12 Apr Re-Member. Family Tails and the Machine to Travel Back to the Future.

Family research I Publication I Video

Growing up in Popayán, the first Colombian capital, had a brutal impact on my self knowledge. I remember my family piecing together the stories our grandparents used to tell us; stories told by word of mouth and lost in time and space until it always got to that tipping point where our family tree simply fades away. Only one thing is clear: we are a crossbreed of everything. The mestiza that fits everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The construction of the concept “black” arises from the need of Europe to lift their culture up, by destroying another. The Moors arrived in America three centuries before than Columbus and we know very little about how we relate to what was one of the greates mankind’s civilizations. Even less we know about black excellence, but we do understand black as the absence of light. This implied biases were applied to Africans and Asians mostly, and our perception of reality was polluted by “mind bugs” as Dr. Banaji names it: “black magic”, “black consciousness”, bad luck brought by “black cats” and this never-ending mental fog.

With the exercise of appealing to family memory to reposition ourselves as members and reconcile with oneself as part of a clan; I didn’t want to know where I come from because of finding myself, since that already happened. The exercise of going deep down to the bottom, is to use the elements from our very own cultures to fortify them and to remember who we really are. The power of belonging to a pack, however dysfunctional it may be; is a potential tool to heal ourselves from the collective madness that afflicts the world as we have created it.

Photos: family archives