Remembering Ex-combatientes: A Visual Enquiry into the Social Memory of Colombia’s Former Combatants

ABSTRACT

This work forms part of the creative component of a visual arts PhD, which investigates the legacy of the Colombia’s internal conflict as seen through the eyes of former combatants. The resultant work and associative exegesis seeks to elucidate the manner in which alternative photographic practices intended to represent and mediate the trauma and lived experience of the Colombian conflict might help to interrogate notions of cultural memory and identity through the subjective choices made in its production.

KEYWORDS:

• Colombian conflict
• ex-combatants
• photography
• assisted self-portraiture
• cultural memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Maria Victoria Uribe, “Memory in Times of War,” Public Culture 21 (2009): 3.

2. John W. Sherman, “Political Violence in Colombia: Dirty Wars Since 1977,” History Compass 13 (2015): 454.

3. Marta Cabrera, “Impossible Histories: Violence, Identity, and Memory in Colombian Visual Arts,” in Technologies of Memory in the Arts, ed. Liedeke Plate & Anneke Smelik (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 203.

4. Garry Leech, FARC, The Longest Insurgency (London and New York: Zed Books, 2011).

5. Maria Victoria Uribe. (2009).

6. Sandra Rios Oyola, Religion, Social Memory and Conflict: The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

7. Enzo Nussio, “Emotional Legacies of War among Former Colombian Paramilitaries,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace 18 (2012): 369-83.