Collectivizing justice: Participatory witnessing, sense memory, and emotional communities (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Communication, 2022
In 2018, families of victims of lethal state violence in Nicaragua organized as the Association Mothers of April (AMA) to collectively search for truth, justice, and reparations. This article analyzes the development of the transmedia project AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory against Impunity, created for remembering and dignifying the victims by an interdisciplinary team in collaboration with AMA. The digital archive hosts the results of transmedia memory practices engaged by the community: accounts about the deaths via hand-drawn maps, digital maps, video testimonies, and a photographic archive of each victim. In the creation of the archive, the community's needs were centered, and we proposed "modular visibility" against the revictimization caused by the circulation of media that represented the victims' violent deaths. The contribution is centered on the use of participatory design methods to create a community digital archive and a temporary exhibition fostering transmedia activist memory practices that turned the private grieving of AMA members into public mourning, building wider mnemonic communities. Keywords: Transmedia, memories, media practices, mapping, memory, museum, archive, video, portraits, testimonies, Nicaragua, Latin America, digital media, digital humanities, participatory design, visibility, data, maps, GIS, human rights, violations, dictatorship, necropower, race, gender
A little thing: a ponytail holder. A place: the abandoned soccer field in an abandoned town. Representations of a common object and a place can effectively evoke tragic events and contribute to the collective memory of a country that is trying to come to terms with its violent past. These examples are taken from a photo exhibit by Domingo Giribaldi created as a cultural intervention in the wake of the report of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Shining Path and by the country's armed forces during the 1980s and 1990s. 1 These two examples represent mechanisms frequently found in memorials to social trauma. By examining them I hope to shed some light on the way a community "remembers." Our understanding of cultural memory is reflected in aesthetic choices that, I will argue throughout this essay, consistently embody mnemonic mechanisms highlighted by current research on cognition. Interventions like Giribaldi's are able to produce vicarious memories in viewers by appealing to empathic responses to certain forms of representation. The ponytail holder is from a mass grave discovered in the highlands of Peru. All that is found is a heap of undistinguishable bones and other human remains, but a woman sees the little hair accessory and breaks down in tears. A plain little thing evokes the enormity of her loss. There is a metonymic aspect in the way objects represent absence: a pink ponytail holder stands for the girl who wore it, and when told that this was all her relatives had left with which to identify her, somehow we understand; somehow we are moved. The empty courtyards, kitchens, and playgrounds of the town of
Performative Materials and Activist Commemoration.
Public Art Journal CAP Cadernos de Arte Pública, 2020
Talk given at Fragmentos, Bogotá, September 2020. Monument debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century, turning almost entirely on questions of who is represented and by whom, might benefit from considering questions of how and with what material resources first raised in the context of post-WWII commemoration of the Holocaust and other traumatic events. The involvement of audiences in the memorial’s physical substance, entering its spaces and otherwise performing acts of commemoration rather than just looking upon public art meant to broadcast an ideal official history, has been central to the most durable memorials of the last half century, and is given a particularly radical turn by artist interested in justice and restitution. In Colombia, Doris Salcedo has taken the very fabrication of a memorial space—made from surrendered FARC firearms by women who had suffered in the war in cathartic acts of hammering sheet metal—as a performative process making commemoration physical. The same phenomena can be observed spontaneously in acts of public imagination directed at more conventional memorial objects, such as the Korean Statue for Peace, whose bronze girl commemorates the victims of sexual exploitation during WWII is clothed by anonymous contemporary Koreans. The task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility.
Memorializing in Movement: Chilean Sites of Memory as Spaces of Activism and Imagination
A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, 2019
We argue that the defense of the Museum of Human Rights speaks to the power of memory as possibility, as foundational to ways collectivities understand the genealogies of violence and injustice in order to imagine otherwise. Moreover, memorial site protagonists have successfully challenged and accessed state resources toward representation and education regarding the violence of the past and toward alternative ways of imagining justice and human rights in the present and future
Education, Migration and Development: Critical Perspectives in a Moving World, 2022
This Chapter explores the strengths and limitations of critical museum pedagogy specifically, what new insights it offered about how we might learn about and practice empathy towards different types of migrants. We consider the politics of terminology in relation to migration in the Colombian context, exploring how participants in the Migration Laboratory identified important synergies and differences between the experiences of internally displaced persons within Colombia historically and those of newly arriving Venezuelan refugees. Storytelling, we observe, was a powerful tool in this context for linking experiences and finding connections between different lives. We find that, where sufficient attention is given to the political nuances of each situation and participants are given adequate opportunities to be heard, museums can be important spaces to educate and foster empathy for others by drawing on individual and collective memories of mobility. Museums become, as Clover and Sanford (2016) have argued, drawing on McRobbie 2009 ‘pedagogic contact zones’ - ‘spaces for collective power, critique and debate...sites of cocreated knowledge, resistance, praxis and social, pedagogical and self-reflexivity.’ (129) The event demonstrated the value of the arts in bringing marginalised voices to the fore and enabling the co-creation of knowledge by local and global actors in migration; and the power of memory museums in particular in creating political and public ‘holding spaces’ for non-hierarchical mutual education and identity building among societies.
