Carlos Motta

Nefandus

Carlos Motta

Arragoces Coronado, Carlos Motta

In 'Nefandus' two men travel by canoe down the Don Diego river in the Colombian Caribbean, a landscape of 'wild' beauty. The men, an indigenous man and a Spanish speaking man, tell stories about 'unspeakable sins' and 'abominable crimes'; acts of sodomy that took place in the Americas during the conquest. It has been documented that Spanish conquistadors used sex as a weapon of domination, but what is known about homoerotic pre-Hispanic traditions? How did Christian morality, as taught by the Catholic missions and propagated through war during the Conquest, transform the natives' relationship to sex? 'Nefandus' attentively looks at the landscape for clues of stories that remain untold and have been stigmatized in historical accounts.

La visión de los vencidos

Carlos Motta

In The Vision The Defeated an indigenous slave, who is guiding a group of Spanish conquerors up the jungle, describes the moment in which an army commander witnesses a collective homoerotic ritual, angrily condemns the act as "abominable and unnatural," and orders the immediate execution of the men. Shot in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, Colombia, The vision of the defeated is based on an undocumented chronicle selectively passed on from generation to generation by oral transmission.

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Carlos Motta

Two stories expose the ways in which medicine, law and religion shape discourses of the gendered body: Martina’s, who lived in Colombia in the 19th century and was prosecuted for being a hermaphrodite, and Nour’s, who lived in Beirut during the Ottoman Empire and was forced to marry to her female lover’s brother.