https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-4121
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ABSTRACT
On October 18, 2019, members of the Colombian Army covered a highly visible mural with white paint. The mural depicted the Army’s active and retired generals who are allegedly responsible for extrajudicial executions committed by their subordinates in the 2000s. The Army’s efforts failed; in attempting to make the mural invisible, the Army ensured the mural’s visibility through online circulation. In this article, I describe the rhizomatic emergence of the image in the digital space through different forms and articulations as a challenge to the Army’s intention to screen out a narrative in the physical landscape. I argue that the circulation of the image and its transformations into remixes and other visual representations constitutes an instance of online symbolic accretion. I propose the theoretical concept of rhizomorph, understood as a digital image event that transforms as it moves through a digitally mediated environment to provide an alternative conception of a particular event.
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my deepest appreciation and gratitude to Dr. Roger Aden for his insightful suggestions and invaluable contributions to this study.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Amanda C. Waterhouse, “Colombia’s National Protests Show that Infrastructure, Too, Is Politics,” Nacla, December 3, 2019, https://nacla.org/news/2019/12/03/colombia-national-protests-infrastructure-politics-dilan-cruz.
2 Christina Noriega, “Colombians Decry Censorship After Government Officials Paint Over Mural about Extrajudicial Killings,” Hyperallergic, October 24, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/524685/colombians-decry-censorship-after-government-officials-paint-over-mural-about-extrajudicial-killings/.
3 Michael Taussig, I swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3.
4 #MilitaryCensorsMural, #CampaignForTheTruth, #SOSAgainstCensorship and #TheMuralTheyDoNotWantYouToSee. Spanish to English translations in this manuscript were made by the author.
5 The Mothers of the False Positives of Bogotá and Soacha (MAFAPO) and the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (Movice).
6 Owen J. Dwyer, “Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration,” Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 3 (2004): 420.
7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25.
8 Stephen H. Browne, “Reading Public Memory in Daniel Webster’s Plymouth Rock Oration,” Western Journal of Communication 57, no. 4 (1993): 466.
9 Yvonne Whelan, “The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Landscape: Monuments to British Monarchs in Dublin Before and After Independence,” Journal of Historical Geography 28, no. 4 (2002): 509.
10 Whelan, “The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Landscape,” 508.
11 Derek H. Alderman, “Street Names and the Scaling of Memory: The Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr within the African American Community,” Area 35, no. 2 (2003): 145.
12 Caitlin F. Bruce, Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019), 3–7.
13 Bruce, Painting Publics, 3.
14 The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia is a guerrilla organization founded in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party. In the 1980s, it had become the most powerful military and narco-trafficking illegal group in the country, responsible for widespread violence and systematic violation of human rights. After four years of negotiations, FARC signed a peace agreement with the Colombian government in 2016.
15 Benjamin Forest, Juliet Johnson, and Karen Till, “Post-Totalitarian National Identity: Public Memory in Germany and Russia,” Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 3 (2004): 358.
16 Stephen Legg, “Sites of Counter-Memory: The Refusal to Forget and the Nationalist Struggle in Colonial Delhi,” Historical Geography 33 (2005): 180–201.
17 Hamzah Muzaini, “The Afterlives and Memory Politics of the Ipoh Cenotaph in Perak, Malaysia,” Geoforum 54 (2014): 144.
18 Dwyer, “Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration,” 431.
19 Derek H. Alderman, “Surrogation and the Politics of Remembering Slavery in Savannah, Georgia (USA),” Journal of Historical Geography 36, no. 1 (2010): 94.
20 Dwyer, “Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration,” 425.
21 Rosalind Hampton, “By All Appearances: Thoughts on Colonialism, Visuality and Racial Neoliberalism,” Cultural Studies 33, no. 3 (2019): 384.
22 Bruce, Painting Publics, 4.
23 Cara A. Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 377–402.
24 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 1 (2003): 37–8.
25 Bruno Latour, “How to Be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion?,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 421.
26 Brian T. Edwards, “Tahrir: Ends of Circulation,” Public Culture 23, no. 3 (2011): 493–504.
27 Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 9.
28 Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination on Affective Energy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 1–25.
29 Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 192.
30 Laurie E. Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 14.
31 Lester C. Olson, “Pictorial Representations of British America Resisting Rape: Rhetorical Recirculation of a Print Series Portraying the Boston Port Bill of 1774,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 1 (2009): 3.
32 Olson, “Pictorial Representations of British America Resisting Rape,” 3.
33 Christa J. Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 1–24.
34 Olson, Constitutive Visions, 10.
35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3–25.
36 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
38 John W. Delicath and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups,” Argumentation 17, no. 3 (2003): 315.
39 Delicath and DeLuca, “Image Events,” 321–9.
40 Delicath and DeLuca, “Image Events,” 321.
41 Delicath and DeLuca, “Image Events,” 328.
42 Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory,” 41.
43 The National Liberation Army (ELN) was founded in 1964 as a pro-Cuban guerrilla, anti-imperialist organization, with roots in the Colombian student movement of the 1960s and the principles of liberation theology. The Popular Liberation Army (EPL) was created in 1967 as a pro-Maoist organization also with roots in the labor union and the public university student movements. The 19th of April Movement (M-19) began as an urban guerrilla organization comprised of middle-class youths founded as a response to the alleged electoral fraud in the presidential elections of 1970. See Jorge O. Melo, Historia Mínima de Colombia (Bogotá: Turner Publicaciones, 2017).
