Yuruparí: Traditional Popular Art was a television documentary series commissioned between 1982 and 1987 by the Colombian government through the Instituto Nacional de Radio y Televisión (INRAVISIÓN) and the Compañía de Fomento Cinematográfico de Colombia (FOCINE) – today, Sistema de Medios Públicos de Colombia (RTVC) – Señal Memoria and Fondo Mixto de Promoción Cinematográfica (Proimágenes Colombia).1 Conceived as a collection of films and magnetic media, the series documented the daily life and cultural expressions of rural populations in Colombia amid armed conflict, with a particular focus on peasant, Afro, and Indigenous communities. Its ethnographic episodes sought to record the country’s diverse cultural rituals, festivals, myths, gastronomy, dances, and chants - practices often marginalized, dismissed as ‘folkloric’, and feared to be disappearing - so they could be preserved on photochemical film. All episodes, including the one analyzed in this article, were produced within a specific historical and political context that reflected the state’s effort to archive, classify, and display cultural traditions as part of a broader project to promote a multicultural and multiethnic national identity. Since 2013, restoration efforts led by researchers, filmmakers, public institutions, and international organizations have completed 24 of the 82 episodes shot in 16mm. Today, the series has been recognized as one of the most complete ethnographic records of its time, documenting rituals, festivals, and chants which UNESCO has declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in more than 20 regions of the country.2
While primarily directed by Gloria Triana, one of Colombia’s first female directors,3 Yuruparí, as a television series, has had - until very recent years - limited visibility within the history of Colombian cinema and visual anthropology. Produced at a time when other cinematographic works, such as Marta Rodríguez’s films, were becoming more explicit in their political struggle, the series had to adapt to a television language that entailed a certain aesthetic. Academics and filmmakers often criticized it, with few nuances, for its focus on what was labeled ‘folklore’8, and in its third year, 1987, the series was canceled. Many consider this a form of censorship, as the series had started to incorporate progressively more political narratives, including an account of the murder of Guadalupe Salcedo, a former guerrilla leader in the 1950s, attributed to an act of betrayal by the government of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla after an attempted peace treaty, in the episode ‘Pedro Flórez: músico, llanero y ex-guerrillero’ (Gloria Triana, 1987). Consequently, no funds were offered at the time for its preservation.
Figure 1
Press clipping on Yuruparí, La República Photo Archives (year not found).
Nevertheless, the images and sounds produced by Yuruparí, ultimately deemed dangerous, provide a vivid portrait of gestures, practices, and traces that remain palpable in daily life after several attempts at peace. The series bears witness to the historical processes experienced by rural populations amid armed conflict, drug trafficking, and genocides, constituting an invaluable audiovisual heritage for collective memory. As the archivist and historian Luisa Fernanda Ordóñez notes, the series ‘deserves extensive study from the perspective of what these productions represent in the history of Colombian audiovisuals, as documents of historical processes whose traces remain palpable in the daily lives of communities’.4
With this article, we wish to explore the intersection of audiovisual archives and collective memory research through one specific episode of the Yuruparí series, ‘Angélica la palenquera’ (Gloria Triana and Jorge Ruiz, 1984) to highlight broadcast archives as sites of creative engagement capable of challenging power dynamics of representation. In collaboration with the Kuchá Suto Communications Collective, the proposed participatory and decolonial methodology integrates situated embodied experiences into national television archives’ metadata, foregrounding the communities represented in the images and sounds in order to reclaim agency over the archives’ future. With this case, we wish to emphasize the broader need to design comprehensive audiovisual heritage management processes, demonstrating the potential of community-led practices to foster ethical and decolonial approaches to Colombia’s audiovisual memory.
1 A Vertical Gaze which Didn’t Exclude a Feminist, Political Approach - How Do We Work From Here?
The vertical gaze of the Yuruparí series, a state-controlled production, is undeniably present. Yet the series was shaped by a creative team largely composed of women, whose approach - often attentive to domestic spaces, motherhood, and caregiving gestures - quietly began to unsettle the dominant narrative and opened space for the representation of intimate female worlds that had long been absent from Colombian media. While the conventional narrative has positioned Gloria Triana, a sociologist and anthropologist focused on popular culture and director of national television programmes such as Colombian Nights and Aluna,5 as the main author of Yuruparí, she developed the concept following the invitation of Ann Marie Lóök, then a producer at the television channel. Beyond these two women, recent archival archaeology has unveiled the contributions of more than 25 other women - including editors, filmmakers, producers, editors and negative cutters such as Beatriz Barros, Ofelia Ramírez, and María Ema Frade.6
Figure 2
Gloria Triana in Cerro Nariz, 1985. Gloria Triana’s personal archive, photograph taken by Viki Ospina.
Figure 3
Yuruparí film crew. Gloria Triana’s personal archive, photograph taken by Viki Ospina.
Acknowledging these presences not only challenges the biased and patriarchal narrative towards the production team, but also repositions Yuruparí within Colombian audiovisual history, where women’s labor and perspectives have largely been overshadowed. In this and many other ways, Yuruparí marked the beginning of an alternative representation. As one of the still photographers of the series, Jorge Mario Múnera, recalled, ‘Yuruparí was a political and radical project.’7 As the series progressed over a span of three years, it became increasingly attuned to local voices and social struggles. This gradual shift may help explain the initial difficulties surrounding its preservation, raising important questions about who holds the authority to narrate history, and what stories are deemed worthy of being archived in state-controlled archives.
For this applied research exercise, as mentioned, we focused on the episode of ‘Angélica la palenquera’, directed by Gloria Triana and Jorge Ruiz in 1984, which portrays Angélica María Herrera Miranda narrating her life in first person - important to note that it was the first episode to do so -, in San Basilio de Palenque. Palenque is known for being the first slave-free African town in the American Continent by the runaway slave Benkos Biohó in 1600. It has been overly studied by anthropologists since the beginning of the 20th century, the work of Nina S. de Friedman is specially known, and was declared part of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005. Here you can locate the town on a map to reference the distance with other towns from Mahates in the district of Bolívar, in the northern territory of Colombia.
