As a closing ritual for the international ICAF community that has gathered here in Rotterdam, Héctor Aristizábal invites participants into a collective act of farewell and integration. Through image, gesture, and imagination, festival visitors are invited to give form to what has been felt and learned – crossing the threshold from the gathering back into the world with greater presence, connection, and care.
Héctor is a theater maker, ritual practitioner, and cultural facilitator with over forty years of experience working at the intersection of community arts, collective healing, and social transformation. Trained in Theatre of the Oppressed, he founded ImaginAction in 2000 and has worked in more than fifty countries supporting processes of conflict transformation and collective trauma healing. Since returning to Colombia in 2017, Héctor has been co-creating Re-Conectando, a cultural laboratory responding to the deep social and ecological fractures left by decades of armed conflict. Re-Conectando creates immersive laboratories in natural settings where theater, deep ecology, and contemporary ritual converge, offering shared ceremonial spaces for storytelling, witnessing, and the careful transformation of lived experience.
This farewell ritual is an invitation to pause, to listen, and to remember that culture, at its roots, is not only something we consume or produce, but something we practice together – especially in times that ask us to grieve, to let go, and to begin again.
Héctor Aristizábal | Farewell Ritual | Colombia