Olowaili Green Santacruz

In Mugan Boe, El llanto de las abuelas (2021), Colombian artist Olowaili Green Santacruz collaborates with the Gunadule people to weave an animated elegy for memory, survival, and ancestral strength. The film draws on the Gunadule ritual of the Muugan, the wise grandmothers who, through their tears and dance, recount histories of dispossession and endurance. Their collective mourning becomes a form of resistance—each gesture and note of the gammu flute reviving fragments of a past scarred by conquest, colonization, and displacement in the Darién region.

Rendered in luminous tones and fluid 2D animation, the short film transforms oral memory into a moving landscape. Spirals of yellow light, tropical foliage, and rhythmic movement intertwine to suggest the cyclical nature of grief and renewal. The animation’s aesthetic—both intimate and cosmic—mirrors the spiritual depth of the ritual it honors. Green Santacruz situates this act of remembrance within the broader framework of the Corpografías research project, which foregrounds the role of bodily and performative practices in processes of reconciliation and collective healing in Colombia’s post-conflict era.

Mugan Boe thus operates simultaneously as art, testimony, and archive. It preserves the knowledge of the Muugan grandmothers while amplifying Indigenous and Afro-Colombian voices often excluded from official histories of violence. Through its fusion of ancestral cosmology and digital animation, the work gestures toward a new kind of decolonial storytelling—one that listens as much as it speaks, and that transforms mourning into movement, data into devotion, and the screen into sacred ground.