C’undua, A Pact with Life

A Pact with Life, the fist stage of the C'undua Project, is a body of actions exploring the multiple meanings – real or imaginary – generated by everyday ways of living, coexisting, and dying. The starting point are the stories – words, gestures, images, objects (be they individual or collective) – dealing with extreme experiences in the lives of some parts of the populations inhabiting the outlying districts of the city of Bogota. 

 

To visualise what is invisible, or what we often voluntarily want to ignore, the process of constructing the project appealed first to memory, to rescuing it in order to generate “spaces of encounter” among the populations affected by different kinds of problems: social exclusion, displacement, the informal economy, family instability, lack of affection, use of psychoactive substances, poverty, hunger. We understand this memory to be: “…what is left after something happens and doesn’t completely stop happening” (Edward de Bono).

 

C'undua did not only work with vulnerable populations. It has also addressed outlying districts within the city, characterised by informal development processes, as in the case of the barrios situated on the northeastern hills of Usaquén (...) C'undua wanted to contribute to the process of salvaging the memory and redefining limits, based on the city’s symbolic representations: expression of the relationships of power and coexistence in collective socialization spaces.