Ambachacke émbera chamí (The Mountain People Family)

The Borocuara Ocampo family, indigenous people from the Embera Chamí community, arrived in the Colombian capital in 2009 after receiving threats in their ancestral territory for having sought information about the death of their brother, Baudillo Borocuara, who was forcibly disappeared in the municipality of Pueblo Rico, Risaralda, Waisur community, when he was just 15 years old.

Due to the above, in 2009, Jairo Borocuara, leader of the Embera Chamí community, arrived in Bogotá together with some members of his family.

With comings and goings, they remained in Bogotá D.C until the end of November 2021. During their stay in the capital they resisted the homogenization of the city, and its own dynamics, through weaving, dance, music, singing and the Embera language —representing their survival and cultural identity—.

“Ambachake Embera Chamí”, which in the embera mother tongue means “the family of the mountain people”, is a documentary project that seeks to narrate the family history of the Borocuara Ocampo through their daily experiences in the capital of Colombia, characterized by mainly due to disappearances, forced displacement, illnesses, sudden deaths and violence of all kinds. Far from any romantic representation of the indigenous from the past or, from its counterpart, from the exotic, folkloric, sensationalist look that appeals to the common place of the so-called "pornomiseria" -forms through which the indigenous is recurrently narrated, from a from a eurocentric and extractivist point of view- this project attempts to shape a type of leisurely photography, of the everyday and the simple. But it also seeks to pay tribute to the resistance and resilience of this community; and seeks to be a documentary testimony of a family, and of a community, that has resisted despite the war, dispossession, displacement, re-victimization, abandonment by the Colombian State and the constant discrimination of society.