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Looking backwards to walk forward: Walking, collective memory and the site of the intercultural in site-specific performance

In Sotelo-Castro’s walking project Hacer Memoria al Andar/ Making Memory While Walking (2010), which was presented in the context of an ‘Encuentro’ (part academic conference, part performance festival) of New York University’s ‘Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ held in Colombia in 2010, Sotelo-Castro is concerned with the potentials of re-using an abandoned eighteenth-century stone footpath in performative terms. He walks the path together with groups of peoples from different nationalities: as a means to explore, exhume and transform into something positive what it might mean today - for indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, nationals and foreigners, locals to the region and outsiders - to voluntarily, peacefully and poetically share a moment in the mountainous space of the bleak upland (páramo) near Bogotá, where the stone footpath is located. Sotelo-Castro follows a paradigm in social psychology called Positioning Theory (Harre and Slocum, 2003), in which the acts of thinking and perceiving can be individual as well as communal, and therefore the location and situation in which the acts occur are significant.

A key participant in the project Making Memory While Walking was Ati Quigua. Ati Quigua is not only the first indigenous person (Arhuaca) to occupy a seat in Bogotá’s city council in its entire history, she is also the youngest (born 1980) and the only woman of her left-oriented party Polo Democrático. A new insight about walking as an integral, aesthetic element of participation performance was produced as a result of this practice-based research process: that a walking performance is self-referential in the sense that it encourages conversation about walking. In this case, it facilitated a critical intercultural dialogue about the practice of walking. Out of this project grew Sotelo-Castro’s ongoing interest in exploring the performative potentials of a heritage site for facilitating the production and re-writing of cultural memory.