44 Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, Sala de Reconocimiento de Verdad, de Responsabilidad y de Determinación de los Hechos y Conductas, Caso 003, Muertes Ilegítimamente Presentadas como Bajas en Combate por Agentes del Estado, AUTO No. 005 de 2018 (Bogotá, 2018), 1–10, https://relatoria.jep.gov.co/documentos/providencias/1/1/Auto_SRVR-005_17-julio-2018.pdf.
45 Deaths Illegitimately Presented as Combat Casualties by State Agents.
46 “La JEP hace pública la estrategia de priorización dentro del Caso 03, conocido como el de falsos positivos,” Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, February 18, 2021, https://www.jep.gov.co/Sala-de-Prensa/Paginas/La-JEP-hace-p%C3%BAblica-la-estrategia-de-priorizaci%C3%B3n-dentro-del-Caso-03,-conocido-como-el-de-falsos-positivos.aspx.
47 “General Henry Torres Escalante acepta su responsabilidad en los falsos positivos en Casanare: ‘Asumo con vergüenza el título de máximo responsable,’” Semana, September 19, 2023, https://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/urgente-asumo-con-verguenza-el-titulo-de-maximo-responsable-general-henry-torres-escalante-acepta-responsabilidad-en-falsos-positivos-en-casanare/202344/.
48 “JEP imputa crímenes de guerra y lesa humanidad al general (r) Mario Montoya y ocho militares más por 130 ‘falsos positivos’ en el oriente antioqueño”, JEP, August 30, 2023, https://www.jep.gov.co/Sala-de-Prensa/Paginas/jep-imputa-crimenes-de-guerra-y-lesa-humanidad-al-general-r-mario-montoya-y-ocho-militares-mas-por-130-falsos-positivos-en-.aspx.
49 Forest, Johnson, and Till, “Post-Totalitarian National Identity,” 358.
50 Alderman, “Street Names and the Scaling of Memory,” 165.
51 Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory,” 41.
52 Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric, 19.
53 “On Their Watch: Evidence of Senior Army Officers’ Responsibility for False Positive Killings in Colombia,” Human Rights Watch, June 24, 2015, https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/06/24/their-watch/evidence-senior-army-officers-responsibility-false-positive-killings.
54 “Uribe dice que desaparecidos de Soacha murieron en combate,” Espectador, October 7, 2008, https://www.elespectador.com/judicial/uribe-dice-que-desaparecidos-de-soacha-murieron-en-combates-article-42410/.
55 Jerónimo Ríos Sierra and Jaime Zapata García, “Democratic Security Policy in Colombia: Approaches to an Enemy-Centric Counterinsurgency Model,” Revista de Humanidades 36 (2019): 141.
56 Forest, Johnson, and Till, “Post-Totalitarian National Identity,” 358.
57 Legg, “Sites of Counter-Memory,” 181–2.
58 “Tutela de generales, nuevo capítulo de mural sobre ‘falsos positivos,’” Tiempo, October 30, 2019, https://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/investigacion/tutelas-por-mural-de-falsos-positivos-y-respuesta-del-movice-429000.
59 Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 60.
60 Lee and LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation,” 192.
61 “Juez ordena retirar imagen de ‘¿quién dio la orden?’ sobre los falsos positivos,” Espectador, February 25, 2020, https://www.elespectador.com/colombia/mas-regiones/juez-ordena-retirar-imagen-de-quien-dio-la-orden-sobre-los-falsos-positivos-article-906397/.
62 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
63 Dwyer, “Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration,” 425.
64 Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” 60–2.
65 Edbauer, “Unframing Models,” 20.
66 Olson, “Pictorial Representations,” 3.
67 Olson, Constitutive Visions, 10–12.
68 “Montoya habría dicho que soldados cometieron ‘falsos positivos’ porque eran de estratos 1 y 2,” Espectador, February 13, 2020, https://www.elespectador.com/colombia-20/jep-y-desaparecidos/montoya-habria-dicho-que-soldados-cometieron-falsos-positivos-porque-eran-de-estratos-1-y-2-article/.
69 In Colombia’s socioeconomic stratification system, people who belong to strata 1 and 2 are the ones with the lowest incomes.
70 Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, Caso 003, Muertes Ilegítimamente Presentadas, 6.
71 Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 5.
72 Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric, 14.
73 Browne, “Reading Public Memory,” 472.
74 Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric, 18–19.
75 Dwyer, “Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration,” 420–6.
76 Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, “La JEP hace pública la estrategia.”
77 Final Report of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition, https://www.comisiondelaverdad.co/etiquetas/informe-final-de-la-comision.
78 Nuala C. Johnson, “The Contours of Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: Enacting Public Remembrance of the Bomb in Omagh, Northern Ireland,” Cultural Geographies 19, no. 2 (2012): 253.
79 Courtney E. Cole, “Commemorating Mass Violence: Truth Commission Hearings as a Genre of Public Memory,” Southern Communication Journal 83, no. 3 (2018): 164.
80 Monica Coibanu, “Criminalising the Past and Reconstructing Collective Memory: The Romanian Truth Commission,” Europe–Asia Studies 61, no. 2 (2009): 334.