Memory practices ‘from below’: Mnemonic solidarity,intimacy and counter-monuments in the practices of Zoscua,Colombia

Abstract

This article analyses the memory practices of Corporación Zoscua, a small, grassroots activist group in Colombia representing victims of the armed conflict within the region of Boyacá. After an initial grounding within the broader context of transitional justice and historical memory debates within Colombia, the article focuses on how Zoscua’s practices constitute a form of tactical, vernacular memory-making from below that involves temporary alliances and negotiations in order to make interventions into the mnemonic spaces of the city. Based on a mixed-methods approach that includes semi-structured interviews with participants, as well as textual and paratextual analysis, the article provides an analysis of the conception and construction of their memory wall in the city of Tunja. It highlights first how the choice of location of the wall constitutes a tactical take-over of public space, with grassroots memory being inserted into a conventionally top-down locale that conveys official, state-sponsored national values. Second, the article considers the practices and negotiations involved in designing and building the wall, and, subsequently, focuses on the content of the wall, with particular attention to the collective and collaborative nature of the artwork that, through its imagery, composition and focus on emotions, and contests the high-art values normally associated with monumental practices. The article concludes by suggesting that the distinction between top-down and bottom-up memory initiatives is complicated when examining the mnemonic practices of grassroots memory actors, who make tactical use of alliances to further their aims. As the analysis in this article reveals, bottom-up strategies undertaken by community groups and top-down initiatives promoted by authorities often become entangled or coalesce, evidenced both in the practices and negotiations involved in creating grassroots memorials, and in the resulting materiality of the memorial wall under discussion.

Keywords

armed conflict Colombia grassroots memory mnemonic sites mnemonic solidarity monuments vernacular memory-making victims

Introduction

This article analyses the memory practices of Corporación Zoscua, a grassroots activist group in Colombia representing victims of the armed conflict within the region (departamento) of Boyacá.¹ First setting the issue of memory work within the broader context of transitional justice and historical memory debates within Colombia, the article then focuses on how Zoscua’s mnemonic practices constitute a form of vernacular memory-making from below that involves temporary alliances and tactical negotiations in order to make interventions into the mnemonic spaces of the city.² Methodologically, the research underpinning this article is based on a mixed-methods approach that learns from scholars, such as Katherine Hite (2012) and Cara Levey (2016), who have undertaken research on monuments in Latin American contexts, and combines semi-structured interviews with members of Zoscua with textual and paratextual analysis of the monument itself. The sample comprised women who had participated in the Zoscua workshop creating the artworks for the wall (on which see more below), with the sample size agreed with the Zoscua coordinator, and an interview schedule designed with questions grouped in key areas, these comprising: the piece created and what it depicts; why they chose that object and what they hoped to convey by choosing it; their experience of the process of creation; whether they attended the inauguration of the wall, whether they have continued to visit since its inauguration, and their reactions to seeing their piece on the wall. Respondents were given the option of responding individually or, if they had created the artwork collectively with another family member, responding collectively to the interview questions.³ The first of these interviews took place face-to-face in February 2020, and then, due to the pandemic, subsequent interviews were undertaken remotely, with the respondents either recording their responses or providing them in written form.

The research described in this article is informed by a growing body of work on mnemonic practices and their relationship to transitional justice mechanisms in Colombia. As many scholars have noted, in Colombia, as distinct from other transitional justice contexts, the conflict is not yet a past process that transitional justice mechanisms are subsequently attempting to redress retrospectively. Whereas transitional justice initiatives in countries across the globe from the 1970s onwards, such as those implemented in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru and South Africa, were initiated after a period of transition from either dictatorship to democracy, or from armed conflict to peace, Colombia is an unusual case in that its mechanisms were put in place, and continue to be implemented, during an ongoing armed conflict. This has led to a questioning of the concept of transitional justice itself, particularly of the notion of ‘transition’ which the term contains. Referring to the 2005 Justice and Peace Law,⁴ García-Godos and Lid (2010: 488) note the ‘seeming paradox’ of ‘the application of TJ mechanisms when no obvious transition has occurred’, while Laplante and Theidon (2006: 51; my emphasis) describe this as the moment when ‘Colombia chose transitional justice mechanisms pre-post-conflict’, and Uprimny Yepes et al. (2006: 14) term this a ‘process of transitional justice without transition’. More recently, Sanne Weber (2018: 89), discussing the 2011 Victims and Land Restitution Law (Law 1448), calls this ‘Colombia’s second attempt at transitional justice without a transition’, while Nicole Summers (2012: 220) has highlighted this same law as the beginning of ‘a process of transitional justice within a context where no significant political or social change has occurred’. These scholars, and others like them, have thus emphasised how Colombia’s transitional justice processes call into question the post-conflict status that transitional justice normally implies.

