Los miles que llevo dentro: construcción de un cuerpo político entre narraciones de un barrio al sur de Bogotá y una vereda en Colombia

Abstract

The Thousands I Carry Within: Constructing a Political Body Through Narratives from a Neighborhood in Southern Bogotá and a Rural Hamlet in Colombia is a research-creation project that brings together autobiographical memory, popular storytelling, and artistic practice in order to reflect on the construction of the political body through urban neighborhood and rural experience. Drawing on personal, familial, and community narratives, the project recovers stories of self-construction, migration, urban violence, community organizing, and everyday life in the peripheral territories of southern Bogotá. These narratives intertwine with experiences in a Colombian rural hamlet, allowing for a reflection on the continuities between urban struggles for inhabiting space and the forms of peasant dignity that sustain rural life. Methodologically, the research moves across different languages and practices: archival photography, painting, graffiti, hip hop, narrative writing, and care practices connected to work on the farm. These forms of expression function both as devices of memory and as strategies of self-representation that make it possible to understand the body as a field of political experience shaped by class, territory, and family history. In this way, the project proposes a situated reflection on the ways in which working-class subjects construct identity, resistance, and critical thought from within their own territories. In the movement between neighborhood and rural hamlet, a central intuition of the research emerges: in the city, we often have too much street, but too little countryside.