Visual Story Bird Spirit by Fredy Chinkangana

Abstract

During the year 2020, in the context of the health emergency of COVID-19, the need to establish ties between poetic text and graphic illustration emerges, with the initial objective of experimenting with new forms of construction of artistic knowledge, through manual and digital tools of editing to generate knowledge from visual expression. Experience translated into a series of visual registers, such as sketches and drawings accompanied by poetic stories that configure an imaginary and symbolic world populated by characters and settings far from human sensibility and experience. Chinkangana's “Spirit of the Bird” (2010) is a poetic story loaded with “pure literature, pure creation, what human beings lack so much: so sane, so calculated, so little instinctive” (Sierra, 2017). Story that through oral language and visual language refers to an increasingly remote world, punished, mistreated and undermined by the irrational action of the human being. And that in full confinement emerges as a heartbreaking cry from a resignified orality with images that take on a life of their own apart from a present incapable of respecting the past memory of native peoples: “I dedicate these songs to the struggle and resistance of our native peoples in Colombia and America; to the grandfathers and grandmothers who have known how to keep their wisdom in a safe place to be taking it out in the most difficult moments of our journey ”(Chinkangana, 2010, p.10).

In this way, text and image make up a visual story made up of "eight acts" that represent the poem "Bird Spirit" by Chinkangana (2010) in different fragments. Story that shows the need to belong to a Mother Earth, from which we have expelled ourselves to create spaces that satisfy a walk away from oral traditions. Language that allows to preserve the ethnic nature, philosophical reasons and worldview the life of indigenous peoples, whose holistic vision of nature plays a fundamental role in the life cycle of indigenous peoples, to transcend the limit of individual or collective physical well-being that puts us in contact with the spiritual essence of life itself (Moreno Rangel and Olmos Zamudio, 2014, pp. 30-31).