Figures 4, 5, 6, and 7
Stills from ‘Angélica la palenquera’ (Gloria Triana and Jorge Ruiz, 1984).
The Kuchá Suto Communication Collective in Palenque was founded by storytellers and narrators of memory from the community. Since 1999 it has functioned as a communitarian and alternative media organization led by empirical filmmakers from the region. Initially composed of young people from the Institución Educativa Técnica Agropecuaria Benkos Biohó, under the leadership of teachers Maridis Simarra Ospino, Sebastián Salgado Reyes, and with support from Colectivo de Comunicaciones Línea 21 de los Montes de María through Soraya Bayuelo, the Collective started with community radio programming and youth training. Over the years, Kuchá Suto has implemented self-education processes, filmmaking trainings, and the creation of audiovisual content to reconstruct historical memory, strengthen and preserve the region’s own cultural expressions, oral traditions, and intangible heritage - such as music, language, rhythm, movements, and ancestral stories.
More recently, their scope of action has expanded: they maintain a sound archive Banco de Memorias (Bank of Sounds) documenting everyday life in Palenque and neighboring corregimientos; organize photographic reconstruction projects to revive the Palenque of the 1920s–1990s; run a traveling cinema club; carry out radio community programming; and participate in cultural festivals and public exhibitions. Their work is closely linked with Línea 21, which supported their early formation, and their experiences have had positive spillover effects on other memory-collection efforts in the region, serving as a model for how community-led communication and heritage recovery can foster collective identity, intergenerational exchange, and resilience among children, youth, victims of armed conflict, and broader audiences.
2 Our Positionalities
Rodolfo has been one of the main coordinators of the Kuchá Suto Collective since its beginning. Laura has been working in and around the Montes de María region and Palenque on research and communication projects since 2014, where the two met more than a decade ago. At the intersection of their friendship, their shared interests in memory and anthropology, and the decolonial archival practices in film they wished to explore, Laura proposed this project as part of her MA thesis in Archive Film Studies at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastián, Basque Country, in 2023, with the support of TresMilMalas, her collective in Colombia together with Mateo Grillo.
From the beginning, this research project using the Yuruparí archive had a creative component, a latent ongoing process, which was grounded in a critical reflection on positionality and the contribution of other possible voices - those that could amplify their own agency and political perspective within the archive. In this sense, the need to focus on one of the episodes in order to invite individuals from the specific regions where Yuruparí had been filmed, had been previously discussed as a parallel and necessary process alongside the restoration of the episodes. We discussed this during the conference ‘“Yuruparí: Arte tradicional popular” on San Andrés and Providencia’ with Dr. Juana Suárez, at the 2nd Restored Cycle of the Cinemateca de Bogotá in October 2020. As Juana had emphasized in her approach to the collection’s restoration, our discussion then highlighted the importance of an anthropological and more accessible approach to this archive.
With no resources from the institutions who manage their rights hitherto, our long-term friendship and collaboration in Palenque, sustained and made it possible to envision a participatory workshop that included collective cataloging and an identification exercise. This eventually connected us with other regional archiving initiatives, such as the San Basilio de Palenque Audiovisual Archive Management Project and the broader community audiovisual archives in Montes de María to continue working in the near future.
This exercise offered the opportunity to situate the workshop within broader initiatives and present a case study of participatory cataloging and testimonies, employing qualitative and ethnographic methodologies. It also allowed us to reflect on the state-controlled gaze still present in Colombia’s audiovisual heritage and preservation strategies. Simultaneously, we reflected on what Kuchá Suto has been able to achieve with their own audiovisual archive, and the economic prioritization needed from the public institutions in order to implement collective research on archival narratives and representations from Afro, Indigenous and peasant communities in Colombia. The vertical gaze of state-controlled production is contrasted here with a community-driven, decolonial perspective on archival work.
The decoloniality of this metadata process can be articulated from the outset as a core argument: it challenges conventional hierarchies in the production, preservation, and interpretation of audiovisual heritage, while foregrounding local knowledge, expertise, and memory. This perspective is further strengthened by our mentioned positionality: Rodolfo as an embedded community leader and practitioner, and Laura as an external researcher and archivist collaborating closely with the community. Together, we believe our backgrounds allow us to reflect and articulate the ethical and methodological dimensions of participatory, decolonial archival work, without, of course, always needing to improve and receive constructive criticism. We are aware of the inherent limitations this unfinished process faces in terms of impact, particularly in the absence of institutional will and resources, and when considered alongside other, more urgent projects within the community’s priorities. While critical of the state-controlled framework, we understand it is important to recognize that the community’s archival initiatives have benefited from public policies, highlighting the productive tensions between autonomy and state support in the management of cultural heritage in Colombia and elsewhere.
Our work on this project was carried out across different locations - Palenque, Bogotá, San Sebastián, and Madrid - through ongoing discussion in Spanish. The audio from the participatory screening and discussion was transcribed into Spanish, while portions of the conversation occurred in Palenquero among participants. Some segments of the reflections were originally drafted by Rodolfo and later translated and integrated by Laura, who also authored the remaining analysis.9 The historical contextualization of the Yuruparí series was written by Laura, while the reflections on the potential contributions to local projects in Palenque were authored by the Kuchá Suto collective and Rodolfo. Laura was also responsible for the editorial completion of the text, ensuring coherence and integration across sections. The on-site production of the participatory cataloging exercise in Palenque was made possible through the work of the Kuchá Suto collective and Rodolfo, with crucial logistical support from Silvia Miranda. The transcription process combined the use of digital tools and autocorrect platforms with the careful review of an external anthropologist. This multilingual and collaborative process underscores the dialogic and co-constructed nature of the research, aligning with feminist and decolonial approaches to archives that foreground shared authority, relational accountability, and the amplification of historically marginalized voices. Finally, the project also aspires to publication in Spanish and Palenquero, reinforcing its commitment to linguistic diversity and community-centered knowledge production.
