Editorial
One of the features of Actio’s editorial project is transversality, which is expressed in many ways, is associated with various disciplines, and includes different approaches. We have therefore, in our editorials, adopted
this feature when approaching, in each edition, a specific aspect that, together with the others, takes a deeper look at the subject and trace edges that enrich the project as a space for knowledge generation. In
the first number we dealt with technology and its different meanings in design, filmic arts and visual communication, while, in the second edition, our subject was academic journals and their relationship to knowledge
production. Here we deploy a novel form of emergent thought resulting from the impact of the new information technologies and audiovisual communication, the reinvention of art, and thinking design in media, industrial
and cognitive culture: the videoessay. The production and making of this unsettling genre and format, undoubtedly a legacy of literature, philosophy and experimental film, opens up spheres of interest for
the ideas and strategies of design, filmic arts and visual communication. The amalgamation of image (fixed and moving), sound and language is both the mediation and the medium on which the theoretical, practical
and experiential making flows at this time of technological revolution, cognitive capitalism, global economy and the globalization of culture.
Reflections on the creation of videoessays
Audiovisuals are a product of semiotic machines, for they generate discourse, forms of perception, representational models, and support ideologies and new modes of sensitivity. It is conceived of as an essay
in hybrid writing, so that audiovisuals are an innovative form of expression, thought and action, in so far as they recontextualize historic and oral memory, recreate scientific knowledge at the limits of everydayness
and vice-versa, and promote a dialogue among various knowledges and practices, extending sensibility in search of unprecedented meanings. While film, since its inception, had an experimental, documental and fictional
form, it evolved, in the industrial and technological era, into video (audiovisuals), that extended to the popular and massive, was easily accessed and low-cost. Artistic avantgardes soon realized that film is equivalent
to writing; just as the writer uses a pencil, a filmmaker uses the camera to write in a different language. We should emphasize, regarding the videoessay, the fact that, in our globalized era, we have the audiovisual
means to actualize our ideas and desires. However, the fact itself of not needing a laboratory, an editing room and big sums of money has changed. We need ideas and versatile equipment —found in different ranges
of resolution—it will suffice, however, with a camera embedded in any screen to find new creative and critical ways.
We speak today of audiovisuality to signify types of subjectivities and symbolic regimes supported by images, sounds, graphs and verbal languages; ever increasing sophisticated technologies for the capture,
setting and publication of the complex and fragmented sociocultural reality. The video camera is a device-communicative-consciousness that is presently defined less by the language of movement and planimetry, than
by its ability to establish mental relationships, critical interrogation, theorization and all kinds of experimentation. It provokes great questions and opens up the participation—no longer receptive, but productive—of
intellectuals, researchers, and makers through the videoessay. This is why Actio calls upon, for the following editions, authors interested in this transversal way focusing on natural, social and
humanistic sciences, technology and art, to submit their proposals for reflection in a verbal written format (article) or audiovisual format around or from the videoessay: history, scope, limitations and forecast.
See editorial policies and author guidelines at the following link.
Still image of the event «Actio 20-30-40, encounter on design, filmic arts and visual communication technologies for peace-building». From left to right: Julio César Goyes Narváez, César Augusto Galán Zambrano,
Nélida Yaneth Ramírez Triana, Juan Pablo Cortés Castro, Jairo Augusto Solórzano Ariza, Gabriel Alberto Alba Gutiérrez, Juan Guillermo Buenaventura Amézquita, Angélica Chica Segovia and Karen Lange Morales.
Articles in this edition: an approximation to peacebuilding from technologies in design, filmic arts and visual communication
This edition gives particular attention to peace and its relationship to the technologies of design, filmic arts and visual communication. What do these disciplines have to say regarding peacebuilding? Nine articles,
an interview, and three series of audiovisual proposals (adding to twenty-six perspectives from national and international scholars) make up this edition, reflecting on one of Colombia’s and the world’s greatest
desire: How can one contribute to peace from design, filmic arts and visual communication?
The first article, «Technology and design: articulations for peace», by Carlos Córdoba-Cely, discusses how graphic design, industrial design and architecture are understood as creative disciplines, based on the analysis
of the discourse by nine national and international experts on the subject, from the grounded constructivist theory. The author establishes nine dimensions: political, social, systemic, projective, equity, justice,
civic, human and consumption, based on which he builds relationships among these disciplines, technology and peace. This manuscript is followed by the first series of reflections on design, technology and peace,
used as a starting point for writing the article that precedes them. In these microvideoessays, Amit Ray (India), Andrea Botero (Finland), Andrés Felipe Pérez (Colombia), Andrew Thatcher (South Africa), César Puertas
Céspedes (Colombia), Jaume Gual Ortí (Spain), José Eduardo Naranjo (Colombia), Juan Carlos Mendoza (Colombia), and Juan Pablo Cortés (Colombia) reflect, form industrial design, graphic design architecture and psychology,
the connections between these disciplines and peacebuilding.
