Art and memory: Magdalenas por el Cauca

Neyla Graciela Pardo Abril

doi:10.3897/ijhmc.2.70846

Abstract

Adopting an interdisciplinary framework of Memory Studies and Art and employing semiotics with a multimodal and multimedia character, it is explored how social groups in Colombia memorialise the violence of the internal armed conflict. The reflection associates the victims’ experiences with those expressions of commemoration and remembrance that are narratives embodied in visual and scenic art. It is explored how a semiotic landscape of memory is created through a performative artistic proposal. In this landscape, not only cultural frames can be determined, but also the semiotic-discursive resources that give meaning to the relationship between art and memory. The aim is to characterise the performance known as Magdalenas por el Cauca (2008) which was recorded audiovisually in several spaces on the internet. It means that, in addition to the ephemeral mise-en-scène, there are records of the performative and communicative work. In this article, we analyse the video X PEREGRINACION TRUJILLO y MAGDALENAS POR EL CAUCA (2010), one of the records that perpetuates Magdalenas por el Cauca. This reparation act is an audiovisual narrative with ethical and political character and produced collectively by relatives of victims, witnesses, artists and other interlocutors, which interpret and assign new meanings to the performance.

Highlights

Latin American societies and Colombia have suffered several periods of systematic violence perpetrated by different types of actors
We propose to characterise the mediatised artistic proposal “Magdalenas por el Cauca” using the mediation process recorded in the video “X Peregrinación Trujillo y Magdalenas por el Cauca” that was collectivised on YouTube in its first media update
Through “Magdalenas por el Cauca” and the performance “X Peregrinación Trujillo”, it is possible to infer the potential of collective artistic practices to build spaces for interaction, in which those collective and individual memories of a painful past, caused by the violence in the internal armed conflict, are invoked and made visible

Summary

Introduction

Latin American societies and Colombia have suffered several periods of systematic violence perpetrated by different types of actors. The video becomes a symbolic and material connection that enables a transition from conflict, pain and death into ways of explaining, understanding and interpreting the traumatic experience as it recovers the aesthetics of the victim and updates that of the perpetrators From this perspective, the short documentary interweaves sound and visual elements making visible diverse voices in the construction of a narrative, articulated to the socio-political and cultural death of those defenceless people, whose acts of resistance transit the Cauca River. Through “Magdalenas por el Cauca” and the performance “X Peregrinación Trujillo”, it is possible to infer the potential of collective artistic practices to build spaces for interaction, in which those collective and individual memories of a painful past, caused by the violence in the internal armed conflict, are invoked and made visible. The semiotic landscape is conceptualised as a dynamic communicative interaction that materialises an artistic expression with multiple and diverse knowledge, which

Reading the mediatised semiotic landscape

Reshaping the semiotic landscape of memories

Conclusion