LA ESCUELA DEL FRACASO by CAMOGRAPHER

EthnoFictions by:

LA ESCUELA DEL FRACASO

Introduction I’m Camo, a photographer and filmmaker based in Colombia and the Netherlands. Through my independent work I depict social, subcultural and sexual diversity in the world of art, fashion and documentary photography. I link these diﬀerent contexts in intimate, raw and sometimes more polished photographic works that emerge from my personal life experiences in the problematic, but vibrant social-political climate of Latin-America. Over the past 10 years my work has mostly centered around portraiture; photographs in which I weave natural beauty, spontaneous acts, and every day into often provocative imagery. Recently I have also focused on my background in media and video experimentation, and through my interest for Ethnofiction - a concept that declares a union between ethnography, art, media and fiction - I expresses views on forms of alternative visual anthropology.

I. Motivation From the view point of a visual anthropologist, I have been producing and exhibiting new visual and local narratives based on the visual and socio-cultural exploration of the Colombian territory. Through my project La Escuela del Fracaso (The School of Failure) I oﬀer training workshops and “artivist” projects to visual artists, performers and other creatives from the periphery. La Escuela del Fracaso supports research, countercultures, and unconventional practices that capture and challenge the formulation of culture, manufacturing, and the commodities of knowledge. These projects fight to achieve democratization and the decolonization of information tools, new media and sustainable use in the arts in my hometown Cartagena de Indias, in the Colombian Caribbean. For me this open call makes a lot of sense, it motivates me to demand the validation of many outsider artists and silent heroes, like me, that have been waiting for a drastic change (now or never) in Colombia; the voice of producers and artists who have been active in a country full of censorship and biases towards countercultural artistic and transgressive work. In the past few years I have been living mostly in Colombia, but also spent part of my time in the Netherlands with my Dutch partner. This is how I got connected with both countries during the pandemic which made me realize how in countries like the Netherlands there is a much larger support for the type of “artivism” I’m trying to develop in Colombia. Even if it seems otherwise, I think The Netherlands is a very diverse country like Colombia and I wish my country had the economic power to be able to invest in cultural projects and not just in weapons to fight a “war on drugs” that causes minorities to suﬀer and their social leaders to disappear and be murdered. The absence of a strong art world in Colombia, to notify, to register, to inspire is a painful realization. In Colombia my work is known to fight for cultural and countercultural forms of social and creative resistance, working with minorities such as LGBTQI+ black and indigenous communities. To me these works form the engine of a new narrative for the country’s natural and cultural heritage and mixed ethnic identity. Colombia is full of conflicts; where there are still the ravages produced by the modern colonization of supposedly stronger cultures, and the ravages of the war on drugs, which attacked and polluted our natural resources, which are luckily still abundant in one of the most bio-diverse countries in the world. Cartagena has some of the poorest communities in Colombia, but also the richest and cultural transactions are scarce. Through the free workshops and laboratories of La Escuela del Fracaso I aim to create a kind of creative circular economy, breaking the colonial codes and divisions of class and ethnicity that Colombian the creative sector still follows. The students are transgressive artists and enthusiasts within the black and queer minorities that want to use artistic narratives to build a new idea of the country. Through my network and past work in art and fashion I look for resources in private institutions, luxury clothing brands and alternative or mainstream media who wants to support these initiatives to make the world of art and fashion more accessible to creatives from the most marginal neighborhoods. With all of them we form a team of art directors, makeup artists, videographers during the workshops, which are aimed to connect them to future artistic and commercial networks of collaboration, which benefits everyone involved including myself and the institutions and brands that support this.

II. Descriptions of the Project. -ManifestoEthnofiction consists of a multimedia format/style (video, photography, performative installation, artivism, socio-cultural collage, and fashion) that influenced by countercultural and ethnographic artistic processes, imparts in real life another methodology of seeing and transgressing the image. Is a manifestation that fills the blank and links the gap between what is fictional and what is documented. Ethnofiction, as a concept, blurs the line between the ethnography of a documented reality fact with the fiction of performative and cinematographic art and whose natural gallery is the Colombian territory and the Latin American social climate, where I expose my personal vision on the forms of alternative visual anthropology, body as an art gear and new beauty and gender standards Ethnofiction declares the union between ethnography, art media, and fiction and expresses my personal vision on alternative forms of visual anthropology and new disruptive narratives. Formally the images derive from mockumentaries that portrayed performances generally in unconventional spaces with real or invented characters belonging to a social fact or fictional subculture. With less orthodox words, an Ethnofiction could just be a sharp cover for Vogue or for National Geographic as well. _____ My proposal for Back in the Day is our Future is called ETHNOFICTION. From this project I would like to show a selection of photographic images that can be seen as final works created within the framework of La Escuela del Fracaso and an accompanying journal (that still needs to be compiled) that documents the whole process of co-creation that led to these images. These photos are portraits of previously unseen faces that expose Cartagena as a site that has faced ongoing exploitation of its culture by hetero-normative and white supremacist ideas. A city where the black population is 90%, and whose black communities were the first to free themselves from the colonialist chains, that is still in havoc many years later. I do not belong to the black community, coming from a more mixed Latino background, but I have been a strong voice that has had the opportunity to enter parts of the mainstream creative world and from there launch the voices of many. I have taken advantage of these platforms that my work has provided me; like important magazines, mass media and media personalities, to implant these “artivist” productions in the public eye; attacking the system while being inside it, changing the system from its guts.

The proposed photographic series in the documentation shows the contrast of my city through fashion, decontextualized in the most forgotten places of the city, such as La Boquilla, and glorified with the beauty of local women and Palanqueras (women who come from Palenque, the first people in the world to free themselves from slavery). These women designed hairstyles and braids, illustrating the escape routes in colonial times and I wanted to bring this idea to the present. These photos are also escape routes that seem to be glorified in some way by fashion, but they are really strong activist pieces that the only thing they try to achieve is to transgress some social codes in my country and my city. To achieve this I use fashion to attract viewers but deep down these images are loaded with transgressive power and function as an agent of change.

ETHNOFICTION

This document shows portraits and process documentation made in La Boquilla, Cartagena. Images with a fashion campaign aesthetics in places abandoned by the Colombian government. These forgotten lands where the black community lives contrast the exuberance of the ebony beauty in Cartagena, the first city to free itself from slavery in America, but the last to claim the de-colonial processes. With La Escuela del Fracaso we use countercultural processes to deliberately appropriate new cultural narratives and the perceived exoticism of the black community and place them into stable parts of the mainstream. A way of a sustainable cultural appropriation.

Process documentation

CONTACT Camilo Delgado Aguilera A.k.a CAMO camo.grapher@gmail.com Phone 1 +57 3002411751 (Whatsapp) Phone 2 +31 685820239 ( NL) Adress 1. Spuistraat 12f. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Adress 2. Calle Real #20-145. Cartagena, Colombia.