Simón plays homage to Yuma – or the Magdalena River as it is known today, 29 February 2024
Simón Mejía is a visual artist and music producer. Simón is the founder and producer of the internationally renowned Colombian band Bomba Estéreo. Simón has also recently founded Monte Jungla, an audiovisual production company based in Bogotá. Monte Jungla experiments between sounds of nature and electronic music to foreground environmental struggles as they relate to music cultures across Latin America. Since 2005, Simón has been involved in music productions and filmmaking, and working on environmental projects and campaigns such as Siembra Conciencia and Sonic Forest.
Bogota, D.C. – Colombia
For this quiet conversation Simón plays homage to Yuma – or the Magdalena River as it is known today. Yuma is a sacred river and main artery of Colombia. The music that emerges from its shores, waters and peoples embodies and mirrors Colombia’s social and political contradictions. Yuma is a silent witness of Colombia’s colliding histories of violence and music. Starting with a conversation around the violence that the act of naming entails – Yuma being replaced for Magdalena - in this quiet conversation Simón speaks to violence but also of healing, to human and more than human entities, to affect, to sounds and resonances, to emotional and ancestral connections. But mostly to the politics of sound and to music as that which mobilises and can foster a reawakening of memory, reparation and change. Yuma, Sonic River, the film project in which Simón has been working over the past 10 years with Simón Hernandez sits at the core of this conversation.
00:02 My name is Simon Mejía, I am Colombian. For many years I have been a music producer, and visual artist with a background in film, and photography. I started and founded a band – Bomba Estéreo – which in its twenty years has explored fusions between Colombia’s various traditional and electronic music.
These last years my artistic practice has focused on the production of documentaries that foreground cultural and artistic practices here in Colombia. For the last five years I have been mostly focused on raising awareness, through art, on Colombia’s most pressing environmental concerns; concerns that are also planetary as all ecosystems worldwide are connected.
Colombia is a powerful force in ecological terms due to the wealth of ecosystems we have. My practice has focused on interweaving my knowledge of music, with documentary practices and with these ecosystems and biospheres so that one holds the other. I have focused on creating connection points between them so that they can apalancar each other and become tools for our fight against climate change and biodiversity loss.
02:47 I am by no means an expert in environmental issues. I am learning in the process. Doing so led to the creation of Monte Jungla foundation. Monte Jungla is a creative enterprise that has allowed me to think about impact as building dialogues with vulnerable territories and support in prompting change. It has also allowed me to explore ways where impact campaigns can become calls to action.
… Documentaries represent. They show reality. And can be tools of complaint. But they remain bound to a screen. In some ways they are ephemeral; their lives are restricted to and defined by screens, and to time. As films and tv programmes expire. With Monte Jungla my interest lies in expanding knowledge, amplifying voices and sharing life histories. How can we join other initiatives around the world where documentaries are tied to territories, and to their communities? How can film foster real change?
5:00 The two documentaries we are now working on – and hopefully released this year are: Yuma: Sonic River, which I won’t say is about Yuma or Magdalena River in Colombia but takes place in its waters. And Guardianas (safeguarding women). A documentary about three women environmental leaders who live and act in territories where defending land is very dangerous. Each of these two documentaries will be tied to an impact campaign in short and long term.
This is what we are working on now at Monte Jungla. We believe that entertainment, art, and environmental concerns can go hand to hand. Entertainment, as the world we fortunately or unfortunately live in, can be a way of reaching audiences and people in ways that science, politics can’t. In Colombia we live disillusioned with politics, historically, so it is difficult to engage people through politics. And science is something not everyone believes in. But people do believe in art, in actors, actresses, music, and therefore these can be tools towards raising awareness or calling for concrete actions.
