Mobile Country is an initiative of the Alliance for Reconciliation Program of the United States Agency for International Development that operates in Colombia. This initiative together with Estrategia País and in partnership with the National Center of Historical Memory, created a mobile platform for communication, pedagogy, culture and audiovisual production that will serve the construction of memories and reconciliation in five municipalities of Colombia: Cartagena, Santa Marta, Ciénaga, Apartadó and Turbo.

 

The platform functions with a bus that will travel for 6 months working on the construction of memories, awareness and mobilization, support for the peaceful resolution of disputes, the arrangement of meeting scenarios in respect of similarities and the differences, the re-construction of the social fabric, the projection of possible futures, coexistence and the generation of trust of the communities mentioned above.

 

Within this context, the Mobile Country team proposes a visual narrative workshop that tries to pose a visual and narrative reflection in relation to the environment, the memory and the life stories of the inhabitants of the communities where the project passes. The development of the workshops has as its central point this reflection while it profound in different ways of generating visual narratives, seeking to expand the panorama of why to express, plan, investigate and produce our own stories.

 

The Mobile Country bus made a stop at Pies Descalzos School – Cartagena, where students received technical knowledge of narrative and photography by doing field work, in which they chose stories from their surroundings and told them through photographs.

 

The young people were very interested in these three days of work, especially in how the media can be used in the development of reflections that have more to do with the community itself and its problems, than with the aesthetic purpose of a photograph.

 

The workshop team finished the day very satisfied with the critical abilities shown by the students of the institution. This is how from the Pies Descalzos Foundation we thank all the mentioned institutions for linking our students in the development of workshops that bring significant experiences to the community.