Bogota, 2014-15

Canciones para vivos y muertos is a series of installations and performances that occur between the Central Cemetery and the Center of Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in Bogota. The cemetery is located in a powerful urban area, a place of big potential for renovation and development. Paradoxically it is surrounded by the Barrio Santa Fe, red line district of Bogotá. An area known for prostitution and also for the circulation of psychoactive substances. It is a place that reflects the most political, economic and cultural conflicts and asymmetries of the country. Its inhabitants, neighbours from Santa Fe, are those who have embraced the cemetery with great affection, providing activity with a series of practices and popular rituals to ask for improve of their daily live, through the contact with death. Also they, because of the lack of a public space have converted the cemetery into the big park of the neighbourhood. This work puts into dialogue different approaches to this territory, and questions the dynamics that are seeking to give signification and solidity to this place as point of memory of the city. Through the combination of these voices this work is generating a (live) polyphony to account for the heterogeneity of discourses that draw the micro and macro stories that are woven into this place. It is a travel from the city of the living to the city of the dead, from the proper name to anonymity, from the individual to the community.

Canciones para vivos y muertos is a project developed by Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación; Escuela Taller of Bogotá; the Department of History at the National University of Colombia; Cultural Heritage Institute of Bogotá (IDPC); Red Interdisciplinar de Artes Vivas Colombia, Unidad Administrativa Especial de Servicios Públicos (UAESP) and Vividero Colectivo.

Vividero Colectivo was commissioned to realize the creation of this experience, the design and dramaturgy of the first part of the tour through the cemetery that is connected to the work of other partners.