Bogotá, Colombia, 2019
Participatory action research / public policy / situated futures
Metágora 2019/2039 was a participatory action-research project led by Alex de las Heras and Paolo Vignolo within the Strategic Area of Culture, Interculture, Art, Communication, and Contemporary Poetics at the National University of Colombia.
Developed in the context of UNESCO’s XIV Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, the project invited cultural agents, academics, artists, activists, and representatives of diverse cultural expressions to imagine the future of intangible cultural heritage in Colombia over a twenty-year horizon.
The project asked how public policies might better respond to the lived realities of those who sustain cultural practices. Through dialogue circles, collective analysis, and future-oriented reflection, participants discussed the value of culture, sustainable tourism, gender parity, social justice, documentation, and the long-term impact of heritage policy.
Rather than approaching heritage as a fixed inheritance from the past, Metágora 2019/2039 treated it as a field of future negotiation. It explored how cultural practitioners imagine, contest, and propose futures for the practices they carry, defend, and transform.
In this sense, the project forms part of the early development of Situated Futures: a methodology for studying how imagined futures emerge from situated lives, institutional frameworks, cultural memory, and collective political demands.
