The Project

Salsa Culture: the Musical Hybridization between El Barrio -Spanish Harlem and the Global City

An original work

The objective of our project, “Salsa Culture: the Musical Hybridization between El Barrio -Spanish Harlem and the Global City” is the creation of an online interactive hypermedia platform about the musical culture intertwined in the contemporary history of Santiago de Cali, Colombia although it certainly is not unique just to this city.

The musical culture of Cali has been investigated and researched during the last three decades by the School of Communications at the Universidad del Valle. Consequently, there is sufficient information and understanding on the topic at our disposal. We take advantage of these resources to create our hypermedia – an artistic product enlivened with new information and communication technologies. The research done on the topic, which was carried out by authors from a number of different countries since the 1980s, is part of the field of Cultural Studies. In this area, historical and sociological analyses converge with an anthropological perspective to tackle an interdisciplinary topic such as salsa as a form of popular music. In our case, we sought also to disseminate the knowledge produced to a worldwide audience.

This artistic project is based on previous research and has two distinct components. On the one hand, we have the thematic content, which focuses primarily on the latter half of the 20th Century (although salsa undeniably has antecedents in the slavery of the colonial period). On the other hand, there is also the graphic design component applied to the creation of the project in which the aesthetic dimension and the use of different languages converge.

For the artistic element, we were interested in exploring and innovating with a convergence of languages in order to construct the hypertexts. Thus, the project constitutes both a means and an end. As a means, it functions to present content from previous authors’ efforts, while it is an end because of the specificity inherent in its digital support, the technologies it entails and the aesthetic forms it assumes. In both cases it is a product intended for pedagogical use. Thus, we hope that this hypermedia project will be useful in bringing to light the historical and cultural practices around salsa  music as its object of study.

Given the variety of information, materials and resources available as a result of our ongoing research (texts, photographs, video-stills, radio programs, music recordings…) it is evident that salsa has a rich cultural history where Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Panamá, Venezuela, New York and Cali all converge via this music. This hypermedia incorporates new technologies and languages to represent a diverse and substantial quantity of information that would be difficult to integrate through other means. Therefore, the creation of such hypermedia is necessary not only as a learning space meant to complement the books and written materials that it is based on, but also as a work in and of itself for educational, artistic and cultural purposes.

Objectives
As it tries to create an unprecedented work on the subject, the interactive online hypermedia constitutes a new means to access a previously disperse understanding in many bibliographical sources, as well as a new understanding integrated in a single source. In that sense, we propose the following objectives:

  1. Produce an interactive online hypemedia about the history of salsa and the culture it ascribes to as a result of a historical process throughout the 20th Century and today.
  2. Represent in the hypermedia the musical memory of salsa, as told from the perspective of  caleños –people from Cali, Colombia,  drawing on several investigations on the topic while taking advantage of the available resources (academic bibliographies, discography, oral registries, videos and photographs that document aspects of that history).
  3. Propose a close relationship between aesthetics and concept in the context of salsa music, its development in a globalized world, the popular culture to which it historically ascribes and the ways in which these elements interact in the hypermedia to generate a new form to view and relate to salsa music.

Text translated by Juan Pablo Jiménez C.