Jesús Abad Colorado’s Epidemic Photography. Regarding The Paramilitary Siege on Memory

Abstract

Jesús Abad Colorado’s photographic exhibition “El testigo” (2018) portrayed the Colombian conflict through a human rights perspective centred on the victim. The show took place at a time when the recent process of transitional justice was threatened by the election of a government hostile to it. This article argues that, even if the exhibition served as a powerful instance of symbolic reparation, its focus on the revelation of the victim – more than 550 photographs – had the opposite effect, causing what I here term a “limits epidemic”, by which the majority of the images, and therefore the victims, escaped the audience’s attention. The exhibition thus echoed a similar effect to that of other transitional justice processes, which in revealing victims end up concealing them. Three of the photos of the paramilitary horror, victims absent in all of them, nevertheless had a different effect, causing an “oscillation epidemic”. That is: a reciprocal relationship between spectator and image that elicits an exploration of testimony beyond its function as proof and of the vestiges of the paramilitary apparatus as a siege on memory.