By Monica Delgado

Within the Short & Mid-length: Artists’ Moving Image section of the recent Rotterdam International Film Festival, you can see EKOBIO, a Colombian short film by the artists’ collective formed by Elkin Calderón Guevara and Diego Piñeros García, which is the result of a multimedia project which is based on the texts of the Afro writer and researcher Manuel Zapata Olivella, who died in 2004.

Based on extracts from the epic novel Changó, el gran putas (1983) by Zapata Olivella, the artists explore the sense of identity, belonging and memory from a liminal state and point of view of African cultures from a specific and current territory: the islands of Bocachica and Ararca, in Cartagena, which still preserve the remains of colonial strongholds and the resistance to a type of vision anchored in the past about the diaspora. And this correlation or tension of the present from the voice of the community with this architectural memory that refers to a past of oppression is the core of this short film that also seeks to generate a type of question about the very process of filming or recording from the outside.

The work begins with a clarification, or in any case from the meaning of the word “ekobio”, which Zapata Olivella assumes and explores in some passages of his essays. “It arises from the need to find a word that would identify the black without using this word. In African peoples, where identity is not expressed by the color of the skin, it will be absurd to use it (…) the word has been expanding its meaning, extending to people who were not black ethnicity, but in their behavior, they assume their defending”. And this quote at the beginning of the short film proposes two announcements of possible readings about what we are going to see from the figure of the ekobio: on the one hand, the defense of an identity and the resistance in a process of colonization whose lags are still in force, through the classism, racism, displacement, poverty in Afro communities in Cartagena. And the approach to this premise from other social components such as the presence of the picó, giant speakers used in street parties in popular neighborhoods, with a particular colorful design,  that culturally depicts a social and musical mix around the African diaspora. And on the other hand, the perspective or position of the artists, who are also perceived as ekobios in defending the demands of the characters they record.

Using some devices of the documentary, of the quote, or of the appearance behind the scenes, the authors combine a register layer of the characters in articulation with a space that models them, while another layer exposes the very feelings of the actors. and actresses reciting passages from the work of Manuel Zapata Olivella. And here not only appears the grain of a literary text that takes on a visual dimension thanks to the characters, but little by little EKOBIO becomes the materialization of a critical perspective on representations, on how African and Afro-descendant communities have been recorded in the audiovisual. And also about what artists can do from their “ekobio” place to materialize this resistance.

If in Zapata Olivella’s novel the source that is nourished is a critique of Eurocentrism, both in its historicist proposal and in the analysis of a colonial past from this archeology of slavery, the artists Calderón and Piñeros appeal to this proposal to precisely dismantle the place of enunciation and the modes of representation in the audiovisual, therefore appealing to the musical culture of Picó as an alternative to the ruin of the forts or factories of colonial exploitation.

Sección Short & Mid-length IFFR 2022
Directed by: Elkin Calderón Guevara, Diego Piñeros García
Script: Elkin Calderón Guevara, Diego Piñeros García, Belmir Caraballo Díaz, Belmir Caraballo Díaz, Evenazar Blanquicett Godoy, Alexandra Castro, Seny Blanquicett
Cinematography: Elkin Calderón Guevara, Diego Piñeros García
Editors: Elkin Calderón Guevara, Diego Piñeros García
Sound: Eduardo Cote
Music: Álvaro Cuéllar
Colombia, 2022, 23 min