3 Institutional Frameworks and the Politics of Preservation
From a situated archival perspective, it is important to acknowledge the provenance of these images and sounds and the outcome of ongoing preservation and restoration efforts led by Proimágenes Colombia and RTVC-Señal Memoria, the current rights holders of the series. The restoration initiative, carried out in collaboration with the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, where the film archives are preserved, was launched in 2013 under the leadership of Dr. Juana Suárez, Director of the MIAP Program at NYU, who initiated the digitization and digital restoration project through both national and international partnerships, together with the director and editor Juan Sebastián Quebrada (image) and media archivist Pamela Vizner (sound).
Early recognition of the collection’s importance by Juana Suárez helped secure grants from organizations such as FIAT/IFTA’s Save Your Archive programme in 2014, with later support from the National Museum of African American Culture-Smithsonian/Blake McDowell in the US. Ongoing work from the technical team of RTVC–Señal Memoria and Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, led by Jorge Mario Vera, and independent filmmakers initiatives such as María Fernanda Carrillo’s with Churubuscos Studios in Mexico, amongst others, contributed to scanning and restoration of more episodes. In 2021, Juana Suárez and the Colombian institutions collaborated again with FIAT/IFTA, this time with PRASAD, to continue the digitization and restoration of Yuruparí.
Thanks to these efforts and others, 26 of the original 86 episodes (approx. 25 minutes, filmed in 16mm) have been restored. Eleven episodes, with no interference regarding the collective copyright of its music, are available on RTVCPlay. These initiatives demonstrate the local and international collaborative nature of preserving a sociopolitical documentary series such as Yuruparí in Latin America, highlighting its exceptional audiovisual and cultural value, while emphasizing an urgent need for community-centered archival practices to achieve a more comprehensive approach of its gaze and institutional representation. In addition, according to the 2016 inventory led by Juana Suárez and Gloria Triana,11 remaining archival materials of the production process of the series include VHS, academic articles, newspaper and magazine clippings, award certificates, administrative and personal correspondence, interviews, brochures, photographs, retrospective materials, programs, posters, scripts, conference texts and presentations by Triana, lectures on Yuruparí, and promotional flyers, which have yet to be summoned in the restoration and wholesome research process.
Figures 8 and 9
Film reels A and B from the episode ‘Cumbia sobre el río’ (Gloria Trian, 1986). Photographs by Jorge Mario Vera (2021), taken at the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, where the Yuruparí film carriers are preserved.
The shared management of this heritage among national institutions has so far hindered the establishment of standardized coordination across grant initiatives and technical protocols, which would be necessary to ensure consistent quality and a coherent editorial approach in both physical and digital restorations. Nevertheless, national institutions have made progress with El Retorno de Yuruparí, a project that presents selected episodes in the communities where they were originally filmed. These screenings have fostered closer engagement with attendees and culminated in a creative intervention project with the reels. The initiative, however, has not fully incorporated the archival preservation frameworks that preceded it, leaving open the possibility to strengthen community participation so as to mitigate the verticality inherent in such projects through a participatory and anthropological methodology. We wish such possibilities to be developed on a larger scale with institutional will and support.
These challenges in budget prioritization, institutional coordination and restoration practices highlight a broader set of questions about the role of archives, their governance, and their accessibility. Beyond technical and administrative concerns, they point to the limits of state-centered approaches in fully engaging with the individuals represented in the preserved materials. Such tensions invite a critical examination of how these archives mediate power, whose voices are prioritized, and how archival materials can be approached as living, negotiable spaces rather than fixed repositories of hegemonic memory.
4 Revisiting ‘Angélica la palenquera’
The inherited colonial gaze adapted to the context of Colombia can be epitomized in the relationship between the center and what is called perifey, or peripheral cities and towns, as well as in the economic, cultural and political domination from the capital. The tensions of Yuruparí - manifested also in ‘Angélica la palenquera’ which was the first episode to be narrated in the first person and from the point of view of a local female inhabitant - are visible through a non-institutional gaze.
In this episode, Angélica María Herrera Miranda portrays and discusses songs, dances, and games of her hometown, San Basilio de Palenque. Having lived in Barranquilla, Atlántico, a larger city up north from Palenque for many years, she returns to her community, reflecting on her Palenquero origins, family life, and the value of collective work. She recalls how their traditions - such as the baile muerto, bullerengue, and the funerary rite of Lumbalú - are inherited from the cimarrón ancestors of the colonial era. The episode highlights both women’s songs, performed during daily chores, and men’s chants and musical skills, showing how music becomes a marker of identity. In one sequence, women perform their dance on a Barranquilla beach, as part of a broader narrative of the intersections between these communities in daily life. The camera also lingers on festive moments, collective labor, and children carrying forward the traditions. At the same time, it aestheticizes cultural heritage in its ambivalent tones - capturing both joy and sorrow, as seen in the images of the Lumbalú death ceremony, where song, rhythm, and ritual embody memory and resilience.10
Figures 10, 11, 12 and 13
Stills from ‘Angélica la palenquera’ (Gloria Triana and Jorge Ruiz, 1984).
While the episode of ‘Angélica’ aimed to preserve these traditions, it also raised more questions when revisiting it again in 2023: what happens to the voices, bodies, and individual lives that do not fit the institutional lens, both literally and figuratively? What about the diasporic bodies closely affected by forced displacement, the unspoken exchanges of collective resistance, the daily routines of those closer to armed conflict, those moments that resisted being categorized or contained in these images?
