Your film, which offers a sort of counter-history of the conquest of space from Colombia’s point of view, has a rather ironic title. Where does this phrase come from? Could you tell us more about the genesis of the project?
The phrase “Welcome Interplanetary Conquerors and Sidereal Space” was taken from a reception poster made by children from the Kennedy neighborhood in Bogotá when they were visited by American astronauts on their tour of Latin America in 1966. This scene is archetypal and reveals a certain passivity in the face of information and Pan-American political projects conceived by the US and local governments. As a filmmaker, I have been intrigued by how the history of cinema reinforces colonial and imperial stereotypes, from the “Conquest of America” to the colonization of space. These narratives have always seemed like fiction, especially when viewed from the perspective of our global south realities, or when they are created by official media.
Since 2009, I have been researching the Cold War’s impact on Colombia, and I also found brief information about the Tropics Survival Training in Chocó territories. I began collecting archives and news about these events with the intention of understanding our position as Colombians and Latin Americans regarding the space race.
The project, which began more than 10 years ago, started as an artistic installation, essays, performances, and took other forms, until at La Vulcanizadora we decided to turn it into a film.
Influenced by films like Our Century (1982) by Artavazd Peleshyan, and Out of the Present (1996) by Andrei Ujică, I knew that I had to create a Latin American film on this issue, especially in response to the emergence of new forms of colonial threats in our territories and several migration crises caused by these endeavors that often endanger our means of existence and life on Earth.
Manuel Zapata Olivella, a great Colombian thinker, once wrote that “The romantic declarations in defense of the indigenous must turn into an act of ethnic consciousness that starts from the historical and concrete fact of seeing the indigenous within our own blood, in the context of our own national culture, in our intellectual acts, and not out there in the jungle, beyond our skin and foreign to the universe of national culture.” For me, this question has also become global. The film begins as a sort of deconstruction of that scientific view of the conquest of space, a human project that excludes a large part of the population at the cost of exploiting and destroying the Earth. We Colombians carry many contradictions, for example, Colombia means “Land of Columbus,” a problematic figure in times of decolonization.
The film is a journey which, beginning and ending with images from NASA propaganda films about the Tropic Survival School, while revisiting a multitude of archives, recalls the orbital movement. Its center would be the Darién jungle. How did you go about constructing the film? What principles governed the editing of all this material?
The amount of NASA archives and those about the astronauts is overwhelming, but these training archives were scarce and not readily available.
To our eyes, the Darién changed the face of the Earth and could be likened to the center of a galaxy. In reality, it is a place of flow, movement, and encounters—where the Pacific meets the Caribbean, and Europe meets America. This idea of encounter was mirrored in the image of the galaxy, serving as a foundational principle in the editing process—arms extending from that center in a storm of images. To organize them, one aspect of the editing draws on techniques from the Mnemosyne Atlas proposed by Aby Warburg, a series of images that survive across many stories and narratives. This is why a geographical principle of editing was adopted, and likewise, a cosmographic one. Everything revolves around the region known as the Expanded Caribbean.
Throughout, we maintained a cinematic end; we wanted the film to be understood as one understands a person’s face—to translate that forest of archives. The facial painting that Antonio wears in one scene was pivotal—a face with marks and lines above the lips and the lasting impression it leaves when remembered. Similar to recalling the movements of someone who speaks or sings, who tells stories—these structures of orality were crucial in defining the rhythm and cuts.
An interesting comment from a test screening viewer was, “it’s as if the whole editing was upside down,” or the expression we use, “patas arriba” (upside down), as Joaquín Torres García said, “nuestro norte es el sur”.
You reworked these archives through repetition, cropping, slow motion and animation. What did these interventions allow you to do? Can you go back over the long animated passage of Leopoldo Galluzo’s illustrations and the context of their publication?
Galluzo’s illustrations are part of an astonishing story about the imagined conquest of the Moon; they were featured in The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. This was a series of newspaper articles published by the New York newspaper The Sun that falsely attributed to scientist John Herschel the discovery of a civilization on the Moon, I particularly appreciate Galluzo’s decision to mimic the scientific illustrations of the time. The articles claimed Herschel had used a telescope installed at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which was actually created by William & Caroline Herschel.
