Cartucho

Nightime, out in the open. A wide shot on a peaceful park, city noises and a few rare silhouettes in the distance: it’s the Third Millennium park, at the heart of Bogotá, now replacing the district called Cartucho. A privileged site for drug racket and misery right by the presidential palace through the eighties and the nineties; a court of miracles where up to 15 000 souls have been stirring. Setting commonplaces aside, formally-trained urban planner Andrés Cháves Sánchez’s endeavour seeks to render the marketplace it used to be in all of its diversity as well as its paradoxical memory, a task finely accomplished, on the one hand, by crossing today’s images of that place shown from a distance, now deserted and haunted by tales of those who lived in it – only voices will be heard in their phantom-like presence – with, on the other hand, incredible archives produced in the midst of it, of a complex life taking shape in multiple ways. We see how drugs and poverty have destroyed bodies. Tales are being told of absolute danger, ever-more-powerful cartels, existence stripped of its value, ordinary murders as witnessed by a threat of execution for a 1,5$ debt. But also its vitality, its celebrations, its economy of survival unfolding in the shadow of the capital city somehow still finding interest in it. Cartucho is a memorial placed in front of its own erasure underneath the policed appearance of an urban park. A return to light in the absence of self-pity and regrets, of what was evacuated and eradicated, no doubt with some resistance, and buried under the trees and flower beds. Haunting them. Having provided such invisibles with bodies and images, isn’t Cartucho an attempt to take responsibility for the events that took place in this country? (NF)
Andrés Chaves Sanchez
Andres Chaves Sanchez