María Ximena Betancourt Ruiz, with her article «Of technological artifacts and the emergence of the image technopromotion», extends her reflection on the ITCs in the field of visual communication, based on fourteen
theoretical-discursive interventions by professors and researchers summoned by Actio magazine in audiovisual format. The author reflects on hybridization, radicalism and exclusion promoted and reproduced
by technology in the light of power artifacts. She also attends to the resignification, interconnections and interactions established by the audiovisual information and communication technologies, creating new sociocultural
spaces for thought and creation, where everydayness and globalization, the verbal and the visual, reading and writing, the signic and the symbolic, the physical and the virtual coexist. Thereupon, the audiovisual
series is presented including the reflections on which Betancourt Ruiz developed her article: Alejandra Niedermaier and Eduardo A. Russo (Argentina), Andrés Sicard, Andrés Torres Guerrero, Armando Silva, Aura Patricia
Orozco, Beatriz Quiñonez, Carlos Caicedo Escobar, Fabio López de la Roche, Javier Tovar, Luz Marina Rodríguez y Neyla Pardo (Colombia), Jesús González Requena y Lorenzo Torres Hortelano (Spain).
The third article «Film as an expressive technology for peace. Interviews, ideas and possible applications», by Felipe Salazar, approaches the idea of film as an aesthetic and expressive technology aiming at achieving
peace. He proposes a methodology that includes interviews as an ethnographic axis for field work. Similarly, he holds that film narrative is a way for reflecting and analyzing the different forms of violence lived
during years of conflict and, alternatively, it is a scenario to elucidate resolution and education regarding the subject of peace. Throughout the text, a historic journey on representative national cinematography
is undertaken, from the documental work of Martha Rodríguez, Chircales, to Víctor Gaviria’s film, La vendedora de Rosas, to Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s epic film, Pájaros de verano.
It shows in this way the “oniric” outlook of a society where conflicts have intensified and that could succumb if no formulas are found for advancing towards peace. This article is followed by a sequence of microvideoessays
on filmic arts, used as seed for Moreno’s theoretical reflection. From and with the moving image as instrument, three artists and university professors, Libia Stella Gómez (Colombia), Silvio Fischbein (Argentina)
and Jaime Rodolfo Ramírez (Colombia), present their arguments in film’s cultural, aesthetic and political role within the context of peace. Film is seen as a mirror, dialogue and reflection on the ways to solve
all this brutality, as an instrument that awakens memory and recovers facts and feelings that acquire sense for understanding lived events, as transit towards collective consciousness, as a method to widen perspectives
from the symbolic, and, finally, as a way to study audiovisuals representations of the different realities of the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia.
The fourth article, «Methodology, territory and peacebuilding. An experience in Nariño’s Pacific
Coast», by J. Mauricio Chaves-Bustos, narrates and reflects on a participative communicative methodology for peacebuilding, applied in Nariño’s Pacific Coast, for the implementation of the Development Plan with
a Territorial Approach contemplated by the Peace Agreement signed between the Colombian State and the FARC (Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces). Here, the territory is conceived of not only as a geographic space,
but as a techno-cultural, historical and political space, in so far as it takes into account the region’s ancestral, natural and cultural richness, but also denounces its backwardness, due to the State’s lack of
attention, a State that does not control or punish armed groups’ incursions: the denial, on the part of local and national governments, of the historic violence that has engendered racism and debased its inhabitants;
the lack of vision on the part of the country’s rulers and communication media that make proposals invisible and showcase poverty and violence in Nariño’s Pacific Coast.
This manuscript is followed by the work «Narratives: grid of plots in an entangled social bond», where professor Julio Eduardo Benavides Campos approaches the complexity of narratives in an hyperconnected world and
presents the power of the concept of “narratives” as a space-time where contemporary communication processes take place, and the practice of communication media that generates bonds among human beings.
Narratives, then, as devices for re-thinking communicative mediation in the global society, connected by technological links in webs, are actions explaining the emergence of new kinds of memory and the need to narrate
in different ways the causes and effects of violent conflict, so as to contribute to an understanding of what has occurred and assign social meaning to collective actions.
With the article «Design and conflict: actions for collective building», Kevin Fonseca Laverde discusses the importance of participative methodologies in memory building and in the appropriation of territory, based
on the analysis of six design projects. The seventh article, «Study and analysis of the “manjar blanco” in Palmira. Diagnosis, technique and maker», by Jean Frank Santofimio Díaz, articulates tools employed in the
understanding of territory for analyzing a food product typical of Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Through social cartography, interviews and audiovisual register, the author presents an understanding of his object of
study, as he himself points out, «food and intangible patrimony»; and shows the problems and opportunities associated with its recognition and sustainability.
David Puentes-Lagos and César Galán Zambrano, based on the wide experience acquired as auditors for the Colombian State, through the manuscript «Approximation to incorruptible design. Auditing experiences for taking
care of public assets», approach a subject rarely explored from the perspective of design, but fundamental for peacebuilding: how, from design, one may contribute to the fight against corruption. On his part, Javier
Olarte Triana, in the article «Image as evidence: visuality in children under six years of age in the locality of Suba», holds that lived experience may be an effective device for visual creativity in children.
Drawing as a powerful text for creating tales in early infancy is not only recreation, but a way of thinking and enriching culture.
This edition concludes with an interview with professor Alejo Vargas, Director of the Center for Thought and Follow-up of the Peace Dialogue, by Julio César Goyes Narváez. It is entitled «Violence, awkward traveling
companion of our history». It is a space for a historical-critical dialogue activating a reflection on the possible causes that originated violence in Colombia, associated with land tenure, political processes and
parties, a precarious cultural and technological development, and the complicated but hopeful peacebuilding through the Agreement that put an end to the conflict with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (
FARC).