Medellín: Body and Territory

Abstract

Medellin has been a privileged subject in Colombian cinema. In films whose stories take place in Medellin and movies' plots that revolve around the production of Medellin’s space, themes like social exclusion and violence become representational elements associated to marginality and segregation, as well as to struggles over the control of the urban territory and its correlates expressed on female and male bodies. By drawing on emotional geography, this article examines these films to explain how Medellin is constructed visually and discursively to elaborate stories based on segregation, exclusion along race and class, and the armed conflict that Colombia has experienced in its recent history, a conflict of which Medellin has been a battleground. Additionally, it becomes clear that social conflict in Medellin is a multi-scalar process. The ways in which political and social tensions have been experienced in the city—and their correlates in the production of urban spaces—are fundamentally shaped by the nature and structure of the urban territories (and their geographies) where conflict materializes (and dialectically, territories are shaped by different forms of violence and conflict). In visual narratives, stories (or topics) unfold at these multiple sites of urban conflict. These topics are representations built on dichotomies like inclusion/exclusion, center/periphery, and masculine/feminine, depicting Medellin as an ill city, an urban collection of geographies that suffer from an illness of which drug trafficking is its main cause and violence its main symptom.