current projects in development
MUNTU CHILD.
film
duration: about 28 minutes.
conceived and directed by Natalie Romero Marx
Muntu Child is a poetic essay that narrates historical episodes as experiences lived in different lives. The film reveals the arrival of the African slaves to the Americas as a historical moment that marked the creation of a new identity. Born from the entrails of the slave ship, the new men and women arrive to be fed by the ancestral original spirit of the Americas. The yet to be free men and women of the Americas struggle to survive systematic violence.
The Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant was of great inspiration for Muntu Child. Glissant compares the shape of the slave ship with a womb, a womb abyss; and the transatlantic trip with a painful birth where some came out “death and others under sentence of death”. For Glissant, this forced and tragic collision of cultures at the end all became knowledge. He also talks about the rhizomatic relation: “Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relations, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other”. The project also uses inspiration texts Changó, The Baddest Dude by Manuel Zapata Olivella; Black Skin, White Masks by Fantz Fanon; and various films by artist Alejandro Jodorowsky, Maya Deren, Shirin Neshat, the film A Man Walking by Enrique Ramirez and the work of performance artist Nora Chipaumire and Guillermo Gomez Peña.
Collaborators
LUIS CARLOS RINCON ALBA
Performance artist
Luis Rincón Alba (Colombia, 1984) is a performance artist and a PhD candidate at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University where he is currently working on a dissertation which focuses on the carnivalesque as a creative and decolonial strategy deployed by Caribbean artists from Colombia, Cuba, Guyana, Brasil, Trinidad, and Haiti. His areas of research are decolonial philosophy, critical race theory, Caribbean and Latin American studies, Theater and Dance Studies. He also holds a M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University, an M.A. in Philosophy and the Arts from State University of New York at Stony Brook, Graduate Studies in Contemporary Philosophy from Universidad del Norte (Colombia), and a Bachelor degree in Philosophy from Universidad del Atlántico (Colombia). As a performance artists he has collaborated with The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richars (Italy) and Jesúsa Rodriguez (Mexico) and his work has been exhibited in Colombia, Brasil, United States, and México.
ELIECER SALAZAR
Visual artist
Eliécer Salazar (Colombia, 1981) is a visual artist and with a degree in Plastic Arts from Universidad del Atlántico (Colombia). He also holds a Masters degree in Technology and Electronic Arts Aesthetics from Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero (Argentina). He is currently the director of the media production team at Teatro Nacional Cervantes in Buenos Aires (Argentina). His research work has centered around the relation between historical revival, performance, and new media. His creative work is based on the development and creation of media devices for theatrical production; interactive video, video performance, mapping, virtual staging. Salazar’s artistic work has been exhibited in diverse spaces and event in Colombia, Germany, and Argentina.
More about Salazar here
MARIA | performance
In this work I am thinking about the dream of decolonization and the resilient spirit shared by the people living in the Caribbean, about the supernatural, the storms, about Puerto Rico. I am thinking about how I grew up listening to their popular music. Narrating always with sentiment a state of freedom not yet achieved; a message of cultural resistance that traveled across Latin America. The performance is a commentary about those images that belong to the contrasting realities: natural abundance and beauty, natural disasters, the fate of the people, human absurdity and brutality.
It is a commentary about the image of the president trowing paper towels to Puerto Ricans so they could wipe their tears, their sweat, their damp lives. A commentary about, the abandonment of the people of Puerto Rico. How long will it take for Puerto Rico and the USA to recover?
The project participated in the Creative Lab 2018 at the Double Edge Theatre farm in Ashfield, MA. and also is informed by research on bomba music and dance with Dr.Drum and BombaYo at the Andrew Freeman Home in the Bronx.