Federico Urdaneta News

Documentary Film-making

fu — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:18:32 +0000

My super good friend Juan Pablo had a pretty bad accident some years ago where he damaged his spinal chord and as a result lost almost all the mobility in his body. Taking these sour lemons he made some really great lemonade: he now runs the Arcangeles Foundation where disabled people from all over Colombia are treated and helped and pampered. The man is also a political dynamo, taking his words to the higher echelons of Colombian bureaucracy in order to advance his cause.

In any case, he recently invited the Great Lakes Storm Rugby team - quad-rugby players from Michigan, USA - to Colombia to talk about the sport (it was the subject of a recent documentary called Murderball) and play a bit. I was invited to join the crew to film the whole event in order to make a documentary about it. The trip (Bogota, Cali, Medellin and Cartagena) was absolutely awesome and surreal: more than 20 hours of video were the result. As soon as the doc is ready (I shot it, but someone else is editing it) ill post a link to it.

Teach the world

fu — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:27:50 +0000

My good friend Lela teaches a Music appreciation class over at the Externado in Bogota. I was invited over as guest lecturer, where the young ones were treated to what I called “An Introduction to Experimental Music”. Seeing as these kids are mostly business majors, I decided to give them a broad view of the avant garde (starting with Debussy and going on through Pierre Schaeffer and Cage), minimalism and drone music (from Reich to Basic Channel / Maurizio, LaMonte Young to Growing), and some of the newer results of joining the experimental with the pop (Sonic Youth, Boredoms, Lightning Bolt, etc…). Pretty pretentious stuff, fun for some, an unbearable brick of knowledge for others.

Boraxx profiling

fu — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:30:28 +0000

The highly respected quarterly Chief Mag just asked me all sorts of questions regarding Colombia, the truth about drugs and music. Read the answers here.

Remote in South Korea

fu — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 11:21:02 +0000

Remote (more info about it here) has been shown at the Fabrica:I’ve been Waiting for You exhibition in Seoul, South Korea. We (me and my good friend Oriol) were even on TV for a sec there.

The Stairs at Centre Pompidou

fu — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 11:02:33 +0000

So this October Fabrica (where I work) has had an exhibition in the ground floor of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and we were commissioned to do a work of “architectural intervention” on the stairs going down (full explanation here).