• Un pechiche para Benkos
  • TitleUn pechiche para Benkos
  • Author Marcos Avila Forero  
  • Year 2016
  • Classification Video art
  • Duration 00:05:27
  • Edition 4/5
  • Medium Video
Description
In the video "Un Pechiche para Benkos", Marcos Avila Forero suggests to a Congolese musicologist and percussionist - specialized in ethnic percussions - to activate the drum of Palenqueros, reinterpreting the secret codes with which the slaves communicated during the Colonial period, from a series of rhythms that still exist and retain some of the old traits of a lost language. Besides the sound of the activated drum, the video unfolds the narrated where two voices from two separated periods coexist embodied in a unique character: on the one hand, the real account of a contemporary, clandestine migrant, hidden in the hull of a cayuco, trying to cross the Mediterranium; on the other hand, Benkos Biohò, killed in the 1622, former slave and leader of the first empancipatory movement in Colombia. [...] By using these codes - which echo those of the means of communication of the colonial period - to tell a story, the drums become a vehicle that invokes the past in order to reunite it with a contemporaneity where neo-imperialism and post-colonialism coexist. - A.A. V.V., Contra las corrientes, p. 45, 2018
Exhibitions
Personal Exhibition at Pori Art Museum, 23 Mar-3 Sep 2018.
Bibliography
A.A. V.V., Contra las corrientes / Desde las montañas, Pori art museum - ADNgaleria ediciones, Finland, 2018.