We were inclined to see these questions as an invitation to think about representation: how it has been constructed, whether it had any impact on the lives of the people from Palenque at that moment (or on their relationship to the dominant center of the country, Bogotá), what implications the gaze of on-screen representation continues to have in the present lives of people from the region, how it has circulated after the digitization and restoration of the archival footage, who has actual access to it, and, most importantly, how it can be disrupted.
In Colombia, efforts toward the decolonization of audiovisual archives have mostly been carried out at the level of practice, where there remains space for developing knowledge management through academic and participatory settings of reflection. Despite a long and positive trajectory of promoting and shaping public policies that strengthen community processes, many of these initiatives continue without stable public funding, and the role of the State in such processes - whether to be resisted or supported - remains in an unclear tension of dependence from such projects. This situation raises pressing questions about the sustainability and long-term consistency of these projects, the actual agency of the people leading them, and the politics of archival stewardship.
This brings us to key questions such as: what does it mean to decolonize a state archive like Yuruparí? How can we observe, engage with, listen to, and circulate what has already been registered by the gaze of state-controlled production? What would it mean to reclaim such a state archive or to shift it from a repository of institutional memory to a tool for community reflection and activation? What are the rights of those represented in them? Who are the stakeholders for whom these archives carry meaning? What is the meaning these archives carry for those involved in their preservation, as opposed to the meaning they carry for the people in the region? What kinds of dialogues can these archives suggest with their current lives?
Approaching Yuruparí as a living archive - a collection in constant use and evolution, shaped by both institutions and communities, as well as the passing of time - positions images and sounds as part of both individual and collective memory. This perspective allows the construction of a possible counter-archive, reconsidering diverse archival policies, foregrounding ethical, social, and political layers to specific contexts, and opening possibilities for reflection, creative practice, and forms of resistance from situated practices. A counter-archive, as exemplified by the Archive/Counter-Archive project, refers to community-based, countercultural, and political archival initiatives that preserve audiovisual heritage of Indigenous peoples, Black communities, women, LGTBIQA+ groups, and migrants, while actively supporting the communities in telling the stories behind the content.12 It implies approaching the archive as a socio-political object of study, in line with the ‘archival turn’, where the contexts of production, organization, and preservation are themselves objects of research. By integrating frameworks such as Giorgio Agamben’s concept of profanation13 and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the creative act,14 this approach treats archives as spaces of constant (de)construction, negotiation, and malleability, where audiovisual practices intersect with social struggles across territories.
In the process of revisiting ‘Angélica la palenquera’, we understood this archive as a living, breathing space - one that carries the memories, power structures, and unresolved silences of those it depicts, and is shaped by those who return to it. This archive brings necessary questions, dialogues, and disruptions. Revisiting the images and sounds of an archive produced by state institutions implies a democratic act of listening from the vantage point of the present, in order to unveil the ethics of the less evident social, economic, and political layers embedded in the archival materials representing the past. This perspective emphasizes that archives should not remain static, but serve life, knowledge, and collective memory beyond the walls of vaults, constituting a strategy against oblivion.
5 Other Ways of Naming the Archive: From State Memory to a Living Archive
Cataloging within the public and private institutions that safeguard the carriers of Yuruparí, materials have traditionally focused on technical aspects such as formats, duration, and primary production and direction credits. In the case of RTVC–Señal Memoria’s online catalogue, this also includes detailed descriptions of synopses, awards, and institutional commentary. Other written documents and online platforms have contributed contextual information about the series. However, as noted earlier, the accessible corpus of the Yuruparí archive - despite recent progress - remains ‘random, scarce, and disorganized in documentation centers’.15
In response to this gap, the collective cataloging and identification exercise of ‘Angélica la palenquera’ was designed with a decolonial and participatory approach in mind. Conducted in a hybrid form (in person and online) on October 3, 2023 at the Casa Museo Simankongo, in collaboration with the Kuchá Suto collective, the exercise sought to move beyond purely technical documentation. By centering knowledge, memories, and perspectives of community members, the systematization aimed to propose a more inclusive cataloging strategy that acknowledges both institutional priorities and the lived experiences of local actors. The methodology combined intergenerational dialogue, community-centered reflection, and co-creation of archival categories, ensuring that the archive functions as a living resource shaped by those who are represented within it.
The project drew on methodologies previously implemented by the Kuchá Suto collective, as well as ethical frameworks and collective cataloging tools from Juana Suárez’s reflections. These included, but were not limited to - acknowledging the need for a situated political and cultural evaluation - Murkutu CMS, a free, mobile, open-source platform developed with Indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage, and Local Contexts, which employs Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels to enable communities to assert cultural protocols regarding access and use of heritage circulating digitally beyond local contexts. The Smithsonian National Collection Program’s Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns framework, despite being primarily applied to museum collections, was also taken into account to guide access, reuse, and restitution practices of the two Colombian institutions responsible for audiovisual heritage, including the Yuruparí archive.
The project functioned as a site for collective inquiry, shaped by memory, knowledge exchange, and reflection on audiovisual representation. Participants included local leaders, teachers, musicians, artisans, and filmmakers from different ages and genders, each with distinct connections to the episode ‘Angélica la palenquera’ and to the evolving identity of the town. Among them were Yaneth Santana Herazo, Ignacio Herrera, Dairis Miranda Salgado, Juan Martínez García, Antonia Cassiani Padilla, and Nicasio Reyes Salgado, whose insights were integral to the systematization and written analysis presented in this text. We include here short biographies of the participants:
Yaneth Santana Herazo is a community leader from the La Bonga neighborhood in San Basilio de Palenque, who experienced displacement in the aftermath of the armed conflict in 2001. Today, she serves as a member of the Ma Kankamana community board of San Basilio de Palenque and works as a cultural manager, leading initiatives that support her community in situations of displacement.
Ignacio Herrera is a peasant farmer who was dispossessed of his land due to the country’s sociopolitical violence in 2021. He experienced the loss of his daughter during the displacement process and later lost his wife due to the new living conditions he had to face. Currently, he serves as a prominent community leader in his sector, advocating for the rights and welfare of local farmers.
