Maria Romero’s extensive artistic practice incorporates many different forms, stretching across performance, pedagogy and community-building. Combining these elements with embedded knowledge and networks as a native of Barranquilla, the filmmaker transmits a feeling to the viewer of being led through a series of private encounters with the featured performers, musicians and citizens (a perspective which would otherwise be closed to us). In effect, this series of encounters establishes a filmic form that mirrors a parade or procession—one of the central components of Carnival—through our short interactions with participants/performers, who are then displaced by the next subsequent person to step in front of the camera.
But La Nave is not just a formal mirror to the Carnival de Barranquilla; the film beautifully captures the sensorial phenomena imparted by its participants. It is alive with pleasure, sensuality, spirituality, humour, spontaneity; it simultaneously upholds the weight and gravity of tradition whilst leaving space for the expansiveness of new perspectives to supplant what came before.
In Spanish, “la nave” means vessel, such as a ship. In contemporary Colombian slang, the term takes on a futuristic meaning, such as referring to technological devices and their ability to “shift space”. Within the imaginations of Barranquillerx, the Carnival can simultaneously expand forward and backward in time, imagining new futures and reinventing suppressed pasts. As Maria Romero puts it: “The film’s vessel is one full of lucid and fearless people making an upside down world, in which all (historically oppressed) worlds can and have a right to exist. Aboard La Nave, directioning is a collective, decentralizing, eternal dance ever expanding its reach and partakers.” —Herb Shellenberger
