Theater director and playwright Patricia Ariza has been appointed by President-elect Gustavo Petro as the new Minister of Culture. She is an artist who has done work for years with marginalized communities, who has been a militant on the left, who is close to movements of independent artists, and who was one of the pioneers of what was called the New Theater in Colombia.
“An explosion of culture throughout Colombia for Peace and coexistence,” said the president-elect when announcing the new Minister. “A culture for identity to dynamize diverse Colombianness”. Unlike the other two ministers already announced by Petro – Foreign Ministry and Finance, which will be led by former officials from the conservative and liberal parties – Patricia Ariza does come from a long militancy from the epicenter of the left. She is also the first woman announced by Petro in his new cabinet, which the president-elect promised will be equal.
Ariza is a 76-year-old woman who was born in the department of Santander, who studied plastic arts at the National University, and who became central to the Bogota cultural scene since the 1960s. Together with the playwright Santiago García (who died in 2020), they were founders of the Casa de la Cultura, later renamed Teatro La Candelaria, an independent and protest theater that trained several generations of actors and introduced the country to the New Theater: works that denounced the reality of Colombia and in which the collective creation was done jointly by actors and directors.
“These are complex projects. It took us years to assemble them but they also have a long journey. Some of them are 20 years old”, Ariza told El País in 2009, when she was honored at the Ibero-American Theater Festival in Cádiz. Among her works are The Wind and the Ashon the violence of the Spanish conquest, Camilo Lives about the assassination of the leftist priest Camilo Torres or my parta monologue told by the girlfriend of a hitman.
But Ariza is also an artist who has sought to work in plays with marginalized communities — displaced by violence, homeless people, or victims of war. In 2016 she directed Memorya work about women who have been displaced by violence and who keep the truth of war in their testimonies.
Ariza is a militant of the left. “I belong to the history of resistance,” she told El PAÍS in 2009. Her father was a Gaitanista militant – an admirer of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, the martyr assassinated in 1948 – and she first joined the Communist Youth in Bogotá, and then the Patriotic Union Party (UP): a party that was persecuted by the state and groups paramilitaries (at least 8,300 citizens were victims, 5,733 disappeared, according to the Special Justice Court for Peace). Patricia Ariza, as left-wing senator Iván Cepeda put it, is a “survivor of the political genocide against the Patriotic Union.”
“The most important intellectuals were close to or were from the UP,” Ariza told a local newspaper in 2016. “From there, an impressive cultural, poetic, and political convening capacity was exercised. But the genocide damaged everything, the lives of so many. And, of course, the cultural movement suffered from within”.
Álvaro Uribe’s government (2002-2010) was also a tough period for Ariza, when the National Unit against Terrorism opened a file on him for allegedly having collaborated in campaigns in favor of the FARC guerrillas – a complaint that never prospered and rather, it generated campaigns in support of it at the national and international levels. Over the years, rather, she has begun to be recognized globally for her work as a cultural manager in favor of peace and reconciliation. In 2014 she received the National Award for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia, an award given by a Swedish church and the Swedish government.
But although Ariza has been president of the Colombian Theater Corporation and vice president of the La Candelaria Theater, until now she has no previous experience in public administration in a position equivalent to the Ministry of Culture. What she has is great recognition among groups of independent artists, who see her as a leader committed to promoting laws that favor cultural policies in favor of national production. It comes after the government of Iván Duque promoted what it called ‘the orange economy’: a set of initiatives that sought to promote the cultural industry, but which were harshly criticized by groups of artists who denounced favoritism to friends of the government, little space for rebellious art, and privilege the international industry over the national one. With Ariza’s profile, a new opportunity is given to the independent and protest theater that she has worked for years —and with very few resources— to be at the center of cultural politics.
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