Dairis Miranda Salgado is a cultural manager and member of the women’s Madre Montes collective, which works on issues of food sovereignty and traditional agricultural practices through field cultivation and environmental care.
Juan Martínez García, whose adolescence and schooling were disrupted by constant persecution from armed groups. However, participation in a communication training program for radio changed the course of his life. Today, he works as an audiovisual producer with the Kuchá Suto Collective in Palenque.
Antonia Cassiani Padilla was another participant in the workshop. Between 2010 and 2012, a broader museum committee was formed under her leadership. Trained in community museology, participatory research, object valuation and inventory, action planning, and resource management, she organized and curated a more structured exhibition on El Pilón at the current Casa de Cultura de Palenque, with support from the Colombian Ministry of Culture. In 2019–2020, she led the opening of a new exhibition and participatory research on the history of Simankongo and its connection to the African-origin instrument: the Marímbula, the Son Sexteto Habanero, and, in particular, the preservation of Palenque’s traditional house. This initiative was part of the Beca de Estímulos awarded to Bernardino Reyes and Antonia Cassiani by the Colombian Ministry of Culture and the National Stimulus Program.
Nicasio Reyes Salgado is a farmer and coordinator of cultural activities at the Casa de Cultura de Palenque, who has served as a community leader.
All group sessions conducted during the first stage were recorded both on video and by sound recording, generating a living archive that integrates photographs, testimonies, and analytical observations. Ethical and reflexive considerations were central to the methodology: informed consent and reciprocity ensured participants understood the project’s objectives and the potential uses of the material. Care was taken to address power dynamics inherent in documenting community knowledge, emphasizing co-creation and community guidance in interpreting archival material.
The workshop was conceived in two main stages, with the collaboration of Silvia Miranda and Mateo Grillo. The initial one consisted of a collective viewing of the episode ‘Angélica la palenquera’ with six community participants. During this session, participants engaged in both individual and group reflections: they wrote or drew their impressions, shared memories and knowledge, and discussed their perceptions of traditional Palenqueran culture. The process began with personal introductions and a contextual presentation of the Yuruparí project, fostering a space of trust and recognition of each participant’s expertise and lived experience.
Following the viewing, semi-structured questions guided these conversations, focusing on audiovisual representation, local traditions, songs, dances, and the continuity or transformation of cultural practices over time. Participants reflected on the spaces, objects, and people depicted in the episode, as well as on the narrative choices made by the filmmakers, considering both what was included and what was absent. The session concluded with participants identifying a space or object evoked by the episode and filling out the first part of a cataloging form, documenting selected frames and personal associations with support from the Kuchá Suto collective.
Participants engaged with the archival footage in different ways, generating narratives, anecdotes, and clarifications concerning local practices, clothing, streets and housing, songs, gastronomy dishes, and dances. The process revealed frictions present in the episode’s original framing and emphasized the need for critical and imaginative engagement to supplement the audiovisual representation. Participants recounted specific practices, such as Angélica singing while dancing or the attire used during the Lumbalú ceremony. The active listening process allowed contradictions and unfinished stories to surface, and informed the participatory cataloging categories to develop for potential metadata inclusion.
The second stage, still pending to develop, was designed as individual sessions in which participants would complete detailed cataloging forms, revisit the places and objects mentioned, contribute photographic and audio documentation of memories, and reflect critically on the methodology itself. Furthermore, we would systematise and integrate all this technically as metadata in RTVC-Señal Memoria and Proimágens Colombia’s archive documentation system. This phase would require additional financial and logistical support to be implemented.
The collective cataloging process was conceived as a political intervention, redistributing interpretive authority from institutional metadata to the lived experiences of those represented. Each frame prompted structured reflection through questions such as: ‘What do you see? What do you remember? What is absent?’ Responses were multilayered and non-linear, often complementing or contesting one another, identifying places and individuals absent from prior institutional records. This methodology also enabled interrogation of the silences within the Yuruparí series while facilitating new possibilities for meaning-making. As emphasized by the Kuchá Suto collective, the exercise contributes to the recognition and valorization of community-led memory practices; it underscores the potential of archives as dynamic sites of narration, critique, and reimagination rather than as static repositories.
6 Mapping Oral Memory: Traditions, Places, and People
The subsequent section presents a synthesis of thematic axes emerging from the cataloging process, revealing an acute awareness of the transformations within both the social landscape and the material environment of Palenque, illustrated with participant categories and images.
Figure 14
Juan Martínez and Nicasio Reyes waiting for the exercise to begin. Photograph of the pilot exercise of collective cataloging and identification in Palenque, photograph taken by Rodolfo Palomino, 2023.
Yaneth Santana Herazo recalled:
I think that video… I was 12 years old when it was filmed. What we saw there was Palenque as it used to be. It brought back many memories because it talked about the stream, the little house, everything they mentioned is what we grew up with as young people. Pouring water over our heads. I think it reminds us of many things that are still maintained today, like the hairstyles of the people who lived there—many people still do them.
Her words highlight how the arroyo was once more than just a body of water: it was a communal space where children played, families gathered, and memory was etched into daily life. The recollection of pouring water over one’s head is anecdotal and emblematic of how physical spaces facilitated practices of care, sociability, and identity. Even as she notes continuity in cultural expressions like hairstyling, her testimony underscores how places central to community life have receded into memory, becoming intangible markers of belonging.
Figure 15
Viewing of ‘Angélica la palenquera’ (Gloria Triana and Jorge Ruiz, 1984), during the pilot exercise of collective cataloging and identification in Palenque, 2023.
Antonia Cassiani Padilla reflected:
The plaza is gone. They also talk about the stream, the traditional houses… What has disappeared is the land, because we hardly see any heritage left in Palenque. Palenque is being transformed.
