- PUBLISHED BY Alfredo Cohen Montoya
I didn’t like termite. I was just a kid when he ended up with a giant closet in my home studio. He fell suddenly to the ground, an illustrated encyclopedia of the twentieth century that broke the acetate discs of “El Flecha”, the literary character of David Sanchez Juliao, with whom my father fell in love with the Caribbean. Those were times when drug trafficking was flying carts on the streets of Colombia, so the unexpected noise from the imploding closet shit me out of the scare. At that age, no one had told me that there were bugs that fed on wood cellulose.
This term (beginning with Spanish) for which I write falls better to me and it does achieve its purpose: to generate ideas to gnaw at the system. I will become his fan, the faithful follower, the soldier, the termite number one.
It is a joy that this space celebrates a year precisely the year in which invisible bugs seem to destroy everything. The vast majority of social enterprises do not achieve this, but I am convinced that a project that lasts more than a year can last a lifetime. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you get it, but you can because it’s a collective project, which knows what you want and more or less where you’re going.
Congratulations to this plural project, with character, independence, own voice that, like termites, is used to teamwork.
When I met those behind the initiative, I understood that I could not expect less and that I also wanted to be there: to be part of a “comején” like this, with so much wood ahead.
Text originally published in EL COMEJÉN.