Interweaving the Displaced Environment: A digital storytelling network for Ciudad Bolivar

Abstract

Colombia's internal conflicts over the past fifty years have forced nearly four million Colombians to be displaced from their homes and relocated from rural areas to slum urban living situations. The displacement process has forced this population to abandon everything; to lose their sense of culture, place, and identity in the world. These people usually enter an unfamiliar environment, in self-built squatter settlements that are already marginalized zones within densely populated cities, having lost all sense of their former identity with no collective place to replace it, to reconnect to their community and cope with their traumatic past. The displaced environment created by this problem needs a collective network in order to begin stitching its scattered spaces and give its dislocated fragments a sense of order. This thesis will provide a digital storytelling network for the displaced environment of Ciudad Bolivar, Colombia. The intent is to explore how architectural solutions can be quietly inserted into the urban fabric in a way that integrates wtih the existing surroundings and yet provides a visible marker for collective gathering. The project seeks to create spaces that provide for the individual exploration of film to facilitate a process of healing and restore peoples' link to their story, the collective condition of displacement, and their new neighborhood. The project responds to the displaced environment by producing a space where all the social conventions within the neighborhood are stichted together. It uses the concepts of stage, instrument, and receptacle to form spaces that will allow the individual to cope with the condition of displacement as it relates to their own story, the group, and the urban fabric. Through the exploration of film and media, residents will begin healing and restoring their link to themselves and to their neighborhood. Going beyond the functions of a community center, the new media network will integrate technology, material innovation, local culture, and the framework for an economy to create a sense of place for a community without one.