Against All Odds: How an Electronic Scene in a Small Colombian Town is Self-Managed

Author: Santiago Riomalo Clavijo Photo Credit: Jose Gómez When you live in a small town in Colombia, one phone call can ruin a party that has been going on for months. “The person who rented us the sound system told me that the equipment had come from another municipality, and that the car had had an accident,” says Juan José Muñoz, aka Moncayo, co-founder of the collective Sonidos Urgentes Resistentes: S.U.R. “He said he was three hours away from the event venue, that as soon as he arrived he would solve the problem.” The solution was to get another sound system. But the collective pulled off its first electronic party in Pitalito, Huila, a department in the southwest of the country.  This is one of the many variables that collectives in Colombia’s small cities must overcome if they want to survive in the undergrowth of self-management. A country that, due to factors such as internal conflict and inequality, accumulates the bulk of its population in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla, the only cities that, by 2018, had more than one million inhabitants. Moncayo from Pitalito, Jose Gómez, aka Zemög, from Pereira and José Daniel Muñoz from Mocoa operate in this