In September, during the Festival Internacional de Cine Comunitario Afro (FICCA) KUNTA KINTE (Medellín, Colombia), the bilingual audiovisual platform Creole Connections/Conexiones Creoles was launched, in the development of which Raquel Ribeiro was involved.

The platform contains a catalogue of more than 40 audiovisual testimonies, organised by theme and place of recording, which present different concerns and aspirations from a disputed seaspace, a space shared between communities on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina, and the diaspora of the raizal community in mainland Colombia.

Creole Connections/Conexiones Creoles emerged as a response to the urgent need to share the stories, needs, and experiences articulated by the raizal-creole communities, in the face of the systematic fragmentation caused by colonial claims, geopolitical disputes, and Hispanocentric programmes of cultural, linguistic and spiritual dispossession and invisibilisation. It aims to rebuild ancestral connections, provide intergenerational exchanges, and imagine a prosperous future.

This initiative was the result of close collaboration between communicators, activists, cultural managers, and researchers from institutions as diverse as the University of Edinburgh (Julie Cupples and Charlotte Gleghorn), the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA FCSH (Raquel Ribeiro), Universidad de las Regiones Autónomas de la Costa Caribe Nicaragüense (Dixie Lee), Corporación Afrocolombiana de Desarrollo Social y Cultural CARABANTÚ (Ramón Perea Lemos), Noticias Bluefields (Neyda Dixon), and Black Crab Studio (Sergio Bent).

The project was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and strengthened a collaboration between the participants of an international network, also supported by the AHRC, entitled “(In)Visibilidad Afro-Latina y el Decenio de las Naciones Unidas: políticas culturales en movimiento en Nicaragua, Colombia, Cuba y el Reino Unido” [Afro-Latino (In)Visibility and the UN Decade: cultural politics on the move in Nicaragua, Colombia, Cuba and the UK].