The Council of Festive Devils - Alex de las Heras — Artistic Researcher | Situated Futures

Bogotá, Colombia, 2019
Happening / public intervention / artistic research

Developed with historian and researcher Paolo Vignolo within the Official Academic Programme of UNESCO’s 14th Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, The Council of Festive Devils unfolded in Bogotá between 9 and 11 December 2019, during Colombia’s national strike and a period of mass protest, police repression, and civic unrest.

Structured as a three-act intervention, the project moved across three politically and symbolically charged sites: Ágora Bogotá, where a journalistic performance embedded itself within the intergovernmental event-ritual and returned the ethnographic gaze back onto UNESCO’s own proceedings; Museo Santa Clara, a former 17th-century Baroque church, where festive and disobedient bodies activated colonial iconography through a decolonial happening; and the presidential axis near Casa de Nariño, where a collective gesture displaced official discourse into civic space.

More than 120 festive devils, heritage guardians, artists, activists, scholars, cultural agents, technical teams, and media participants took part in an immersive choreography of celebration, critique, and future imagination.

The project explored the re-signification of Colombian architectural, iconographic, cultural, and historical heritage from the perspective of futures. It staged a dialogue between the Baroque theatre of Counter-Reformation senses, colonial images of salvation and empire, and contemporary imaginaries shaped by social uprising, democratization, environmental concern, and the desire for more just futures.

The Council of Festive Devils initiated the research trajectory later developed through PAN and Situated Futures. It marked an early operational articulation of how imagined futures enter social life through bodies, rituals, institutions, protest, laughter, and public space.

The project was documented through interviews, audiovisual records, press coverage, and public actions. It was featured in Colombian media and internationally, including The Guardian’s “Best photographs of the day.”