Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict

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This project explores representations of conflict, justice, and victims in Colombia's 60-year long conflict. It focuses on how these topics are starting to be represented in museums and official exhibitions that have been, or are in the process of, being developed within Colombia. It also interrogates the voices that are not yet heard or represented in these official accounts, and proposes mechanisms for recording these voices, and, ultimately, integrating them into these accounts. Conceiving of museums as spaces in which collective memories are represented, and in which conflict is documented, but also as providing potential mechanisms for transformation or resistance, the project will offer insights into these practices, evaluate the effectiveness of their representations, and contribute to policy-making and public awareness.The project proposes that there are two key issues at stake: firstly, that of agency, in the sense of the victims themselves being given active positions within these representations. Secondly, that of gender, which is often overlooked in accounts of Colombia's civil war. Our hypothesis is that existing discourses of the 60-year long conflict in Colombia have often overlooked gendered violence, since narratives of the conflict tend to focus on male actors, and that only by bringing to the fore these forgotten voices can the full story be told, and, ultimately, conflict transformation be fully enabled. As a starting point, the project will evaluate existing practices of representation of victims in Colombia in a museum context, through a detailed visual and textual analysis of the forms of representation as depicted in the Museo Nacional [National Museum], and in the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica [National Centre for Historical Memory], and will produce a classification of these as regards key issues such as agency, point of view, and the gaze. Subsequently, the project will work at uncovering and documenting alternative histories and alternative memory, and will offer new proposed forms of recognising these victims. Focussing on women, the project will analyse forms of representation on the digital platforms of NGOs dedicated to women victims, memory, and resistance. Here, our analysis will again focus on the key issues of agency, point of view, and the gaze, and will also document any new and innovative forms of representation that take into account the voices and needs of the victims themselves. We will also undertake an in-depth analysis of the documentation gathered by the Centro de Memoria Histórica to draw out women's experiences.We will devise and deliver an ethical workshop to research students specialising in Human Rights, and, subsequently, these researchers will undertake research projects focussing on rural and campesina women in the Boyacá region of Colombia. We will then work closely with these women victims in co-creation workshops, in order to develop a new, interactive artwork which will tell the story of these women victims, and offer new perspectives on the conflict, empowering these women to take ownership of their narrative. This interactive artwork will form part of a mixed-media travelling exhibition, which will be displayed in the first instance in Bogotá, and subsequently at other venues around the country. Although this artwork will be specific to the Colombian context, we aim to draw out, in the form of a toolkit, how findings could be adapted to other contexts, and so develop the as yet unexplored potential of digital art and its role in conflict transformation. Throughout the project, we will also work closely with the team advising the creation of Colombia's proposed new Museum of Memory, and aim to shape its practice, and contribute to the creation of more valid and victim-centric narratives.