Federico Atehortúa Arteaga's Mute Fire is showing January 27 –February 25, 2020 on MUBI in most countries as part of the series Direct from Rotterdam.
With Pirotecnia ("Mute Fire") I wanted to reflect on the situation of those who, like me, have experienced war solely through media. I wanted to know how the images that the media use to depict the war shape our sensitivity and feelings towards that event. My aim was to shift the approach by not focusing on the deaths left by the war, but on how they are represented. I proceeded with one main intuition: how we feel and experience war is disputed on the aesthetic field, because an image is never just an image but also the series of relations in which it is inserted and the energies and emotions that it triggers.
I began the process by investigating the first photographic staging of violent events in Colombia: a series of pictures called El 10 de febrero. Historians usually recognize this series as a major precedent of cinema in the country. With that in mind, I wondered on the nature of the relationship between the production of images and the events of the war in Colombia. I wanted to construct a link between these photographs and one of the greatest tragedies that the war has created in the country, the so called falsos positivos (false positives). Such was the name given to the extrajudicial executions of thousands of people from marginalized sectors of the country, especially unemployed youngsters, who were drove to the countryside under false pretenses, often promises of work and money, and then killed by members of the Colombian Army. Those dead bodies reappeared disguised as guerrillas amid fake stagings of war events, as if those innocents had belonged to some insurgent group and had been killed in the battlefield. For years the Army faked its results and used these mise en scènes to create a victorious image for the public opinion in the war against insurgency.
These crimes were carried out for someone to see. That could be the only reason that explains the intricate theatrical device designed to operate on the bodies of the dead. One could conclude that the war in Colombia has been shaped, in some cases, by and for the spectators. The falsos positivos then can be understood as a deeply perverted theatrical performance that is inextricable linked with the history of Colombian Cinema. To better phrase it, the falsos positivos was a sinister development of Colombian cinematic tradition.
Nevertheless, something seemed to be missing to tie all the knots together. It was then that I saw that my mother's mutism and the family destabilization that it triggered could be incorporated into the film. For some reason it seemed necessary to include a personal narrative that could help maintain a certain distance with the other themes of the film, a similar distance to the one I have had with the war in Colombia. In the end, the story of my family helped me to better see the film’s main question: what is the relationship between my personal life and the war in my country, if I am only a spectator of that war?