THE BENETTON
FAMILY

It was Halloween, and I wanted to dress up as Wonder Woman; I had the costume, but in order to be Wonder Woman, I needed a pair of red boots (everybody knows that there is no wonder woman without red boots). So, we, a five-year-old kid and a my very pregnant 30-year-old mother, walked for hours looking for a pair of red boots in the moody weather of downtown Bogota, which is rainy and sunny and windy and dangerous. We finally got them in a store in the nineteenth street.

The boots were perfect: red, shiny, and as a plus, waterproof, so I could fight all kinds of evil in the world, especially puddles. I wore the Wonder Woman costume every day from Halloween until my birthday that is on November 12th. It was Wednesday, and the celebration was going to be on Friday the 14th. But my brother was born that same day. He was due in December, but the red-boots-quest accelerated his birth. No celebration for me.

He did grow, but he never stopped being pale. Despite that, for me, we looked like a lot: we both have curly hair, chubby cheeks, and big foreheads. For others, we didn't. I was black, and he was white. He was blond, and I had dark hair. His eyes were green mine black. I was la negrita, and he was el monito. When I was born, one of my mum’s tías congratulated her saying: Thank God she is not that black! People would stop my mum and tell her that he looked just like baby Jesus.

When I met him a few days later, everything was a little bit off. I couldn't believe how small and pale he was, but I thought that in order to be in your mum's belly you need to be little, so you don't hurt her, and in there, you don't get too much sun, so of course, you are very pale. What got me, though, was his name. I cried my eyes out because his last name was not going to be Cordoba. My mom comforted me, telling me that there are families whose last names are different, that there are different kinds of families, and ours was unique. I think I stopped crying.

If we walked together, people would ask us if we were neighbors, cousins, acquaintances, or distant relatives, but they never guessed that we were brother and sister. Every time, we had to explain that we had different fathers, and they replied that everything made sense now that we were only half-brother and half-sister. I never understood nor accepted that name, my brother was my brother and not my ‘half-brother’ because he was complete, not just half of a brother.

One day after school in our apartment's elevator, a neighbor asked us if we were related, we proudly told him:

--> yes! we are brother and sister. Can you tell?

And he replied:
--> Sure, you "can tell" straight away.

We were thrilled to hear that finally someone recognized our striking similitudes, and we ran to tell our mother, she smiled and congratulated us but I had to learn later the meaning of sarcasm.

My mum thought us to think and feel the world through images but also to produce the world through images, to fight back, to mobilize, to create alternatives.
When we were confronted by people that couldn’t understand us as a family, she used to tell us that we should be proud to be different, that we were actually the Benetton Family, every one of us was of a different color and character, and that made us special. It is not until today, as I write this text, that I realize that she was trying to explain to me the racist and conservative world in which I was growing up and my position in it.

The ads of Benetton between the eighties and the nineties portrayed a multiracial group of happy and ‘cool’ people in colorful clothing. The image of the Benetton Family, allowed her to explain me, that our racial ‘difference’ was also a sign of being modern, she implied that we (especially me) were different and that was ok but also, that we were (I was) not alone. She always said ‘we’, despite the fact that I was the different, at least in racial terms. .

Indeed, we were an unusual family, my mum never wore heels only classic chucks-like shoes, she married a black doctor, she divorced him, she refused to study law and instead studied theater, she was the black sheep of her generation and the daughter of a black sheep. That makes me a second-generation black sheep, and my rebellion was trying to be ‘normal’ I wanted to fit without having to give explanations.I started straightening my hair, I asked my family to organize me a first communion even though they were not religious at all and I wasn’t even baptized,

I asked my family to transfer me from a ‘hippie’ school called Experimental Pedagogy School to ‘normal school’ where all the kids wore uniforms and their families have never been in a theater. I wanted to live in that world that my mum regarded as disgusting. I wanted to be normal because I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to cope with reality outside my home were fantasy was always part of our everyday.

We were enacting as a family her utopia of a space without hate, violence, and racism, but outside, she has always warned us, those three things moved the world and our task was to combat it. That impulse of escaping to ‘normality’ was short, by the time I went to the university I understood that I had the tools to cope with reality, I had imagination, fantasy and a desire to transform reality.

I have learned to see the world through images and storytelling. Every time my mother tells a story, whether a childhood memory or a recent awkward encounter with some lady in the bank, one has the sensation of watching a movie, she describes the lights in the scene, the context, the conflict, and interprets some of the gestures, silences, voices, and even inner thoughts of all characters. Sometimes you have to be the ‘other’ character she would instruct you what to do and say. Her gaze is always accurate, subtle and anticipatory.

She has thought me how to aguzar (sharpen) my gaze, paying attention to the minimum, the detail, the subtle, the everyday because the world is contained in a gesture, in a moment, in an image. At the same time, she has always stimulated my imagination and trained me to speak up.

One day she told me that the photography of a long-haired old man in a ruana smoking a cigar was my great grandfather. According to her, he was a Cacique (an Indian Chief) that fought for the land of indigenous people in El Cauca (the region from where her family is from).
At first, I refused to believe her, I knew that sometimes she makes up stories just to play with us, but this time, it seemed possible. The picture of the mysterious old man hung in the living room wall next to the portraits of my grandparents for years, so he seemed to be important in our history.

The man in the picture, was Quintin Lame, a rebel indigenous leader born in 1880 in Popayan, Cauca. This specific image corresponds to the arrest of Quintin Lame and a group of rebel indios that were plotting to create an indigenous republic in 1915. Quintin Lame and the rebels are looking straight to camera, you can tell who they are because they are darker, unarmed, and defiant. He might not be my great-grandparent by bloodline, but certainly, he is my ancestor, I am my ancestors.

She was teaching me an alternative history of Colombia. One in which we are the (his)storytellers, a history in which we refuse to be objects to be look at and reclaim our place as the bearers of the look. My mum thought me to situate my gaze, and propose new perspectives, she didn’t read Donna Haraway but incarnated perspectives and situated knowledges have always been part of her work as an artist and a mother.

Because I was thought to think, feel and express through images. My memories are theatrical, they have the perfect lighting, sometimes more than two cameras (one used for close-ups and the other for a wide shoot), the earliest ones occur in a theater, so I often doubt if I am not remembering one of my mum’s stories.

I am seated in the first row, but the audience is not yet there. I am looking at the actors and actresses warm up; they make strange noises, gestures, jumps. Sometimes they look at me and say hello with a silly face, and I smile back. I learned how to laugh without being heard because I know I must remain silent for the ritual. I look at my shoes that can’t reach the floor yet and imagine how it would be like to be seated and touch the floor with my feet at the same time. That is my first memory in a theater, not my first time there.

I was born in a theater, but my relationship with it goes beyond that, when I was in my mother’s womb I acted in El Viento y la Ceniza (The Wind and The Ashes, 1986). That was my first and last time on the stage, since then I have remained seated in the audience, looking at my mother and her others thrive, Maravilla Estar, a lady in red that could fly or character of a mute man in a blue shirt in the play El Paso. I have learned through theater the painful history of my country, discovered the nuances of human relations, learned how to read silences and gazes.

As I grow older and my feet were closer to the floor a thought started revolving in my head: Was I cyborg whose memories were implanted by my playwriter mother?
Am I a character of her greatest play?