Mending the New: A Framework for Reconciliation Through Testimonial Digital Textiles in the Transition to Post-Conflict Rural Colombia

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Despite the importance of reconciliation in Colombia as a process that is actively practised by citizens in their everyday lives, most research so far has deployed an institutional, top-down approach to this process. The need for a bottom-up understanding of reconciliation in the post-agreement phase can help establish practices of reconciliation as long lasting and collective acts of communication, of doing and learning, which allow communities to negotiate the violent past, and situate themselves in the transitional present and a hopeful future.The proposed project will develop a framework for reconciliation with communities which have been crafting textiles and have been severely affected by the armed conflict. Textile crafting in Colombia is a widespread activity that incorporates traditional techniques of knitting and sewing and is organised primarily by groups of women within rural areas. Rather than just documenting memories of war, textile crafting generates spaces of common reflection and has a healing, restorative and constructive potential that negotiates memory and reconciliation. It is specifically this novel dimension of textile crafting that this project will illuminate. In 2015 the group Mujeres Tejiendo Sueños y Sabores de Paz from Mampuján won the National Peace Prize and has one of their memory tapestries displayed in the National Museum of Colombia. Many textile crafting groups--including all groups that will participate in this project--are members of the national "Network of Knitters for Memory and Life" launched in 2016.Research on textile crafting offers the unique and exceptional opportunity to investigate reconciliation in a context that brings together everyday practice, the realities of the conflict, the possibility of healing and the rebuilding of the social fabric towards a post-conflict society. However, textile crafting is often considered as a representational activity producing "visual metaphors of collective memory". Rather than conceiving textile pieces as products, the proposed project will implement an original approach, seeing textile crafting as a making process which is collectively realised within the context of war. The project will deploy a ground-breaking methodological design in order to elucidate reconciliation through the practice of textile crafting that (1) includes an intensive ten-month-long ethnographic study of the processes of crafting (2) a series of public participation events for disseminating the findings and promoting reconciliation and post-conflict (3) the development of a set of original technologies that add digital components to the handcrafted textiles with the ability to digitally record and reproduce reconciliation stories. Specifically, the project will design a compositional material-digital object, a testimonial digital textile, as a novel method for conducting research in the context of conflict and reconciliation that can open fresh avenues for research practice within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The final outcomes of the project will be: -a framework for reconciliation narratives and practices that are achieved through community building and community crafting-a unique documentation of textile crafting as a practice of memory and reconciliation -the design of a novel technological object, a testimonial digital textile, that records stories and experiences of the armed conflict -the implementation of an innovative methodological research design for investigating textile crafting-the creation of spaces that foster trans-local dialogues and exchange between different communities in Colombia, and between Colombia and the UK -the design of an open publicly accessible digital archive of testimonial textiles that capture oral histories of the war and of reconciliation-a series of academic conferences, publications and publicly accessible reports-a major public exhibition and presentation of the project's results