Juan Manuel Echevarría´s _“Filme NN”_ in _“Contraexpediciones. Más allá de los mapas”_ at the Museo de Antioquia, Colombia
The Museo de Antioquia presents “ Contraexpediciones. Más allá de los mapas”, a reflection through diverse artistic practices on the forms in which local communities inhabit their territories.
This exhibition uses art to address themes like the environment, biodiversity, ancestral wisdom, agriculture, communal memory, urban development, and indigenous and rural populations.
As part of the academic program of “ Contraexpediciones. Más allá de los mapas” there will be a showing of the documentary “Réquiem NN”, by the artist Juan Manuel Echavarría, which exhibits the burial practices that the inhabitants of Puerto Berrío have for the bodies of the NNs (No Name) that they find.
The exposition reviews concepts such as landscape, not only as an art genre, but also as a representation that portrays the form in which human groups relate to territory through their cultural context and social issues. The name of the exposition is an answer to the colonial, imperialist, and Eurocentric imaginary implicit in the term “expeditions”, like the ones that occurred in Colombia in the 19th century. This imaginary motivated the Museo de Antioquia to propose a series of counter-expeditions that visualize different perspectives on territories, and the collaborative construction of the knowledge on them. The exposition present a fragment of the current state of diverse environmental issues, as well as communal knowledge and the alternative micro-politics that have surged as a way to counter them, placing all of this in the bigger context of the socio-environmental conflicts of the country.
About Echevarría´s film
Puerto Berrío is a town situated in the banks of the Magdalena River in Colombia. For more than 30 years, its inhabitants have been rescuing the bodies, or the pieces of the bodies, of victims of violence that have been thrown into the river.
These unidentified corpses, known as NN (No Name), would be destined to a mass grave. However, for decades, the people of Puerto Berrío have adopted them, given them names, decorated their tombs, and brought them water, gifts, and flowers. According to their beliefs, the spirits reward the living by giving them protection and conceding them favors. Some of the people even baptize the dead with their name and last name.
“Through this collective ritual, I think the people of Puerto Berrío are telling the perpetrators of violence: ‘in our community we do not let your victims disappear; we don´t know who they are, but we make them ours’.” Said Echevarría.
The film “ Réquiem NN” shows how this ritual reconstructs the social fiber that has been torn for decades by continuous cycles of violence in Puerto Berrío.
