Colombia Digital 2021

The reporter Catalina Gómez Ángel (Colombia) works in the Middle East as a correspondent, covering events in countries such as Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, where she worked after the fall of the government and the surge of the Taliban regime. She is the co-author of the book Balas para todas. seis mujeres periodistas en Oriente Medio y Magreb (2021). This highly experienced journalist offered a workshop for young reporters from the community.

Jacobo Vélez (Colombia) is the leader of La Mambanegra, an orchestra comprising nine virtuoso musicians from Cali who play in a style they call “breaksalsa”. The saxophonist and creator of the research and music creation project El Calle Hueso, Vélez showed us how to set up and present a musical project.

The Colombian psychologist Manuela Molina is the author of Nuestra piel arcoiris, an illustrated book for children, which talks about how all of us have different colours of eyes, hair and skin, and how, far from being a reason to feel or think ourselves better or worse, this is a source of celebration and cheer, since diversity is what makes the human experience something richer and more interesting.

We are in the future, in a world without social media, since world leaders have banned them. On her thirteenth birthday, Amelia, a solitary girl, full of doubts and who has recently lost her voice, discovers a way to create a secret social networking service for girls. There she meets girls like her, “fun girls who are on their own, bored or looking for fun”, with the help of LilaLady, the artificial intelligence that helps her to create the service, called Shhhat. Together they will learn about the world around them, and find practical activities for putting their knowledge into practice. El libro secreto de las niñas, created by the writer, blogger, journalist and influencer Mariángela Urbina and the illustrator Cecilia Ramos Valencia, invites girls, but also their mothers, fathers, teachers and carers, to explore their inner worlds and to reflect on what it means to build an identity free of stereotypes, limitations and fears.

People call Emilia the Bird Girl. Many fear her, not only because she is rather a solitary girl, but also because she talks to birds. Yet there is more: there begin to be disappearances in the town and everyone suspects that these are happening because of Emilia’s curses. Tobias, her neighbour, is the one who is most afraid of her but, with his courage, he will soon discover the true nature of the Bird Girl and the mystery of what is occurring in the town. Valentina Toro, the author and illustrator of La niña que hablaba con los pájaros, shared this beautiful story, one that might instil fear, but also strength, with the children, inviting them to create their own stories in both words and images.

Starting from the reading of some excerpts from the illustrated book Operación Bikini, Júlia Barceló worked with the participants of this workshop on concepts such as aesthetic pressure or dieting culture using humour and personal experience. The goal of the workshop-talk consisted in delving into the structural pressure that beauty canons imply, the problems that they bring and how we can fight them in real life as well as on social media. It is important to find tools to educate a kinder way of looking at other people's bodies as well as our own, to improve our coexistence and empower ourselves in regard to this.

The Colombian psychologist Manuela Molina is the author of Nuestra piel arcoiris, an illustrated book for children, which talks about how all of us have different colours of eyes, hair and skin, and how, far from being a reason to feel or think ourselves better or worse, this is a source of celebration and cheer, since diversity is what makes the human experience something richer and more interesting.

At this performance, poetry and language shared the spotlight with games, and also with the participation of all the children who attended the event. It involved telling (and singing, as Machado wanted) the experiences and adventures of the poet child Chamaquili and his close companion Mapá (a character who is both a mother and father figure), with moments of fun, tenderness, nostalgia, brightness and energy, lit up with the drawings of Jorge Oliver Medina and the improvisations in rhyme of our maestro Alexis Díaz Pimienta.