Shot on 35mm film.

Garzón, Huila (Colombia)

2018

We arrived to Garzón, Huila-- a municipality some 450 kilometers south of Bogotá, after an eight hour drive. The last traces of sunlight for the day were pulsing through split clouds that sat barely above the mountain hills that cocooned the town. We drove around in circles time, and time again, before finally finding CooCentral, the coffee cooperative who we were going to be working alongside for the next six weeks.  

 Coffee palpates as pathos and memory in my life. I had every logical reason to become involved sooner, to touch it more, to research the socio-political conditions of those producing coffee, who were coincidentally so close to me. I could have chosen to be mindful so much sooner, but it was never required. Instead, I chose to enjoy it superficially and pay no mind to the politics behind coffee that are microcosms of a larger civic project that I am currently dissecting.

When we were living in Garzón, my room was Paris themed. There was a peel off sticker of the Eiffel Tower placed above my bed, and another sticker that read “PARIS” in an italicized comic sans font right below it. I chose the room that had a view of the road that crawled up and down the Zuluaga Mountains because it was also the room that was closest to the balcony. That way, when my windows are open and my colleagues are outside, I can still talk to them, but do so from my bed. In actuality, it resulted in me being woken up by the motorcycles going into town in the mornings. I remember how loud true loudness felt after sleeping in such silence, and while that is true, I also remember how loud the flapping of flies’ wings felt after we had all gone into our rooms. The sound of beetles against the glass ceiling light or the glass division between my bed and my bathroom, audible clutter, like pocket change.

I want to share how sensorially stimulating this experience was for me, because I want to emphasize the importance of viscerality in my academic work. If I wanted to talk about valuable microscopic particles, I would sit here and talk about coffee with you.