The young people who used this space made a film about the projects they’d done there and showed it to a local counsellor, saying: Look, this is what we’ve achieved with nothing. Imagine what we could do if you gave us some support. The first thing he did was to give them some land and helped them to build a community centre there. Before, the counsellor thought that those kids weren’t able to do anything.
Through film, he got an insight in what they were achieving and how their organization worked. So it’s not only changing the story of how their issues are represented within communities, but also the perception of what people think those kids are like and what they are capable of.
Another focus of Changing the Story is to help ensure that the narratives of marginalized groups are represented in national histories. In 2016, after more than 50 years of civil war, the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition was set up. An important task of the Commission is to capture the testimony of former child soldiers who were recruited by paramilitaries to fight in the war, but whose experiences haven’t yet been fully represented in the national historical archive. How did you capture those voices as part of Changing the Story?
Cooke: I worked with my colleague Matthew Charles from El Rosario University, a journalist and academic. We developed this project where young people aged between 15 to 17 interviewed former child soldiers who are now in their 40s. On the one hand, this work was about recording their testimonies in order to preserve the past. But it was also about making their experience in the past real to the kids, in order to stop these kids being in danger to be recruited to similar organisations now. This kind of recruitment is still going on by paramilitaries and drug gangs.