06:40 This ongoing work is informed by Sonic Forest. An impact campaign about carbon credits and forestry protection. I was invited to join an ongoing initiative led by an organisation called Stand for Trees which has ongoing projects in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and I believe also in the United States of America too, on sites with ecological and environmental importance. My role was to support the amplification of voices and landscapes in areas of the Pacific region in Colombia. In Chocó’s Pacific coast more precisely, and in Mutantá (inland Chocó but in the mountains), with Afro and Indigenous communities that are working on carbon credits schemes. In the end it became a co-production. We made a beautiful video where I appear travelling and exploring the music of each one of these places, and through music telling stories of the people protecting and safeguarding these forests. It became a tool to share the stories of the many communities that are safeguarding our forests.
09:20 Nidia Góngora, cantaora (traditional women singer) from the Pacific joined us for one of the songs – Déjame respirar (Let me breathe). It was beautiful. But to return to what I was explaining before. First, we worked on the music clip, and it turned out to be a very strong entry point to the project; it was more successful than the documentary. People connected easier to it. The music clip then was an invitation to watch the documentary and to go into the project’s website. It created momentum for people to donate to the projects I mentioned above in Colombia, and around the world.
11:14 I would now like to share briefly about Yuma, which is the project I am now working on, and is the closest one to the questions you have invited me to think about. Yuma is a documentary project that speaks to the peoples living by the shores of the Magdalena River in Colombia. The object I bring today is a river, a living entity, a being. The Magdalena is not the longest but the most important river in Colombia as it crosses the country from the southern mountains and the páramo de las papas – the hydric star of Colombia where most of its important rivers are born near the border with Ecuador, and transverses all the country to its mouth in the Caribbean. Today we know it as Magdalena, in Spanish. It is a river that is born and that dies in Colombia.
13:00 Yuma is a project that addresses the river’s memory, and that starts by its name. The river had many names because of its complex topography and geographic conditions, but also due to the names given by our indigenous peoples living on its waters and spread throughout the different complex mountainous, rainforest and desert territories… Each indigenous group is distinct because of the weather, the altitude and the biodiverse ecosystems of the different territories; from the Caribbean coasts to the Pacific to Andean altitudes. The river crosses them all. Each territory had a group which named the river according to their cosmologies and beliefs. In the south, where today are the remains of San Agustin, the river was called Guaca-hayo – river of tombs, mainly due to all funeral rituals in the area; here in the more Andean region was called Yuma (river of the friendly neighbouring lands), in the lower Magdalena was the Arlí river, and descending to the Caribbean, it was río Karakalí (the river of caymans) o Karihuaña. In this heterogeneity we chose Yuma, as it more closely represents where we are standing from today.
During colonial times a unique way of seeing the world was enforced, and all river names were erased. (The Spaniards just baptised it Magdalena – after the catholic figure of Maria Magdalena, and name of the mother of water, that coincides with the orixá of Yemanjá). The river moreover became the means for all colonial forms of violence to arrive. With Yuma we revisit this history of erasure, whilst foregrounding the river’s memory. By choosing Yuma as the documentary’s name (and the object of today’s conversation), we are already suggesting a narrative.
17:00 My interest also lies in the naming and sounding. As there were many names given to the river, there were as many, or more, forms of music that each indigenous group living by the river had, and in some places still has. Each indigenous group must have seen this river as their river, and in a different way to others. This multiverse, multiplicity of relations, of gods, of rituals as they relate to this water body was effaced by the arrival of colonial violences and by the homogenising practices we talked about before.
20:00 My and our first encounter with the river was through music, and it was beautiful. Yuma is the river from where cumbia, one of the most recognised music genres in the world emerged… Cumbia was born in the Magdalena. Cumbia is one of the most popular Colombian music genres recognised worldwide, and cumbia has always been an inspiration for me and for Bomba Estéreo. Before colonial times, indigenous peoples along Yuma already had their flute and simple drum-based music. Not yet with the elaborate rhythms of the Africans that later arrived enslaved to these territories. It was music that was mostly ritualistic. People from Africa brought their drums and their rhythmic traditions, as well as other instruments with them. A precarious form of cumbia emerged when these two were merged in spaces that indigenous and Africans created to resist the violences subjected to. Many other rhythms emerged as well – rhythms that still today live by the shores of the Magdalena River. These traditions spread, and the Magdalena River took over the world through cumbia.