Antonia situates her testimony within a broader awareness of material disappearance. The loss of the plaza, the arroyo, and traditional architecture speaks to processes of erosion that are both physical and cultural. Her statement that ‘the land has disappeared’ condenses a profound reality: when territory is transformed or appropriated, the cultural landscape that once flourished within it is destabilized. The remark resonates with wider dynamics of Afro-descendant communities in Colombia, who often confront urbanization and the absence of effective preservation policies. Her testimony becomes both a diagnosis of change and a lament for the fragments of heritage that persist only in memory.
Nicasio Reyes Salgado shared:
In Palenque, we used to have seven or eight rezanderas. Today, we barely have two.
Nicasio draws attention to the diminishing presence of rezanderas - women prayer leaders who once held central roles in spiritual and social life. This decline is not merely numerical; it marks the erosion of a system of communal care that accompanied people in moments of vulnerability, illness, and death. He further explained:
The priest would never enter the house; he only went to the door to bless the sick person. It was the rezanderas who came in and accompanied them. Today, this is disappearing.
Through his reflection, Nicasio articulates a subtle but powerful critique: the resilience of community-based spiritual authority is waning, displaced by external religious structures. His testimony points to the archive’s silences: while the Yuruparí series may have filmed such figures, it could not fully capture the profound role they played as guardians of spiritual continuity.
Figure 16
Silvia Miranda in the foreground, Nicasio Reyes, Dairis Miranda, and Laura Alhach in the inset, in the midst of the conversation following the screening, during the pilot exercise of collective cataloging and identification in Palenque, 2023.
Antonia Cassiani Padilla declared:
I am the healer of gastronomy. A Black Palenquera, I was the wisdom keeper of gastronomy. That food with teeth and mind, to have strength, spirit, and energy.
For Antonia, food is far more than sustenance. It is healing, spirituality, and embodied knowledge. Her description of gastronomy as ‘food with teeth and mind’ encapsulates a worldview in which cooking transmits strength, spirit, and resilience. To identify herself as a ‘healer of gastronomy’ is to affirm that cooking is a practice of resistance and a mode of keeping memory alive. Such testimonies remind us that heritage is not limited to building spaces or material archives; it is carried in recipes, tastes, and the everyday acts of nurturing that constitute living archives.
Nicasio Reyes Salgado added:
In Palenque, we have many wisdom keepers who are the foundation. In Palenque, we believe that if you charge money for this service, the secret you hold is lost. It is done as an honor.
Here, Nicasio touches upon a crucial tension between traditional knowledge and modern economic pressures. Wisdom, in Palenque’s worldview, is a commodity and a gift. To place a monetary value on it would strip it of its power. This philosophy underscores a spiritual economy where knowledge circulates as honor, not as transaction. It also reveals why archives –even when they record practices– can never fully capture the ethical frameworks in which such practices are embedded.
Antonia Cassiani Padilla recalled:
The arroyo is where we would meet, or it was a means of communication.
The arroyo, as she remembers it, was a social artery, a space that enabled encounters and exchanges, both practical and symbolic. Its absence is not just environmental loss but the disappearance of a connective tissue that once bound people together. The testimony underscores how space itself functioned as an archive of memory - one that cannot be replicated once it is gone.
Dairis Miranda Salgado remembered:
I had a book of prayers. I asked my aunt if I could borrow it, and she told me, ‘I cannot lend you this book. If you are interested in this, you must embrace it. It has power, it carries weight.’
This exchange reveals the sacredness of transmission. The prayer book is not a neutral object; it is imbued with power and responsibility. To inherit such a text is to embrace a spiritual calling, not merely to receive information. Dairis’s memory demonstrates how intangible heritage is safeguarded through protocols of respect and initiation, creating an ethical boundary that formal archives cannot replicate.
Figure 17
Juan Martínez, Yaneth Santana, Nicasio Reyes, Dairis Miranda, with Laura Alhach and Mateo Grillo in the inset, in the midst of the conversation following the screening, during the pilot exercise of collective cataloging and identification in Palenque, 2023.
On the power of self-representation, Dairis also proposed:
We can create a video of the present, show it, and hold workshops in schools and the municipal plaza. Show both worlds: the one from before and the one today.
This desire to construct a ‘double perspective’ signals an active reclaiming of narrative authority. For the community, the archive is not an inert record of the past but a living tool to be reinterpreted and set in dialogue with present realities. Dairis’s words point to an audiovisual praxis of resistance, one that contests archival neutrality and instead proposes self-representation as a form of agency.
Yaneth Santana Herazo emphasized:
For me, it is extremely important that we record what identifies us as Palenqueros ourselves.
Her statement resonates as a manifesto for community authorship. To record ‘what identifies us’ is to reject imposed gazes and reclaim the power to define one’s own image. This intersects with the ethos of Kuchá Suto’s collective practice: not merely to preserve but to intervene, reconstruct meaning, and question the central powers that historically shaped the narratives of Afro-descendant peoples in Colombia.
Nicasio Reyes Salgado concluded:
It is important to make multiple copies of this video and present it to young people.
For Nicasio, the archive’s value lies not in preservation for its own sake, but in its circulation among the youth, who embody the future of memory. The demand for accessibility over enclosure reframes the archive as a resource for continuity rather than as a relic hidden away.
Yaneth Santana Herazo affirmed:
From the collective, we can continue recording these manifestations. Tomorrow, it could be us.
Her testimony underscores the archive’s open-endedness: it is not a closed book but a process in constant renewal. The act of recording becomes both a documentation of the present and a preparation for the future, ensuring that community members remain active agents of their own historical record.
Figure 18
Rodolfo Palomino preparing the internet connection to begin the exercise. Record of the pilot exercise of collective cataloging and identification in Palenque, photograph taken by Silvia Miranda, 2023.
Finally, Rodolfo Palomino suggested:
It would be so important to have a copy of this episode at the Casa Museo Simankongo.
