Time(s) to Listen: Anthropology/Design Encounters in the Design of a Colombian Exhibition on Reconciliation

Abstract

This paper follows the shaping of “Time(s) to Listen,” an exhibition born at the intersection of anthropology/design practices related to listening embedded into testimonial digital textiles in the context of armed conflict and reconciliation in Colombia. This configuration process demonstrates how anthropology and design can be mutually enriching and contributes to situating design practices in exhibition-making as tools for the generation of wholehearted material encounters, in this case, related to listening. For this, the paper dwells ethnographically in three moments of “Time(s) to Listen” emergence and shows three types of listening that these moments represent: one related to textile making and the listening atmosphere that this material practice generates, a second moment in which the exhibition prototyping detaches from textile making practice and embraces listening as a digital-textile object, and lastly the mise-en-scène of the exhibition in which textile making and its capacity of generating an embodied listening is reclaimed to generate meaningful collective encounters between audiences and communities.