Within this context, thus, historical memory is always about the present in the particular case of Colombia, in which mnemonic practices refer not backwards to a conflict in the past, but refer to a continued – and in some cases exacerbated – conflict which endures in the present. By this I do not mean to suggest that memory is not already the present, but, rather, that the Colombian case demonstrates a particular nexus, where post-conflict memory practices take place within a state of ongoing conflict, and where historical memory is constantly fought over by different actors in the present. Thus, the familiar debates within memory studies, which have reminded us that ‘the present contains and constructs past experience and future expectations’ (Jelin, 2003: 4), that our ‘understandings of and investments in the past change as our present conditions and needs change’ (Dickinson et al., 2010: 7), or, in Terdiman’s (1993: 8) pithy phrase, ‘memory is the present past’ are even more relevant in the case of Colombia; historical memory practices, and the mnemonic actors who undertake them, are always engaging with, and entangled in, present concerns.

Another particularity of the Colombian context when understanding mnemonic practices within that country is the fact that, as scholars have noted, such practices are enshrined in law. The Victims and Land Restitution Law mentioned above includes, as well as the rights of victims to damages, to the restitution of prior living conditions, and to a range of services and special protections in legal proceedings, procedures for symbolic reparations, laid out in article 141 as

any provision made on behalf of victims or the community at large which serves to ensure the preservation of historical memory, the non-repetition of victimizing events, public acceptance of the facts, the seeking of public forgiveness, and the restoration of the dignity of victims.

This explicit enshrining of historical memory in law is subsequently expanded upon with the commitment to series of actions related to historical memory, including the creation of a National Day of Memory and Solidarity with Victims (article 142); the duty of the state to ensure that civil society organisations can advance in memory construction (article 143); the taking of testimonies, participatory activities, exhibitions and shows, the creation of a national Centre for Historical Memory (article 144), and the creation of a Memory Museum (article 148).

The notion of memory is thus over-determined in a Colombian context, with multiple actors, including the state and the legal system, having explicit roles and responsibilities regarding memory. Indeed, this has led to what some have termed a ‘memory boom’ (Ríos Oyola, 2015: 11) or an ‘explosion of memory work’ (Riaño-Alcalá, 2015: 286) in the country, comprising the rise of memory initiatives by civil society actors and the state alike, and involving a complex scenario with, on one hand, the recovery of historical memory officially supported by state laws, and, on the other, the ‘thousands of local initiatives of memorialisation led by grassroots victims’ associations’ across the country (Ríos Oyola, 2015: 11).

Yet this memory boom or explosion of memory is not straightforward, and, as scholars have argued, notable tensions emerge between the top-down, state-sponsored memory narrative and the bottom-up initiatives developed by civil society actors. For instance, Juan Carlos Arboleda-Ariza, Isabel Piper-Shafir and Gabriel Prosser Bravo (2020: 2; my emphasis) have illustrated, through their discourse analysis of the construction of memory in official reparation policies in Colombia, how the Colombian state ‘constructs memory based on laws that generate linear and static narratives about the past’ – narratives which often run counter to the plural, more complex narratives developed by grassroots organisations. Similarly, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá (2015: 285), building on research in the field of transitional justice which has revealed the exclusionary effects produced by singular national narratives of past violence, notes how ‘the paradigm of redemptive memory assumed within transitional justice thought tends to disregard the complex disputes over memory that shape public testimonials’. Likewise, Camilo Tamayo Gómez’s (2022: 385–386) research, building on scholarship that has demonstrated how local practices of memorialisation and commemoration often disrupt the assumptions that underpin official, state-sponsored TJ memory initiatives, has investigated how the mnemonic practices of victims groups in Colombia take place in a

field of constant tension between official narratives about the war waged by the Colombian government, the Colombian army, paramilitary groups and guerrilla groups (‘the official warriors’), and non-official narratives created by civil society organisations, NGOs, social movements, human rights defenders, civilians or victims (‘the unofficial war actors’).

