5 Video Clips from Colombia: Machines of Resistance

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Since April 28, 2021, Colombians have been on a national strike for many reasons: inequality, poverty, historical exclusion, and the disregard of a peace agreement that allegedly was signed to end more than fifty years of armed conflict. For more than a month, people on the streets all over the country have been creating new spaces for resistance and collective organization.

Together with snap-producer Umbra, I created this list around the idea of resistance through technology. In Colombia, as part of the so-called Global South, machines and technological advances have always been more about the oppression and optimization of the labor force. From colonization to coloniality as an imposed rationality, the idea of underdevelopment has been positioned as our condemnation. As artists, cultural managers, and activists, we have been excluded from the creative, innovative, and hegemonic narratives around technology.

More than ever, in the context of the national strike, we affirm that our mind and collective dreams, through imagination and alternative uses of technology, go beyond physical and oppressed bodies. In this process, machines liberate us, and they become vehicles of resistance – diverse, plural, and radical resistance. This selection jumps from sonic fiction to audiovisual landscapes and intimate dreams.

We propose a short trip through sonic and visual initiatives that consolidate new worlds, technological and nostalgic utopias, and dystopias. As of last year, we intend to amplify local and diverse initiatives as part of the work of ECO: a platform for independent and horizontal electronic music communities.

Music: Verraco
Camera: Ross Uribe
Editing: Doppelgänger
Assistant: Retrograde Youth
Track: Our New Order (Colombia, 2020)

Public transportation in a country like Colombia can be a space of reflection and vivid dreams of the future we pursue and a space that also defines our present. Through this premise, Verraco and Insurgentes introduce us to their utopia with a soundtrack of IDM from Latin America.

The city of Medellin, surrounded by various architectural and social nuances and at the same time by the mountains, is explored from the visual point of view. The subway allows us to observe, but we move simultaneously on the plane of our thoughts. Many images appear in a burst: those visions/thoughts of the longed-for future.

The question regarding machines and technology arises again: are they a way forward, or will they inevitably subjugate us? We do not know, but we hope, we dream, we build better futures on our way home.

Music: House of Tupamaras (K.Hole_Kardashian & El Traste with M.C Honey Vergony)
Art direction: Claudia Currea & Javiera Valenzuela
Editing: Raúl Vidales
Track: M4RICON4 (Colombia, 2019)

House of Tupamaras explores what is categorized as «Mariconeo y Pluma»: stigmatized and excluded gestures and movements in public places. The collective is interested in nightlife and parties as places of knowledge construction and meeting between different groups. The camera is a tool to visualize and focus on what has been so stigmatized, hidden, and rejected about sexual and gender dissidence, using «voguing sudaka» as a platform of expression. In this video, technology is a means of representation and visibility. But technology is also the incarnation of a sudaka cyborg: marica, dissident, part of a collectivity that builds diverse horizons every night.

Music: Ambivalencia
Editing and Production: Ambivalencia / Camila Valencia
Track: El Agua También Brilla (Colombia, 2020)

Camila Valencia (Ambivalencia) is a visual artist inspired by the universe of nature and the cyborg. She is currently a VJ and works with video and analog machines and mixers like the Edirol V-4. These she connects to DVDs, devices, etc., loaded with videotapes that she records herself or finds on the internet or on cassettes. She also gives her visual touch by appropriating machines through circuit bending: opening them and manipulating their circuits. «El Agua También Brilla» is a call to strengthen local possibilities to transform the current pandemic situation and environmental crisis. It proposes unity, the recognition of local knowledge and traditions, and the consolidation of networks to protect and use resources for futures that today seem unimaginable.

Music: Lamediscos
Editing and production: Umbra / María Camila Figueroa
Track: Carrera Circuito (Colombia, 2021)

Colombia is a country defined by patriarchal and violent structures. Being a woman or part of the LGBT community is all about the rage and the constant frustration of being called hysterical for standing against harassment, rape, and the pact of silence inside our communities. Umbra seeks to visualize the private dimension of this context through distortions. She carries out the distorting action with digital tools, in a form of art therapy with which she seeks to overcome pain, traumas, structural violence, etc. The video’s visual narratives transform the pain and enhance the positive, translating emotional and intimate processes into textures and shapes that offer an alternate reality: a space of harmony and absolute security.