This proposal reclaims the archive as local heritage, situating it not in distant institutions but in the community’s own museum. To place the material there is to ensure its accessibility and to affirm that Palenque itself is the rightful custodian of its memory.
The following photographs show the principal categories that the six participants’ selected to encompass all the others: Traditions, Places and People.
Figure 19
Map of customs identified during the exercise of collective cataloging and identification in Palenque, photograph taken by Rodolfo Palomino, 2023.
Figure 20
Map of places identified during the exercise of collective cataloging and identification in Palenque, photograph taken by Rodolfo Palomino, 2023.
Figure 21
Map of characters identified during the exercise of collective cataloging and identification in Palenque, photograph taken by Rodolfo Palomino, 2023
7 Situated Design of an Audiovisual Heritage Management Process
Our intention with the first collective cataloging exercise that engaged representatives of the Palenque community with the Yuruparí archive, aimed to recognize the historical significance of this material while also continuing the long-standing work led by the Kuchá Suto Collective. Today, the preservation of Palenque’s historical and cultural memory is a collective commitment that continues to give value to the archival material held within the community. The San Basilio de Palenque Audiovisual Archive Management Project has aimed to design a comprehensive process to systematize, collect, maintain, use, and share audiovisual heritage from the territory, based on best practices and criteria for administration, documentation and preservation.
Since 2017, a process of identification and repatriation of film, photographs, audios, and document materials produced by individuals, organizations, educational institutions, universities, production companies, and researchers in Colombia regarding Palenque has been underway. This has resulted in a database with an inventory of the materials and locations where they are stored, as well as the holders of the property and moral rights for the diverse works. To date, this effort has led to the acquisition and legalization of 60 audiovisual works belonging to the community of Palenque, which are now safeguarded in its archive.
In 2018, more than 50 productions on Palenque’s cultural heritage from the National Archives were cataloged and digitized. That same year, several initiatives were carried out to gather information and materials from different sectors of Palenque, producing more than 400 photographs that document community life. The first round was carried out in the Junche sector of the town, where 112 photographs were recovered with the active participation of its inhabitants. Subsequent gatherings took place in La Almendra, La Olla, and La Loma, producing another 114 images, followed by smaller contributions from La Calle de los Caseres, La Boguita, and María Luisa. Each of these initiatives were opportunities for intergenerational dialogue and reflection about the significance of preserving community memory.
This work has been accompanied by training processes with national institutions such as the Ministry of Culture’s communication division, the National General Archive, and the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. At the local level, Kuchá Suto coordinated the laboratory Palenque en Clave Digital, which engaged 34 students from the Benkos Biohó Educational Institution. Participants produced communicative pieces such as Noticiero de la Memoria and Revivamos la Memoria, integrating materials from the audiovisual archive into new creative practices and reaffirming the community’s agency for self-representation.
While the episode of ‘Angélica la palenquera’ of the Yuruparí series provided a point of contact with State archives, community efforts have long extended beyond those images. The Casa Museo Simankongo has become a key space for consolidating the audiovisual archive, implementing processes of repatriation, preservation, cataloging, and circulation of heritage materials. These initiatives are closely tied to Palenque’s Plan Especial de Salvaguardia (PES) and emphasize ethno-educational strategies that integrate archival materials into schools, workshops, and public cultural life. In this way, archival management is not conceived as a static task of conservation but as a living practice oriented toward pedagogy, creativity, and community appropriation.
The central role Kuchá Suto continues to play in shaping both the archive and contemporary cultural production can be acknowledged in their different projects, combining production, training, and dissemination of their collaborative work. They have formed generations of young Palenqueros in audiovisual and radio practices, and their film Los niños juegan, cantan y ríen, tradición de un pueblo (2013) received a prestigious India Catalina award. Beyond training, the collective has ensured that memory materials circulate on community radio and digital platforms, expanding the reach of Palenque’s voices. Their YouTube channel functions as both an extension of the archive and a space of contemporary production, bringing together historical footage, new works, and community-led documentation.
Other initiatives, such as the Museo Afro, broaden the interpretive framework by connecting Palenque’s archive to wider Afro-Colombian and Afro-diasporic networks. They situate Palenque’s audiovisual heritage within transnational conversations on memory, visibility, and resistance, highlighting how community archives not only preserve but also reconfigure cultural narratives.
The preservation of Palenque’s own audiovisual heritage is, therefore, a practice of resistance that enables the community to continue narrating and re-narrating their history. In this way, it also enables a critical engagement with the audiovisual materials that represent the community through external perspectives and a state-controlled gaze such as Yuruparí, forming part of a much broader and ongoing process of community-driven archival activation. Moreover, continuing to develop heritage management processes within the San Basilio de Palenque audiovisual archive can generate a conceptual and legal framework - consistent with local customs and practices and aligned with national and international regulations - that enables the community to define and delimit the actions and scope of intellectual property and copyright matters related to their audiovisual archival materials.
The project also aims to implement these methods on a wider scale, in collaboration with institutions safeguarding Yuruparí’s rights and with universities in Colombia, as well as in partnership with local communication groups with whom the collective has worked previously. The ultimate goal is the design of a multimedia platform where collective cataloging tools, oral memory analysis, and creative outputs such as photographs and testimonies are integrated. This effort involves addressing themes such as privacy, shareability, linking participants with audiovisual content, and regional dissemination strategies that are mindful of structural limitations to internet access in rural communities. Strategies of cataloging, accessing, reusing, creating, and circulating audiovisual material are ultimately tools against loss, enabling a reconfiguration of official narratives present in Colombian and Latin American archives.
8 Community-Generated Metadata and Decolonial Cataloging: Archival Futures
In the shift from institutionalized, top-down archival practices to community-driven processes, the question of who generates the metadata, and how that metadata shapes our understanding of the past, becomes central. Archival futures, particularly those rooted in the call for a radical reimagining of what archives can be: not merely static repositories of information, but dynamic sites of resistance, creativity, and collaboration.