The Transmission of Traumatic Memory through Performative Protest: HIJOS Escrache in Argentina
Escrache is a form of public protest developed in Argentina during the 1990s that employs public condemnation against torturers and assassins of the military dictatorship (Kaiser, 2002). Derived from the Spanish slang meaning “to expose”, escrache combines elements of a march, happening and public shaming delivered through the medium of guerrilla performance (Colectivo Situaciones, 2009; Taylor, 2002). Formulated by HIJOS, a group comprising the children of those disappeared during the dictatorship, escrache is a response to the impunity or “granting of immunity, the exemption from judicial review or sentence” enjoyed by those who engaged in repression, torture and murder (Kaiser, 2002, p.500) This investigation will examine the unique contribution of escrache as performative protest to the ongoing discourse surrounding memory struggles in post-dictatorial Argentina. Analysis will proceed by situating HIJOS within the historico-political context of the military dictatorship and its aftermath, including the influence of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo on HIJOS’s approach. Inquiry will then turn to the contemporary context within which HIJOS operates, exploring the group’s tactics and strategic function in terms of Freire’s conscientization and Boal’s theatrical resistance. The investigation will then consider the efficacy of HIJOS’s practice as gauged by local and national reactions, and culminate with an evaluation of the broader impact of escrache on Argentine society.
Social & Cultural Geography, 2016
Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates more just possible futures, and that peace is a politicized and contextually speci c process, but how does place-based memory performance actually contribute to social movements’ construction of peace? This article explores massacre commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a group of small- scale farmers living in the war-torn region of Urabá, Colombia. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2014, including participant observation and 49 interviews, I explore the relationship between these spatially embodied practices and the community’s resistance to forced displacement and peace-building project. I argue that these forms of memorialization cultivate key elements for an autonomist ‘other politics’, including solidarity with allies; mobilizing bodies across space to defend life and land; and ongoing re ection, education and strategic planning that strengthen community cohesion and organization. Integrating scholarship on memory performance, peace geographies, and social movements, I illustrate how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community’s massacre commemorations and stones reject vindictive violence and instead build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics through internal and external solidarity.
Filling the Absence: the re-embodiment of sites of mass atrocity and the practices they generate
Despite the particularities that are present within every instance of genocide or state terror, one thing they all share is that, once the physical violence ends, there are always sites that are left behind, many of which contain material reminders or even concrete evidence of the violations that occurred within their boundaries. By focusing specifically on la Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the largest former concentration camp in Argentina, this article examines these sites as places that allow for a certain set of shared, embodied practices to be performed both by the curators or organizers of the sites, as well as the visitors to the sites. I argue that it is never the spaces themselves, but rather the practices that transpire within these spaces and through the process of transforming the space from a site of atrocity into a site of memory that influence the constructive processing of past violence. They do so through their ability to make people re-encounter and re-activate the past in the present.
Émulations , 2017
This paper addresses the experience of two victims’ social movements originating from the Colombian subregion of Eastern Antioquia. Drawing from a transnational perspective, these social movements have been developing different types of symbols and communicative citizenship actions to claim human rights in the midst of the Colombian armed conflict. Specifically, the paper focuses on the cases of The Association of Organized Women of Eastern Antioquia (AMOR) and The Provincial Association of Victims to Citizens (APROVIACI). It explores how these two movements have implemented, transferred and adapted different symbols, communicative citizenship actions and forms of political engagement. In order to do so, they used other victims’ groups of the global south as a reference. These include the association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina) and May our Daughters Return Home, Civil Association (Mexico). The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate that these two Colombian cases (AMOR and APROVIACI) are successful examples of transfers, adapt and implement different types of political actions and symbols from other parts of the global south in order to improve social and political activism in particular contexts. The article introduces the concept of communicative citizenship field in which emotions and affection act as a catalyst to generate collective actions for counter public groups in armed conflict societies. This process ultimately leads to the transformation of the victim status into an active citizenship condition. This study finally argues that the construction of symbols that articulate communicative dimensions of political, social and cultural rights, can help civil society groups and social movements in the rebuilding of a sense of citizenship and collective belonging. Furthermore, these symbols may generate processes of construction of social memory, recognition and solidarity from a counter public perspective.