Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 3
“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology…we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Natalia Gonzalez Español
Centro Cultural Horizonte Ciudadela Educativa y Desarrollo Cultural Comuna 7. This name, rough in Spanish and in English, should draw you in. It pertains to more than one organization, with split histories. Here is how they connect.
Guido Ripamonti had a chance run-in with the anthropological theatre of Renzo Casali1. Decades later he would be the sole remaining cofounder of a theatre collective. He would have, along with a few subsisting villagers, the elastic impulse to sustain an idea.
The Willaldea theatre arrived inadvertently in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the summer of 2005. Formerly, this itinerant group had been a commune in Cañuelas, Argentina, in 1984. It was brought to a halt in 2004, when the cofounders –all except one- had arbitrarily decided to sell off the property.
Guido was like a stubborn tenant- even as he had to give up the apartment, he was not going to let go of the commune´s founding conviction. The position is one in which an idea, an ideology, can fall flat if it does not change itself with the reality of the context that it´s intending to transform.2 As Paulo Freire has noted, reflection and action are codependent – “there is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis.”3
And he acted. He rehabilitated the damn Willaldea project in the form of an itinerant cultural center and set up their Laboratorio de Teatro. Their trip took a tentative course northwards through the Latin American continent until their final destination in Mexico, which they never reached. It was during this trip that they stumbled upon tangled Santa Cruz where I would see first hand that the prerequisite of letting go involves a good amount of deskilling. This is precisely the puissance of their current organization (NGO), Centro Cultural Horizontes 4 that Guido directs alongside his wife and colleague, Yolanda Consejo V.
Situated in what is currently an oil-bound, terrible, violence-stricken city of Barrancabermeja, Colombia, the cultural center is allied with Ciudadela Educativa. To sum up the Ciudadela Educativa: this community organized themselves in 2005 with the intention to reconstruct a framework for the traumatized and degraded inhabitants; those who had been subject to the severe armed, social, political and economic conflict that still reverberates there. The community did this to install some confidence and structure beyond survivalism, to scrape together an alternate hand better than that which they were dealt.
At C.C.H.C.E., they confront themselves with their corporeal intelligence rather than load themselves with repositories of knowledge.2 From the stance of corporeal memory, one is already fully knowledgeable, full of visceral experience and a subjective vision of it.
We may lack the vocabulary to describe our unfreedom, or the candor to acknowledge it, but in Barrancabermeja, the youth of Centro Cultural Horizontes seem to be finding a dialect, a gulp of air before going back under the all-pervasive quicksand of ideology.
1 Italian screenplay writer, theatre director, and cofounder of Comuna Baires independent theatre (Argentina, 1969), Scuola Europea di Teatro Cinema e Scrittura (Italy, 1977), and Willaldea Aldea Laboratorio (Argentina, 1984).
2 Ripamonti, Guido. Telephone interview. 26 Mar. 2015.
3 Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. Continuum Inernational Group Inc: New York, 2008. (p.87)
4 Centro Cultural Horizontes is allied with Corporación de Ciudadela Educativa, Comuna7. The cultural center is funded by Fundación Morelco.
Volume 1, Issue 3
“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology…we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Natalia Gonzalez Español
Centro Cultural Horizonte Ciudadela Educativa y Desarrollo Cultural Comuna 7. This name, rough in Spanish and in English, should draw you in. It pertains to more than one organization, with split histories. Here is how they connect.
Guido Ripamonti had a chance run-in with the anthropological theatre of Renzo Casali1. Decades later he would be the sole remaining cofounder of a theatre collective. He would have, along with a few subsisting villagers, the elastic impulse to sustain an idea.
The Willaldea theatre arrived inadvertently in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the summer of 2005. Formerly, this itinerant group had been a commune in Cañuelas, Argentina, in 1984. It was brought to a halt in 2004, when the cofounders –all except one- had arbitrarily decided to sell off the property.
Guido was like a stubborn tenant- even as he had to give up the apartment, he was not going to let go of the commune´s founding conviction. The position is one in which an idea, an ideology, can fall flat if it does not change itself with the reality of the context that it´s intending to transform.2 As Paulo Freire has noted, reflection and action are codependent – “there is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis.”3
And he acted. He rehabilitated the damn Willaldea project in the form of an itinerant cultural center and set up their Laboratorio de Teatro. Their trip took a tentative course northwards through the Latin American continent until their final destination in Mexico, which they never reached. It was during this trip that they stumbled upon tangled Santa Cruz where I would see first hand that the prerequisite of letting go involves a good amount of deskilling. This is precisely the puissance of their current organization (NGO), Centro Cultural Horizontes 4 that Guido directs alongside his wife and colleague, Yolanda Consejo V.
Situated in what is currently an oil-bound, terrible, violence-stricken city of Barrancabermeja, Colombia, the cultural center is allied with Ciudadela Educativa. To sum up the Ciudadela Educativa: this community organized themselves in 2005 with the intention to reconstruct a framework for the traumatized and degraded inhabitants; those who had been subject to the severe armed, social, political and economic conflict that still reverberates there. The community did this to install some confidence and structure beyond survivalism, to scrape together an alternate hand better than that which they were dealt.
At C.C.H.C.E., they confront themselves with their corporeal intelligence rather than load themselves with repositories of knowledge.2 From the stance of corporeal memory, one is already fully knowledgeable, full of visceral experience and a subjective vision of it.
We may lack the vocabulary to describe our unfreedom, or the candor to acknowledge it, but in Barrancabermeja, the youth of Centro Cultural Horizontes seem to be finding a dialect, a gulp of air before going back under the all-pervasive quicksand of ideology.
1 Italian screenplay writer, theatre director, and cofounder of Comuna Baires independent theatre (Argentina, 1969), Scuola Europea di Teatro Cinema e Scrittura (Italy, 1977), and Willaldea Aldea Laboratorio (Argentina, 1984).
2 Ripamonti, Guido. Telephone interview. 26 Mar. 2015.
3 Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. Continuum Inernational Group Inc: New York, 2008. (p.87)
4 Centro Cultural Horizontes is allied with Corporación de Ciudadela Educativa, Comuna7. The cultural center is funded by Fundación Morelco.
