Empire: Can’t Remember to Forget You [Pt.1]
Empire: Can’t Remember to Forget You [Pt.1] uses VH1’s Pop Up Video aesthetic to collide Shakira’s music video with information about the U.S. military’s abuse of women and girls in Colombia. Pop-media becomes backdrop, frame, and screen for this sexual and gender-based violence. Visible Colombian star-power and highly sexualized imagery intertwine with documentation of abuses that the U.S. media has, over the past decade, virtually erased. The song lyrics further indicate a relationship sustained by convenient misremembering and forgetting.
Notes: I won a copyright claim from International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) on this video, citing parody/free speech and have the rights to show this film as my original work
Tolima, an important place in the film, is where my maternal grandfather's people are from
I was separated from my first family in Colombia for 28 years by lawyers, social workers, and state workers after they coerced my mom into terminating her parental rights
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Benjamin Lundberg Torres SánchezArtist/Creator
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Project Type:Experimental, Music Video, Short, Other
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Runtime:3 minutes 26 seconds
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Completion Date:September 9, 2024
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Production Budget:0 USD
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Country of Origin:United States
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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¡Té Lo Perdiste! curated by Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez at Boston Center for the ArtsBoston, Massachusetts
United States
April 17, 2015
World Premiere -
Se aculillo? | Are you scared?: Benefit for Puerto RicoProvidence, Rhode Island
United States
October 20, 2017 -
2018 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) Fellowship Group ShowKingston , Rhode Island
United States
March 1, 2018
RI State Merit Fellow in Video Art
Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez (b. 1987, Bogotá) uses their art to transform individual witness into collective action by creating work and spaces that encourage action, participation, and collaboration.
Lundberg Torres Sánchez’s work has been shown in the U.S. at the Queens Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, Latchkey Gallery, The Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, RISD Museum, and the Knockdown Center, and internationally in Montreal, Mexico City, São Paulo, Lima, and La Paz. They were a 2022 Broadway Advocacy Fellow, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2017 and 2018 Merit Fellow in New Genres and Film & Video respectively
They are co-founder of We Are Holding This, an abolitionist press focused on independent publishing for people impacted by family policing and separation. Recently, they worked with a team of adopted people and first and birth mothers to completely rewrite Planned Parenthood's national website's pages on Adoption to give clear and accurate information to pregnant people in crisis. Lundberg Torres Sánchez organizes with Adopted, Fostered, and Trafficked Abolitionists (AFTA,) within a reparations project with adopted compas from Colombia, and colleagues at Universidad de Los Andes, and with autonomous networks of people fighting against ethnic cleansing, occupation, apartheid and genocide in Palestine من النهر إلى البحر / فلسطين ستتحرر