Pollinating at Tripido Fest (San Cristóbal, Bogotá)

Bees from the Beehive Collective were present in the 5th Tripido Fest on December 5th, 2015 in the 20 de julio neighborhood Fair in San Cristobal, Bogotá.  The Tripido Fest included performances by musicians, graffiti and mural artists as well as workshops on social cartography, conscientious objection to military service, theater and graffiti. 

The Tripido Fest is born in 2011 as a result of the killing of Diego Felipe Becerra on August 19th of that same year. Diego Felipe, better known as Tripido in the Capitol City graffiti scene, was killed by officers of the national police. Tripido was a young teen who through art expressed his own perspective of reality, though due to the negative stigma towards youth, repression and police brutality took his life away.

The Tripido is a process led by the Tejido Juvenil, Tejuntas, an organization that seeks to create visibility, discuss and denounce the stigmas and criminalization of youth and simultaneously contribute to the building of a youth movement in the Capitol District.

What is TRIPIDO FEST?

It is a Festival that creates a space for the coming together of different musical bands, artistic groups, theater, dance, urban art, and other youth cultural expressions. All of these participants coming from their own urban territories and organizational spaces present alternatives to the militarization of life, working to rebuild social fabric within a setting of political and armed conflict that has devastated local neighborhoods and communities.

The Festival is named after graffiti artist Diego Felipe Becerra´s tag, Tripido. Becerra was killed by the Officer Wilmer Alarcon on August 19th, 2011 while he was painting an image on the intersection of 116 Street and Boyaca Avenue. The Tripido Fest is also a space for the memory of Tripido -Diego Felipe- cabe Totti Beat –Gerson Martínez- , Carlos Enrique Ruiz 1 and all the youth killed, beaten, and disappeared in a society the oppresses its young people with structural and material precision.  This same society notorious for unequal in access to health, education, culture, recreation and sports, especially for the youth from lower income neighborhoods who daily fall under the weight of the injustice of the police state, that criminalizes  and buses them with the mobile brigades known as the UPJ. Not to mention the oppression of forced military service that becomes a pretext to chase down young people in the streets of their neighborhoods or the mass transit Transmilenio stations, whenever there are recruitment brigades.

The Tripido Fest has two purposes. In one sense it is territorial, because we believe that our neighborhoods, the marginal areas of the city need to have more cultural and artistic spaces that are open to everyone’s participation, open to our own forms of expression without us being targeted or marginalized. It is territorial because it opens a space that allows for our neighbors that regardless of difficulties, young people can offer positive things to the community such as their talents and to recognize that most young people want a respectable environment and life for their neighborhood.  

Youth are like seeds that germinate, and are full of life wanting to sing, dance, play, act, run, enjoy. For these reasons the festivals are done in different neighborhoods every year throughout the entire city, such as in Bosa, Kennedy, Usme and for this fifth edition in San Cristobal. 

Simultaneously, Tripido Fest is also a District Festival, because through it local urban youth are able to put on stage and show on the walls the talent of the young people from the different neighborhoods and localities within the capital District. We create a space of gathering for the district that seeks to bring together youth from all the neighborhoods with the objective to show that the everyday reality lived by a young person in Suba shares similarities with a youth in Usme, and for that reason, oppressed and impoverished young people need to generate processes and organizational spaces to build collective movements from their own reality for all of society.

Who organizes Tripido Fest?

The Tripido Fest is organized by the National Youth Fabric transforming Society known as, TEJUNTAS.  TEJUNTAS is a national organization that brings together youth collectives and organizations around 6 points:

1) A life free of militarization;

2) work with dignity for young people;

3) for land, territory, and sovereignty;

4) for culture, art and popular communication;

5) for youth participation in politics and the building of people power; and

6) for peace and a political solution to the conflict.

Within in TEJUNTAS comes together a part of those young people who want to have dignified lives in the neighborhoods of Bogotá, coming from the neighborhoods of the localities of Bosa, Kennedy, Usaquén, Suba, Engativá, Fontibón, Ciudad Bolívar and San Cristóbal. As an organization TEJUNTAS considers that young people have the capacity to propose viable alternatives for the country and halt the projects that bring precariousness to the lives within the Capitol District territories. In addition to organizations of youth, students, workers, peasant farmers, women, environmentalists and others, we participate in the Congress of the Peoples; a legislative peoples´ proposal of how to build a country with livable and dignified conditions as well as a life of harmony with nature.