The casting of the candidates speculates on the following talents: Are they suitable as seismographs or as blueprints for coming social changes? Are they a medium that depicts and records social processes? The jury asks about involvement, shrewdness and survival skills.  The casting will test the applicants’ analytical or intuitive abilities to describe the present social situation and which futures will flash up in their stories about Colombia’s past and present.

Is the conclusion of peace perceived as the end of a period of history? The staged casting situation enables concentrated questioning and discussions in which the candidates and the jury portray themselves. The fictionalisation empowers the protagonists to speculate about the future in a country in which many people cannot imagine a future, the future is recorded as already stolen and history is assumed to be forced to repeat itself. Hannah Arendt called this “exercising one’s imagination in walking”, Siegfried Kracauer “making holes in the wall”. Event and documentation are therefore history in the making: a talk about what was and is and what will once have been history.

The Jury for the audition in Bogotá, May 2018:

Brigitte Baptiste is an internationally recognized expert on biodiversity and an important voice for LGBT rights in Colombia. She is head ofthe Humboldt Institute in Bogotá.

Sebastian Eslavais the male lead actor ofthe Colombian Netflix series La niña, which deals with the return of an ex-Guerillera to civilian life.

Claudia Mosquerais a professor for social workat the Universidad Nacional. She has worked for many years with displaced persons in Bogotá as well as on the legacy of slavery in Colombia.

Eugenia Vazquezhas been working since the 1990s with former guerrilla fighters in the Red Nacional de Mujeres Excombatientes de la Insurgencia.

The Future of the Dead
A presentation by Mobile Academy Berlin and colleagues

The presentation weaves scattered threads to talk about the dead in political discourse, historiography and the sciences.

Karin Harrasser and Hannah Hurtzig have been investigating Colombian connecting lines of memory and possible future thinking since 2015. In the course of their research, they interviewed a number of contemporary witnesses from fields as diverse as human rights, gastronomy, biodiversity and various fields of knowledge in art and scientific research. In Cali they will now present their joint project “Chronicle of some future events”. In this long-term documentary film, the relationship between time and memory will be explored speculatively by projecting the daily life of ten Colombians into an imaginary future.

Furthermore, two colleagues from Bogotá, María Victoria Uribe and Claudia Mosquera, will join the conversation with their research on images of the dead (Uribe) and the legacy of slavery in Afro-Colombian culture (Mosquera). Together they will ask whether mourning can be understood as a special mode of historiography that opens the past towards the future without overlooking its violent effects on the present.

Claudia Mosquera Rosero-Labbé
Professor for Social Work at the National University Colombia (Bogotá) and researcher at the Centro de Estudios Sociales(CES). At the moment she leads a research group on racial and cultural equality, ecological conflicts and racisms in the “Black Americas” (Idcarán).

María Victoria Uribe
Anthropologist and professor at Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá. Her fields of research are the violence of politics and contemporary conflicts. She was the director of the Colombian Institute for Anthropology and History between 1994 and 2005. She was also part of the group researching historical memory forthe National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation.

The presentation took place in Cali on 11 August as part of “La carretera al mar”, a co-production of the Goethe-Institut and the Museo de la Tertulia. Museo La Terulia, Edificio de la Colección, Cali

Chronicle of some future events: First audition in Bogotá

Concept, script, research: Hannah Hurtzig and Karin Harrasser / MAB
Director: Hannah Hurtzig
Jury: Brigitte Baptiste, Sebastian Eslava, Claudia Mosquera, Eugenia Vasquez
Candidates: Julio César Belalcazar, Luis Cermeño, Claudia Pilar García, Ana Garzón Sabogal, Alejandra Gaviria, Carlos Emilio Martínez, Blanca Pineda, Marta Ruiz

Cinematography, Camera 1: Josephine Landertinger
Light and camera 2: Javier Hernández
Camera 3: John Hernández
Sound: Sonia Poveda
Sound assistant: Juan Manuel Fernandez Mora
D.I.T.: Juan José Murillo
Make-up: Wendy Acosta
Photographer: Sebastian Bright Ceballos
Translation 2: Carolina Valderrama
Technician Odeon: Omar Santafé Arévalo

Management Goethe-Institut: Wenzel Bilge
Team at the Goethe Institute:
Production management: Lucia González
Overall coordination: Anne Bechstedt
Production assistant 1: Christina Pirner
Production assistant 2: Sophie Wolf
Translation 1: Juliane Schindler
Driver: Carlos Martínez
Legal counsel: Juan Carlos Tavera
Technicians Goethe-Institut: Candelario Arias

The ODRADEK-FILM project is produced by MAB and the Goethe-Institut Bogotá.

With special thanks to: Tatiana Rais of Espacio Odeon, Más Arte Más Acción, Fundación NATIBO, University of Art Linz, Austria and Katja Kessing, Martha Nubia Bello, Jésus Martín Barbero, Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden, Marta Ruiz.