Despite the newspaper later admitting it was a hoax, many people continued to believe the discovery was true. It is considered one of history’s most famous instances of “fake news.” This media fabrication, supported by scientific information, invites us to consider the contemporary world, post-truth narratives, and other strategies of persuasion.
Repetitions, cropping, and slow motion allow us to evaluate these perspectives and further immerse ourselves in that spectrum. For example, the music we hear is Symphony No. 8 in C minor composed by William Herschel, the astronomer. Andrés Silva arranged it for synthesizers specifically for this film, allowing for the integration of various materials, from Colombian radio broadcasts to AI reconstructions, such as the synthesized voices of Herschel.
You did, however, shoot some 16mm footage in Chocó. Why was it necessary to include recent footage?
This filming is connected to my personal memories of Chocó, a region that is intertwined with my family history and my life. Sometimes I think this film was born there, when I was very young and went with my family to visit my uncles and cousins who had gone to this region seeking fortune in gold and becoming part of the community there.
Maria Rojas and I decided to venture into the Darién to investigate the training, and from there, to travel down to Andagoya via the Atrato River. Unfortunately, we encountered complications with paramilitary groups protecting the exploiters in the Darién, prompting us to quickly escape and continue down the river to get to the remains of the mining camps I had once known before. There, we were able to engage with Manuel Mendoza and capture a voice from within that system. For us, it felt like making a documentary nested within a documentary within another non-fiction film.
The sound treatment of the archives is also subject to your intervention. In a long interlude, the words of an instructor from the Tropic Survival School appear in white in the middle of the black image, while his transformed voice echoes. Why did you choose this black screen device and create this distorted, robotic voice?
This is precisely a segment from Jacqueline Nova’s piece Creación de la Tierra, which she composed in the early 1970s. It appears intact in the film with no intervention other than the mix by Ana María Romano G., a composer, musician, and artist who has been responsible for preserving, protecting, and contextualizing Jacqueline’s music. She also told me that “The work was composed solely using vocal material from the creation chants of the U’wa ethnic group,” which Jacqueline transformed into a mesmerizing piece.
My decision was to give the piece a place and divide it into two parts in the film: the first when the images of Bogotá and the Chronicles of the Indies appear, and the second, the scene you refer to, which is when Morgan Smith, the creator of the training, appears. The intervention in the piece was essentially to edit and mix it as if it were to be performed live. We effectively used the studio as an instrument, and Ana María Romano mixed it so that it was recorded for the film. It is as if at times we were at an electroacoustic music concert. This process even inspired Ana to compose the music for the closing credits.
These texts are part of an interview with Morgan mixed with fragments from the astronauts’ diaries. It was important to me that this presence be seen as uncanny, that his way of expressing himself about the training and about others be intervened by Nova’s Creation Chants, which for me is a piece that also speaks about healing and reparation.
In the continuation of El Renacer del Carare (FID 2020), at the end you unveil pages from the script of the NASA film, which you edit with images from the same film. Why did you do this?
I find the scene descriptions very intense—the language, the way they portray others. This material is used after filming and before editing. In fact, it’s part of the review of the filmed footage, providing information for use in editing.
In El Renacer del Carare, the community script reappeared after being lost for 30 years. In that case, the archive was reconstructed. In this instance, the declassified 16mm scene list allowed me to see how actions, shots, objects, territory, and camera movements are described. It’s a theatre of operations that, within the film, relates closely to the Chronicles of the Indies and colonial atlases. This is the moment when the image, propaganda, and ethnography are deconstructed. It’s a realization that the image of the encounter is a production—a list of scenes that repeat, are cut, and juxtaposed with each other. I believe it’s possible to edit our history even with materials created by those who had the power to create them.
This aspect of archival cinema interests me greatly: beyond providing new context to the images, it’s about understanding why they survive and enabling other ways of relating to them. It involves imagining the multitude of images re-emerging to tell us something potentially different.
Interviewed by Louise Martin Papasian
