I’m in Medellín, Colombia, for a six week residency at Casa Tres Patios, an arts center connected to the University of Antioquia. I’m here with my partner Erica Thomas, and we’re working with the people at C3P to develop some projects with local communities: ex-members of FARC, trans sex workers, people displaced by the previous decades of violence. Medellín has a complex history, and another layer has just been added- on the day we arrived the sound of the cityscape was all explosions and helicopters, from students at the University mobilizing in support of the Minga. The Minga is a national uprising of indigenous communities which has numerous goals- chief among them being a cessation of the state violence and impunity of delinquent state forces that indigenous communities experience across the country, and the escalation of dispossession and broken promises under the right-wing government of Ivan Duque. Roadblocks and confrontations with state forces are ongoing across the Cauca region and now spreading beyond to areas at all points of the compass. I sat down at a table at C3P this afternoon and put together a graphic which we hope to share with people organizing in solidarity with the Minga. Feel free to check it out here, print it out yourself, and share it as widely as you like.
La Minga Indigena
April 1, 2019