FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2024

The state television series, ‘Yuruparí: Popular Traditional Art’, documented cultural expressions of peasant, Afro and indigenous populations in Colombia, leaving a memory of the sociopolitical configurations in the midst of the armed conflict of the 1980s. Being the most complete ethnographic record of its time, with rituals, festivals and songs declared Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, the preservation of this collection after its censorship, invites us to reflect on access and restitution policies, in order to unveil untold stories and embedded narratives.

Following the beginning of its restoration in 2013 led by the colombian institutions of Proimágenes Colombia, RTVC-Señal Memoria and Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, as well as the lead researcher Juan Suárez PhD and international organizations such as the National Museum of African American Culture-Smithsonian/Blake McDowell, FIAT/IFTA, amongst others, 24 of the 86 episodes in 16mm have been completed.

The central figure of Gloria Triana, its main director, has led the conventional narrative around this archive. However, based on the documentation management and contextualization with a gender perspective of the private, state and community archives around this collection, more than 25 participating women who constitute part of Colombian audiovisual history have been made visible; Ann Marie Lóök, Beatriz Barros and María Ema Frade are just some of them.

In this way, in an exercise to recover the oral memory of the production team, the participation of the populations represented in the collective cataloging of their episodes, and the making of a film with the found materials, this project proposes different approaches to reread the sociopolitical narrative(s) imposed in the series and delve into the challenges of access, reuse and promotion of public archives in Colombia.