VIDEO-DANCE: Standing up for Life (ENG)

This video-dance combines contemporary dance, video and audio as memory and poetic tribute to the history of the artist's grandparents who were internally displaced from their place of origin in Colombia

Published on October 17, 2021

Ana María Oviedo Cifuentes | lanid, Arts, Americas (inc Caribbean)

La vida para defenderla. Ana María Oviedo Cifuentes

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE

READ THE PAPER HERE (in Spanish)

This is a work of video-dance where contemporary dance, video and audio converge as memory and poetic tribute to the history of my grandparents who were displaced from their place of origin and by cosmic coincidences of life ended up settling in Bogotá, the city where I was born, grew up and live today. It is also nourished by personal reflection around the concept of being displaced ancestrally, what it means for me and the awareness of those who today face this phenomenon calling to defend life and our condition of humanity. Finally, it is also nurtured by fragments of three texts by the Colombian sociologist, journalist and writer Alfredo Molano: Desterrados – crónicas del desarraigo; Ahí les dejo los fierros and Cartas a Antonia where he gives voice to different testimonies of uprooting and violence throughout Colombia.

Ana Maria Oviedo Cifuentes is a performing artist from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana with an emphasis on dance and somatic arts. She has danced for 10 years in different scenarios and different formats of artistic creation in Colombia. As a performer – creator, she has developed a capacity for self-observation and self-knowledge, which has helped her to appreciate movement as a vital matter and one of well-being. She seeks to transform the micro-universes of those who participate in a staged event, always seeking the same goal: to move people.

This work was produced by the artist during her Summer Fellowship on Internal Displacement at the Internal Displacement Research Programme at the Refugee Law Initiative. The Fellowship was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, on behalf of the UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund, as part of the funded project “Interdisciplinary Network on Internal Displacement, Conflict and Protection” (AH/T005351/1).

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