The process of community-generated metadata allows those whose histories have been represented externally to actively participate in the creation of their own archival narratives. When thinking of metadata, technical descriptors - tags, categories, and keywords – designed to make an archive searchable are the central vision. But metadata can also be understood as a form of storytelling, a catalyst for generating collective knowledge around the images and sounds. It carries the voices of those historically marginalized by institutionalized narratives, allowing communities to shape and reconfigure how their own histories are represented, understood, and shared.
In the context of the collective cataloging project, this meant rethinking the categories, labels, and frameworks that traditionally dominate institutional catalogues. The participatory process that began with the episode ‘Angélica la palenquera’ highlights the potential of a decolonial approach to metadata: one that resists standardization and embraces multiplicity, complexity, and nuance. Rather than focusing on classifying and storing information, the community-driven approach transforms metadata into a tool for engagement, dialogue, and even activism – an approach whose potential needs economic prioritization by archival institutions.
Metadata, thus, becomes a political act. It is a way of categorizing an archive, while also a means of claiming space, asserting visibility, and refusing the erasure of counter-histories. A more pluralistic and democratic contribution to the metadata of Yuruparí materials contributes to a collective rewriting of history, challenging the hegemonic narratives often embedded in state-run archives. A decolonial approach to broadcast archives, as we have sought to implement with this practical exercise, emerges from the open participation of the individuals represented in the archive. There is still a power structure that must be addressed, but from a cataloging perspective, this initiates a radical vision for the future of archives. These spaces must be approached with professional and communitarian care and rigor, generating qualitative knowledge that can unveil the nuances and complexity inherent to audiovisual archives, which helps us better understand the present.
As Julia Cortegana has noted:
Becoming aware of the power that archives have in shaping memory and identity is a key step in establishing a situated and critical position, reformulating, again and again, the descriptions of the archived objects. Advances in social studies allow for decolonial, feminist, or antiracist perspectives (among others), challenging hegemonic knowledge, and therefore critiquing archival practices, which can even question the standards of archival documentation. This opens the possibility for critical archives to respond to patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist logics inherent in classical and governmental archival practice (such as taxonomic hierarchies or the use of merely descriptive terms shaped by normative imaginaries). Critical archives will decide to break with these logics and contextualize their elements in counter-hegemonic ways, expanding what will constitute collective memory.16
Although various archive institutions from the Global North have started addressing issues of dominant practices that overlook marginalized histories of colonized populations and internal segregations, this kind of decolonial modeling can be better incorporated with methodologies from situated-communitarian experiences from the Global South. This makes the example of the Yuruparí project, the methods and approaches used, particularly relevant for the European context. Challenging the traditional narratives of state-run or institutionally controlled archives, opens up possibilities for a more democratic and ethical approach to collective memory-making and historical preservation across global contexts. As archives in Europe and other regions seek to engage with increasingly diverse and complex histories and reckon with their colonial legacies, collective cataloging stands as a radical tool to shift power, center marginalised voices, and reframe whose histories are being preserved for the future, and how they are being preserved.
Notes
[1] Ligia Echeverri Ángel, Yuruparí Series – 20 Years. Gloria Triana: Dream Weaver with the Threads of Science (Bogotá: Fondo Mixto de Promoción Cinematográfica; Proimágenes en Movimiento, 2003).
[2] Juana Suárez, “Digitization of the Television Series Yuruparí (1983–1986): Rescue as a Tool for Research and Inquiry”, in Eyes Open, Ears Awake! Audiovisual Heritage as a Source for Historical Analysis: XIX Annual Ernesto Restrepo Tirado History Chair (Bogotá: Museo Nacional de Colombia, 2015).
[3] Ángela Molina, “Gloria Triana: An Unending Journey. National Lifetime Achievement Award 2015” (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2016), https://www.mincultura.gov.co/planes-y-programas/programas/programa-nacional-estimulos/publicaciones/Documents/Premio%20Nacional%20Vida%20y%20obra%202015%20-%20GLORIA%20TRIANA%20web.pdf.
[4] Luisa Ordóñez Ortegón, “Film, Audiovisual Media, and Politics: Dissidences, Transgressions, and Resistances”, Cuadernos de Cine Colombiano – Nueva Época 23 (2015): 10–31.
[5] Ministerio de Cultura, Pacific Revealed Territory: Proceedings of the Meeting on Communication and Cultural Heritage of the Colombian Pacific (Cali, August 11–13, 2015) (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2015).
[6] Laura Alhach, “Yuruparí (In)visible: Ejercicios de memoria política, colectiva, material y encarnada”, in El legado de las mujeres en la preservación del patrimonio sonoro, fotográfico y audiovisual: Una perspectiva iberoamericana, eds. G. Sanabria Medina and A. C. Medina Arias (Programa Ibermemoria Sonora, Fotográfica y Audiovisual, 2025), 138–145, https://ibermemoria.org/wp-content/uploads/libro-memorias-2024.pdf.
[8] “‘Yuruparí’ Has Become the Touchstone of Audiovisuales, the Official Broadcaster”, Semana, August 12, 1984, https://www.semana.com/cultura/articulo/close-up/5536-3/.
[9] The final version of this article also benefited greatly from the revisions and comments provided by Danna Mustata (VIEW Journal editorial team) and two anonymous reviewers.
[10] Gloria Triana and Jesús Ruiz, “Angélica la Palenquera”, Yuruparí [television episode], RTVC–Señal Memoria, 1984, https://catalogo.senalmemoria.co.
[12] Julia Cortegana, Una revisión taxonómica desde los colectivos queer, LGTBIQA+ y transfeministas: Creación de un glosario [A Taxonomic Review from Queer, LGTBIQA+ and Transfeminist Collectives: Glossary Creation] (Hamaca Publicaciones, 2025), https://hamacaonline.net/media/publicacio/UnarevisiontaxonomicaCAST.pdf.