Editorial

The kings of the world: dancing in contravia

Edison Francisco Viveros Chavarría

How to cite this article in APA:

Viveros Chavarría, E. F. (2023). The kings of the world: dancing in contravia. [Editorial]. Poiésis, (45). https://doi.org/10.21501/16920945.4801

The impact of the film “The Kings of the World” leaves me with an expectation as a spectator. Not optimism, because as Nietzsche says, nothing human surprises me anymore. But rather an anticipation: the armed conflict in Colombia has not ceased to radiate consequences, and in that sense, the expectation comes to me in the form of a question: what are the specific practices and discourses that make invisible the generations born to the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia? This film shows us confronting scenes that most people prefer not to look at directly. Areas in the center of Medellín where children and adolescents navigate without the slightest guarantee of a dignified life that offers well-thought-out and well-structured opportunities, consistent enough to support one of them in their determined desire to live a life different from immersion in the pleasures of addiction, the world of crime, or the dreadful wandering in the streets.

I believe the film carries a powerful message that confronts the hypocrisy of a sector of society that believes that everything related to the Colombian armed conflict is a thing of the past. How many generations must pass for an armed conflict to be overcome? Or how many generations of indifference must pass for there to be no trace of the victims? The four tragic heroes in this film danced against oblivion, the lack of legal guarantees, and the only clear proposal for them: to plunge into the void to meet death. The only proposal for these dancers was disappearance, just like their preceding generations. The proposal of this society for people in precarious and vulnerable conditions is annihilation, stigma, and disappearance. But this doesn’t just apply to those represented by these four heroes; in general, it’s the proposal of this society: to kill, exclude, stigmatize, and form small groups of privilege. It’s a mentality, a way of constructing new forms of the human soul, of subjectivity: we must belong to small groups of privilege and embrace the intimate pleasure of stigmatizing, excluding, sanctioning, and hating.

At the end of the film, three of the four heroes converse with the ghosts of the elderly in front of the destroyed, burned, and devastated house. This scene shows that dialogue with memory remains an intelligent way to create scenarios of reconciliation, respect, and acceptance. Respecting the memory of those who have suffered the excesses of violence is a social task, that is, to remember in order to understand. Therefore, I believe that truly high-quality audiovisual productions, such as this film, have the valuable task of placing before our eyes a reality that does not want to be seen but rather evaded or, at best, pushed as far away as possible.

The Kings of the World are the kings of becoming and dance; they flowed while they lived as four specters that no one wanted to see; only those old prostitutes knew how to see in them a valuable life, but they also knew that life is precisely that flow, that transit, and that movement. Deniers of life prefer stillness and violence. Dancers of life prefer becoming and dancing against the current. I conclude with some words from the greatest philosopher of all time, Nietzsche (2004):

The feasts of Dionysus not only establish a pact among men, they also reconcile human beings with nature. Spontaneously, the earth offers its gifts; the wildest animal’s approach peacefully: panthers and tigers pull Dionysus’s flower-adorned chariot. All caste boundaries that necessity and arbitrariness have needed among human beings disappear: the slave is a free man, the noble and the lowborn come together to form the same Bacchic choirs. The gospel of the ‘harmony of the worlds’ rolls from place to place in ever-greater multitudes: singing and dancing, the human being manifests as a member of a higher, more ideal community. They have unlearned walking and talking. Moreover, they feel like something else. Just as the animals speak and the earth yields milk and honey, something supernatural resounds within them. They feel like gods: everything that lived only in their imagination, they now perceive within themselves (p. 246)

References

Nietzsche, F. (2004). El nacimiento de la tragedia o Grecia y el pesimismo (A. Sánchez Pascual, Trad.). Alianza Editorial.

Notas de autores

Edison Francisco Viveros Chavarría

Master in Education and Human Development, Universidad de Manizales-CINDE, professor at Universidad Católica Luis Amigó, Medellín, Colombia. Contact: edison.viverosch@amigo.edu.co, ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0610-4110