Music: DJ Pai & The Baker / NEA$ Medellín
Editing and production: Desfase aka El4stik
Track: Caunces City (Colombia, 2020)

Y hasta aquí los deportes, país de mierda

(And so much for sports, shitty country)

NEA$ aims to show the country’s political problems, such as police violence, institutionalized violence, and the ultra-right-wing. The images are placed in an animation of six televisions to criticize the government’s media manipulation. The message is clear: «The police do not take care of us», «The police harass, rape, murder, kidnap and torture».

However, in this video, screens are also tools of communicative social resistance: spaces to open the eyes of the vast majority of society. The film offers a way of thinking of a media utopia, and an articulation between music, sonic resistance, and political awareness of the violence the country lives through every day.

Biography

Luisa Fernanda Uribe studies sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies in Colombia. She has been working on feminist spaces since 2010 with a particular interest in the participation of women in public spaces and nightlife in Colombia and Latin America. She is one of the founders of Pez Alado, a feminist collective that works against harassment and violence in clubs and that also creates tools for safer and more inclusive night spaces in the country. She is also a founder of ECO, a platform increasing the political awareness and participation of different agents of the industry in urgent debates about collectivity, decolonization, and other key topics. Follow her on Instagram.

Published on June 09, 2021

Last updated on July 02, 2021

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5 Videos Clips From India: Asserting Equality

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by Suvani Suri,

Shiraz Iqbal

India has been in the throes of a political, social, and civic crisis driven by the nationalist ideology of a communal majority. As mass mobilizations and resistance movements of unprecedented scales and intensities proliferate throughout the country today, what undeniably lies at the heart of the ongoing crisis of democracy is the discriminatory reality of a caste society.

Against this caste order, the Dalit subject is not merely a sociological identity that suffers this brutality, but a revolutionary one as declared by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the insurrectionary constitutionalist.1 Rejecting the violent thinking of a hindu (non)society of unequals – a society that attempts to lock inherited grades of difference into (caste) destiny – Dalit identifies the collective and unconditional thinking of a society of equals2 for constituting a new «common».3

In an interview with The Wire, Yashica Dutt, author of Coming Out as Dalit, observes a shift from «mainstream discourse or pop-culture validating ‹upper› caste images» when she was growing up, to recent times which have been witness to a steady spate of emancipatory and powerful assertions by «Dalit directors, actors, musicians, and academics who are claiming their rightful place in the country’s history and culture». The list that follows is an attempt to turn towards and listen to such a multitude of recent unequivocal assertions in the field of music that declare a radical equality and commit their unwavering voices to the struggle for truth and justice. It is through listening to these scintillating resonances, egalitarian utterances, rhythms, and registers of sound, that we may be able to traverse the impasse of history and the contemporary moment.

Music: The Casteless Collective
Video: Pa. Ranjith, Neelam Productions
Track: Magizhchi (India, 2019)

The Casteless Collective is a 19 member band of hip-hop, rap, rock, folk musicians and «Gaana» singers (a form of ritual music associated with mourning) that was started by filmmaker Pa Ranjith and producer Tenma in 2017. The ensemble takes its name from the lexicon of 19^th century anti-caste activist and writer Iyothee Thass. Their songs, composed and performed in Tamil, are incisive in their take on contemporary politics, caste, and class discrimination and minority rights.

Other than performing as an ensemble, the members are also producing their own albums and tracks. Isaivani, the only woman in the group at the moment, was recently featured in the «BBC’s 100 women 2020» list for her contributions to the age-old field of «Gaana music», a largely male-dominated space.

«Magizhchi», their debut music video, is Tamil for ineffable joy. The song moves through a vibrant dramatization interwoven into street performances and summons the revolutionary power of love and fraternity to exit the atrocities of a hindu caste society.

Music: Arivu & ofRo
Video: Ken Royson
Track: Kallamouni (India, 2019)

This song, a layered political satire, features Tamil rapper Arivu, who has been writing for The Casteless Collective. Together with producer Rohith «OfRo» they released the album Therakural in 2019. Kalamouni (sly silent fellow) zeroes in on the hypocrisy of the selective outrage or deliberate silence in the face of injustice and discrimination in the hashtag era. Choreographed against a vast landscape with stark red hues, it holds up a mirror to the complicity of us, the listeners, in structures of oppression that benefit from the liberal posturing.

Music: Ginni Mahi, Amar
Video: Yash Mahi
Track: Fan Baba Sahib Di (India, 2016)

A young Punjabi singer, Ginni Mahi (or Gurkanwal Bharti) made waves when only 17, with her phenomenal interweaving of Punjabi folk instrumentation and familiar tunes with no-holds-barred rap in her song «Danger Chamar», an expression of Dalit pride and a searing rejoinder to oppressive structures that thrive on invisibilising caste identity in order to keep perpetuating systemic violence. «I don’t want to talk of caste, I want to break it», she declared.

