When you talk of a displaced person, you’re talking about someone who’s marginalized, who has no cultural values, who is down and out, who lives in bleak neighborhoods where there’s no cultural outlet, where there are educational needs. But when you visit these places you realize these people have a wealth of knowledge and some incredible cultural practices. So the main thrust of the project is to turn those discourses around and show the other side of the coin, which is that people shine with dignity, with what their past has taught them and show what they can do with their future. That’s the main idea behind the project. If you take a look, the houses are painted using colors like tangerine, peach, colors that light up their homes, because they give them identity and beauty. They love the houses, the albums. If they didn’t like those objects they wouldn’t ever want to display them. Taking part in the exhibition was a matter of pride.

The dignity I’m referring to is about recovering personal integrity in every sense of the word. The great majority of the people who took part in the project had one of their basic rights taken away: having a piece of land, living on it, wandering around on it, expressing themselves symbolically on it. When that was taken away from them, they were hit by a very strong identity crisis as to who they were, what they are, what they wanted to be. And the conditions under which they arrive in these neighborhoods affect every part of their lives. It’s “easier” for a person in this situation to leave their past behind and be swept up by the dynamics of the city, get caught up in city jobs, bend to the demands of the city, instead of continuing to develop the skills, practices and traditions they already had. One of the basic ideas of this project is to encourage people to raise their hopes, feel better, become a better community, a better collective through the desire and pleasure they derive from doing what they know how to do. And this gives a totally different meaning to the label placed on the construction of territory. I was overjoyed when Ernesto and Gerlys --who focused on cultivation and cooking practices in the project-- decided to open a restaurant. They decided to leave their jobs as a caretaker and cleaning woman and took the risk of opening a restaurant, because focusing their attention on the world of cooking made them happy. That changed everything. In a year and a half they saved enough money to return to the Huila, which is where they’re from. They could have continued doing their old jobs for years and years, suffering from enormous mental and physical depression. Stripping people of their territory is a form of social control, sucking them little by little into the city’s productive systems through the lowest layers, earning the lowest wages without learning anything: it’s brutal.

[…] For me the act of creating is fundamental, I think it’s essential for human beings nowadays. I think it’s really terrible that it’s been left by the wayside. You can’t disconnect your way of relating to the world from the way you recreate the world through what you do, the actions you carry out. When I decided to do this project with the families of Bellavista, I saw a need to open up spaces for creation with them. This didn’t just mean sitting down with them and listening to their stories: by talking to each other, taking pictures and arranging them, we were tuning into that frequency of sensitivity that both they and I needed. Those spaces magnify the way one views experiences in life and help provide a broader perspective.

July 2013