Meeting Helena Producciones and … the trashophone!

On my second day in Cali, I hat a meeting with Claudia Patricia Sarria Macías at Lugar a Dudas about my residency.

While waiting for her, I had a chance to read some of the books about art in the library of Lugar a Dudas, the “Centro de documentación”

In one text, I read about the artist groups from Cali, among which especially one, “Helena Producciones” stroke a chord. When Claudia Patricia arrived, the first thing I found out – to my pleasant surprise – was that she is one of the artists from this artist’s collective. The work they are doing is very much in line with the way I work, and it is perfectly conforming to the theme for my residency: cultural sustainability.

We had a long talk, ranging from the current sociopolitical situation in Cali, over the history of the salsa to details about my stay at Lugar a Dudas.

Claudia Patricia told me that the salsa – which is currently understood as something very caleño – “cali-ish” was actually an item of importation in the 50ies. The reason for importing the salsa was to boost tourism.

Knowing the extent to which people from Cali  – los caleños – have adopted the salsa, and are no almost breathing the dance and music, I was very surprised to know that it has had this history of importation due to comercial strategies…! How can people accept a cultural product like that and make it their own, – and even excel in reproducing it? And in so short time?

Would the same thing have been possible in Copenhagen? I very much doubt it. The answer must be that the caleños did already have a socioeconomically widespread and strong culture for couple dancing.

The good news: I am beginning my residency on June 4th, and this will give me a great place to work, my own bathroom with hot water (not a given in this city..), and not least: contacts, people, possible collaborators.

Read more about my experiences from my residency in Cali here.

My residency in Cali has been made possible with help from 

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Video log 5

Today, Monday 4th of November, we had a session with the team, at Café Sonja. The goal for the meeting was to prepare tomorrow’s workshop with the 18 pupils at Tove Ditlevsen Skole.

In the video you will be introduced to crew members Jaime, Kristine and Natalie, and you will hear about the development of the concepts for the innovation workshop. The introductory question was: how can we design a workshop were the kids combine a part of the digestion with a recycled material to build instruments. What criteria will  we set up and how can we make the pupils work according to these criteria?

As you will see, we decided to let go of the combination with the digestion parts and chose to design the workshop to only include working with the recycled materials and their sound.

And you will also see that we choose 3 criteria, setting up prizes for

• the best sounding instrument,
• the most durable instrument,
• the instrument with most variation in the sound

Additionally we have designed a prize for the group that is best working as a group. AND an extra prize, open category, that can come in handy if one of the instruments doesn’t receive any prizes.

The concept that the class has been informed about since last week, preparing for Tuesday 5/11: The pupils are divided into four groups:

Group	Part of digestion / scenography	Recycled material
1	Preparation	Metal
2	Mouth	Hard plastic
3	Stomach	Glass
4	Gut	Paper

All pupils bring 1-2 pieces of recycled material on Tuesday according to their group’s category. Criteria of the materials:

• it must be something that we throw out, ie. not angle iron and new paper, but, for example cans and phone bills.
• the more common it is, the better, it should be easy to get much of it.
• and so it must be clean!

Read this post about a former experience with building innovative trash instruments with kids (in Danish):  https://oerermedfilter.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/om-somstrumentet-xylogongen-handfladestrumentet-svampebobstrumentet-og-vejrstrumentet-og-om-en-metodisk-landvinding/