23:00 So Yuma, a documentary that was meant to be only musical, changed once we started to know more about how behind this flourishing musical tradition are these and more histories of deep-rooted violences. It was music that unveiled the river’s many layers and memories for us.
The Magdalena has been the place to which violated corpses have been thrown to for centuries. During colonial and republican times, in the height of violence in the 1980’s and 90’s and still today. There is a popular saying here in Colombia that says that if the Magdalena dries, it will be the biggest cemetery in the country. And it will be. But as it holds death, the river’s memory also holds its most vital expressions in life that is music, and these we find necessary to foreground. With Yuma we examine this collusion, and the coexistence of these two energies: music and violence; life and death, through a river.
25:25 Yuma has been 10 years in the making. 10 years’ worth of exploration, immersion, and learning. And 10 years is a timescale that the river deserves; nature goes at a different pace than humans. Immersing into Yuma’s waters has also been an immersion into the river’s peoples who have also been victims of repeated violence through displacement, massacres, etc. It is through these voices that we narrate Yuma’s history. In Yuma a santero (‘priest’ derived from Yoruba or healing knowledgeable man) leads the narrative. A santero that in its sanaciones (healing rituals) to the river looks for freeing violence’s trapped souls as a liberatory and reparative practice. In terms of santería, souls remain trapped and cannot transcend if they were souls of people who died of violence.
This is an act of memory; Yuma is an act of memory. In Colombia there is no memory. We pass the page and forget. And this is grave (terrible). I believe that memory is the most fundamental tool we have; we need to relearn our histories, to not reproduce the violence that those memories entail. But we also need to retell histories of violence – of a massacre that happened 24 years ago for instance, and which is hard and difficult to talk about, but we need to do it as a reparative act. Otherwise, we forget, and forget the people who were most affected by it, and who live in those territories just like the musicians that are the protagonists of Yuma. We need to listen to, and to learn to heal through music as they have done for centuries.
29:00 One of the biggest challenges has been to translate all experiences, sounds, moments into images and film. And how to voice the river. It is not a human voice, but is the voice of the witness, more than anyone of us and of the communities that co-inhabit their territories with the river’s waters. The river isn’t also a resource that has been extracted, a hydric resource. The river has been there for many centuries, has seen it all and has been subject to the most archaic forms of violence, to the most recent environmental ones. So how do we voice the river? Giving a voice is humanising. And it is not what we want to. However, if we humanise it, we may respect it more. We may stop seeing it as an object and rather see it as an entity, as a being that, as an elder we respect.
The river also has its voice, one that is always sounding but we don’t hear. During the pandemic many people started to hear birds. We can also connect to the river if we know how it sounds. And it is a beautiful exercise as the river sounds different in each of its stretches, because, as mentioned before, the river is multiple rivers in one. It sounds different in the páramo (Andean moor) – like drops of water. And it sounds different when each one of these drops ends up being the grandiose Magdalena River, with its many musical forms, its many birds that live in its beds, as the fauna that inhabits it – all river sounds.
30:20 The river as enormous is magnanimous – an eternal source of inspiration. We all have a memory tied to the river – as one of the many times we crossed it by car when we were children; remember? We also have affection towards it. In these 10 years of relating to the river we have been able to dig deeper, they have allowed us to really listen to the river, to its voices, its people; to feel its strengths. We are tied to the river; rivers are part of our families. But to get to know the river we also need to be familiarised with its people and its entities. And this takes time; a time which for this project and for all of us involved has been especially meaningful and powerful.
Excerpt from a Quiet Conversation with Simón Mejía.
YUMA (teaser 2022) from Simón Hernández on Vimeo.
All photographs are © (copyrighted) to Yuma and Simon Mejia, and cannot be used without consent from the copyright holder.
