Diego Melo (CU Geography), Bernardino Mosquera (R铆o Quito, Choc贸) and Juan Diego Espinosa (National University of Colombia) have been awarded one of ten Antipode Foundation 鈥淩ight to the Discipline鈥� Grants. They will develop a community-based film with Black and White-Mestizo peasant-farmer communities living along the upper Atrato River basin in northwestern Colombia. The project is titled 鈥�Living in the wake of a mining disaster: Co-creating film narratives along the Atrato River, from the gold they mined to the skin we inhabit.鈥澨�
Antipode Foundation 鈥溾�� grants are intended to facilitate creative intellectual and political interventions, inventive forms of collaboration, and tears in the fabric of extant orthodoxies in听geography. There are many radical practices, ideas, and sites of knowledge production that do not receive support in the current funding environment. These听grants听encourage imaginative, daring, and unruly scholarship and praxis, including but not limited to workshops, scholar-activism, and conventional modes of research.听The Antipode Foundation听recognises听movements and forces of social and spatial change already at work inside/outside the academy, and wish to amplify interventions that might otherwise not receive funding. In so doing,听the Antipode Foundation听wants听to support attempts to go beyond, and reshape, the boundaries of established academic practice.
Diego and colleagues will facilitate a series of workshops to explore the听non-conventional, contradictory, deeply affective, and embodied narratives听of people who have been exposed to mining-induced riverine pollution. The 10,000 GBP grant will be used for travel expenses,听walk-along interviews,听body-territory workshops, a poetry circle,听and a script-writing and video editing workshop. These activities will facilitate the tools for participants to build their own narrative and co-produce a film about the slow violence of mechanized gold and copper mining on communities鈥� bodies and territories.