Community artistic practices and memories of the armed conflict in Colombia: collective creation to resist forgotten

Abstract

This article presents partial results of the research project “Ways of making the past in Colombia: community artistic practices and armed conflict.” (2024), which develops a documentary analysis methodology to study the Community Artistic Practices (CAP) that address the memory of the armed conflict in Colombia, between 1991 and 2024, from the academic production found in institutional repositories of universities and databases. This document analyzes and reflects on five artistic practices in which the processes of creation with victim communities, have elaborated the grief and memory of the conflict from actions of resistance, fight against forgetting and longing for dignity. The five emblematic cases to be addressed are: In The Rift, The memory skin, The seamstress weavers for memory, The Monument to life park and Magdalenas through the Cauca. The article has five sections, an introduction to present the generality; conceptual approach from several fronts such as the normative, the artistic practices as resistance to forgetting and the characterization of the CAPs as strategies of creation with communities; the methodology is then clarified before moving on the analysis and findings on the 5 selected CAPs; finally, conclusions are presented on the contributions of the CAPs as forms of collective creation and resistance to forgetting.