Alamar Workshops: Omni Zonafranca and Garaje 19
The workshops on video art practices realized in Alamar assembled a collective of fifteen independent producers and film makers which for more than a decade moved around the Omni Zonafranca group. Sons of a tradition of activism in public spaces in Alamar (a peripheral area of La Habana built from the Seventies), the collective attracted since almost 15 years energies and tensions of a generation close to the underground culture of the island: from the rappers to the rast, from the poets to the writers, from performers to musicians.
OMNI
Born as a collective of insertion in public spaces and social communitarian life of a complicated neighborhood as Alamar, Omni Zonafranca organized itself as a collective of video makers and producers (between all other activities), after a lab facilitated from 2005 by the activist collective Inventati (from Italy) and the curator Lucrezia Cippitelli. Alamar Express Lab served as communitarian space of production and distribution of contents for some years, and has been the gateway for other creative people of the “generation Omni” to get close to cheap digital technologies for the production of contents and distribution of self narration.
http://omnifestivalpoesiasinfin.blogspot.com/
Nowadays and after the experience of the Lab, Omni Zonafranca is a smaller collective (mainly focused in performances and insertion in political life). Its reshaping gave birth to other experiences (linked with the idea of independent videomaking of Alamar Express Lab) such as Garaje 19, a production collective focused on documenting daily life from a personal, poetic, popular point of view. Yoyi (Jorge Perez), part of the collective, has been the editor of some of the more interesting videoclips realized for transgressives and powerful rappers from Cuba such as Explosion Suprema.
Yoyi - Modo de Empleo
Together with the new Omni Zonafranca and Garaje 19, Time Frame team worked in Alamar with independent artists as producers such as Ailer Gonzales, painter and performer artist which since 2 years is actively engaged in the project of “Playback Theater” Teatro cuerpo adentro. With a group of self financed actors/performers, Ailer works in the streets of La Habana with shows which reenacts dreams of real stories of the audience. The project is an example of participative art production, realized in order to involve the public in a process of deconstruction of fears and schemes inducted by the system and the reconstruction of a free individuality, reborn after the trauma of the representation.
http://cuerpoadentro.blogspot.com/
Garage 19