Bahia Solano, is a coastal town in Chocó, a province or “department” of Colombia on the Pacific coast. The legal economy there relies heavily on fishing, but it is also part of one of many transportation routes in the cocaine trade. Chocó itself is historically the center of Afro-Colombian community. Many Africans escaped slavery and travelled there to in order to make a living in collective land-groups. Collective land ownership is now enshrined in laws of the region. About 80% of Chocó is of African descent with most of the rest being indigenous Emberá. The Emberá were traditionally politically organized in small independent family clusters, but have themselves innovated larger scale collective organizations to fight for land rights.
Colombia has been racked by violence in the last decades. Over 10 million people have been displaced internally due to the violence there, fueled by politics, the drug economy, and illegal gold mining. Dozens of armed organizations fight for control of lucrative territories: paramilitaries, guerrillas, and more straightforward drug cartels. That is more people than have been displaced during the recent conflicts in Syria. Chocó is one of the centers of this violent displacement. Most people in Bahia Solano have been forced at gun point from other areas and have stories of murdered friends and relatives. The recent peace treaty with the FARC did little more than create a temporary lull in the violence, which has once again been accelerating as other groups move in to fill the power vacuum, they left behind.
Dr. Cody Ross of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, started long-term field research in Chocó in 2012, working with local Emberá and Afro-Colombian communities. The following video is a collage of footage taken at the start of our project to visually document life in these communities and the implications of displacement on the people of Chocó. Everyone in these clips has experienced displacement due to violence.
It is also visually an experiment. Rather than try to create a clear, linear narrative, I experiment with a collage of images without much text. Rather than attempting to create an arc of images that gives a feeling of capturing a complete picture, I hope to give sensory snapshots that make the unknown spaces between them obvious and therefore themselves present. While providing a felt experience of place, I also hope to disturb the tendency of narrative film to create illusions of knowing.
I’ll be joining Cody this winter to work further on the documentary about life after violent displacement.