Her single «Fan Baba Sahib Di» (a fan of Baba Sahib Ambedkar), is an exuberant paean to the radical thinker of equality, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, whose emancipatory politics shaped the anti-caste movement. More recently, she proclaims her commitment to imagining a new world order led by the force of Ambedkarite thought in another ballad «Raaj Baba Sahib Da» (2018). The picturization of this single features the activated and political spaces of gathering and collectivity in Punjab, also alluding to the tradition of «Shabads» and religious hymns around which communities assemble.

Music: Sambhaji Bhagat, Sachin Mali, Sheetal Sathe
Video: Sambhaji Bhagat, Anusaya Arts
Track: Dear Democracy (India, 2017)

The Ambedkarite movement is closely affiliated with resistance music, in the form of the centuries-old tradition of «Shahiris» (Shahir as in poet, a largely Maharashtrian movement in its origin and influence), which transformed into Ambedkarite Jalsas (or public gatherings organized around performances), and was also disseminated via analog recorded media and later over digital mediums and internet-based platforms.

Within the contemporary practice of «Shahiri», the revolutionary music of Lokshahir Sambhaji Bhagat occupies a central place. A Dalit activist, composer, and playwright, he has been rendering the harsh complexities of caste and its implicit structural violence into powerful compositions and public performances.

The song «Dear Democracy» is directed by Sambhaji and hosted on the YouTube channel, «The War Beat», started by him. Written and recited by Sachin Mali and featuring Sheetal Sathe, it calls attention to the failures of democracy in upholding equality and minority struggles.

Music: FeniFina
Video: Jaden Lall
Track: Rukna Nahi (India, 2020)

The debut music video of Mumbai/ Toronto-based FeniFina aka Josefina D’souza, «Rukna Nahi» affirms the exigency to keep traversing the present, in an intent and resolute way. A multilingual composer, she employs a tenacious and experimental visual aesthetic as she dexterously moves between rapping in Hindi to Marathi, urging the listener to «not step, not bend, keep moving...while staying firm».

Another hard-hitting freeverse «Na Hai Insaaf, Na Hai Sukoon» (No Justice, No Peace) was released on Instagram as an urgent response to the appalling lack of justice and state apathy towards the mounting cases of caste violence in the country.

1. (Non) society is a term coined by Prof. Choudhury to mark a paradox: «Hindu society is in actuality a (non)society, in which caste names mark and mask as immemorially given forms of conviviality, kinship and law» (Choudhury 2018, 95).
2. «When the birth of the term ‹dali›’ in language is studied it refers to a rigour which involves the double task of occupying the exact place of the untouchable in social hierarchy and separating from that place/identity in the light of a thought of future egalitarian society … in thinking of equality, the unequal becomes a new subject which with a certain force and delicacy we call dalit. But the dalit doesn’t think merely for herself; she thinks equality equally for everybody» (Choudhury 2018, 61).
3. Prof. Choudhury attends to the invocation of the word ‹common› in Ambedkar’s text «Annihilation of Caste» (1936): «In that sense, the question of the ‹common›, unlike the imperative and reflex of habit, is a question asked for the first time: it is like asking for the first time, what is true society? It is to make language say that society comes into existence with the sentences (un)uttered in 1936» (Choudhury 2018, 78).

List of References

Alam, Mahtab, and Yashica Dutt. 2019. «Interview | ‹But You Don’t Look like a Dalit›: Yashica Dutt on ‹Coming Out as Dalit›». The Wire. March 24. Accessed December 20, 2020. (https://thewire.in/caste/coming-out-as-dalit-yashica-dutt).

BBC. 2020. «BBC 100 Women – Who is on the List this year?». BBC News. November 23. Accessed Novemver 28. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55042935).

Choudhury, Soumyabrata. 2018. Ambedkar and Other Immortals. New Delhi: Navayana.

Dutt, Yashica. 2019. Coming Out as Dalit. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company.

2020. «Na Hai Insaaf, Na Hai Sukoon». Instagram. October 2. Accessed December 20. Instagram video. (https://www.instagram.com/p/CF13Hqmgmzc/).

Gaikwad, Rahi. 2016. «An Equal Music». The Hindu. August 20. Accessed November 15, 2020. (https://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/An-equal-music/article14580390.ece).