Indigenous agency through visual narratives in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia (original) (raw)

This article focuses on the Wiwa community in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia.This community has been reviving its traditional music as part of an effort to reconstruct itssocial network. Moreover, its members have recently embraced visual arts as a versatilemedium in the context of the armed conflict. The local community of Siminke has started usingvisual tools not only to explicitly address their social and political issues on a regional level, butalso to develop a new cultural space for self-expression and social (re)construction. Video andphotography are being used here to preserve a cultural knowledge traditionally transmitted fromgeneration to generation, a process disrupted by the armed conflict in the region. Methodologyencompasses communicative methods such as interviews, visual analysis and photo-elicitationin order to understand and highlight the community’s internal perspective on the use of visualarts to reinforce their agency in pursuit of political goals