communities who have disproportionately suffered violence. Our project started with the collective production of Nuestra Orilla, an eight-episode podcast series that tells the story of the lower Atrato, a region in the northern Colombian Department of Chocó, from the perspectives of its inhabitants and through the life story of its narrator: Ana Luisa Ramírez Flórez. Nuestra Orilla challenges the location, temporalities, and methodologies used to tell the histories of violence in Colombia, in the hopes of producing counter-histories that can help repair the ways in which we relate to each other and to our surroundings. As a result of this project our community partners, Ana Luisa Ramírez and Jenry Serna, founded "Ronca el Canalete", a training school in leadership and communication skills for young people from their region. In this new phase of the project, we will continue to strengthen our collaboration with two objectives. First, we want to foster an intergenerational dialogue between elders and traditional knowledge keepers, on one hand, and youth on the other, around traditional plant knowledge. Second, we will mentor a group of young people from Ronca el Canalete in developing their research and communication skills through the production of a podcast episode based on their experience of intergenerational transmission of ecological knowledge with the elders.