Tamayo Gómez (2022: 387) further emphasises how Colombian victims’ groups attempt to ‘constitute plural discourses in the public sphere’, a plurality which stands in contrast to the static, linear, state-sponsored narrative of the conflict. The work of these scholars, and others like them, has illustrated how mnemonic practices in Colombia exist within a field of tension, taking place within this over-determined, and much contested space.

In the light of this, this article focuses on one such actor within this crowded space of the memory boom in Colombia. It takes as its focus not a top-down, state-sponsored memory initiative, but a bottom-up, grassroots one, analysing the practices of a small civil society organisation and its local memory-making practices. This is not to suggest, however, that the mnemonic practices of this group are strictly oppositional and in fact, as this analysis will show, Zoscua has engaged in tactical negotiations to create its own space within the mnemonic landscape of contemporary Colombia.

Profile of Corporación Zoscua

The particular activist group under analysis in this article, Corporación Zoscua, was founded in 2007 and represents victims of the armed conflict within the department of Boyacá.⁵ A grass-roots community organisation with relatively limited resources, Zoscua works closely with the families of victims to create spaces for remembrance and commemoration. In representing the victims of Boyacá, Zoscua aims to give voice to those who often go unrecognised within the predominant narratives of the armed conflict in Colombia. Their endeavour is particularly important in light of the fact that Boyacá is often framed within national discourses as a peaceful region, frequently described as a ‘haven of peace’, which, Condiza Plazas (2021: 6) has argued, along with the fact that historically, successive governments have often left the department out when it comes to the application of laws, plans, and programmes of reparation, works to ‘invisibilize the causes and consequences of the conflict on victims’ in the region.

The name of the organisation is taken from the Muisca language, 1 of the 65 indigenous languages recognised in Colombia, and a member of the Chibcha linguistic family, within the sub-group known as the magdalénicos (Costenla Umaña, 2008: 127–128). Meaning ‘to compose’ or ‘arrange well’, the term zoscua implies an active process of putting together and creating memory. That this activist group chose a Muisca word for their name symbolises their respect for the indigenous heritage of the region, as well as their commitment to indigenous causes of the present.⁶

In a similar way to many other victims groups in Colombia, Zoscua sees its remit as not merely supporting its members, documenting cases and championing causes, but as also involving creative, artistic and participatory memory practices.⁷ In their Proposal Document, Zoscua overtly link their aims of ‘promoting actions of resistance against forgetting, injustice, violence, and authoritarianism’ to the ‘generat[ion] of societal action in defence of life, based on an active, non-violent approach, using plastic and visual arts, theatre, and other artistic expressions’ (Corporación Zoscua, 2019: 2). To date, Zoscua has undertaken a number of such interventions since 2007 including installations and exhibitions, often working in conjunction with other organisations. This article focuses in particular on the creation of their permanent memory wall-monument, Monument for Memory, Dignity, and Life, arguing that Zoscua’s interventions can be understood within Hite and Collins’s notion of ‘counter-memorial mobilizing’. Discussing the dynamics of commemoration in Chile, Hite and Collins (2009: 383) propose the notion of ‘counter-memorial collective actions’ to refer to initiatives by grassroots actors that reject the ‘staid, sedentary and deadening character of conventional monuments and memorials by inviting dynamic, provocative, public interaction’. This article will demonstrate that such a dynamic can be seen in Zoscua’s intervention in its contestation of official, state-sponsored monuments which tend towards conveying national unity, through their intimate, hand-crafted, open-ended memory wall.

Location and negotiation of the memory wall: grassroots interventions into the monumental space of the urban park

The memory wall Monument for Memory, Dignity, and Life was designed and conceived in 2014 when Zoscua collaborated with the Teatro Experimental de Boyacá (TEB), an interdisciplinary organisation which works predominantly with children and young people in forms such as scriptwriting and storytelling. Zoscua, in collaboration with the TEB, formulated a proposal for a memory intervention as part of the 14th Street Theatre Festival – an annual festival taking place in October each year in Tunja, and to which the TEB is a frequent contributor. Zoscua were thus able to benefit from the fact that the TEB already had an acknowledged reputation within this festival and created this tactical alliance to further their memory intervention. The TEB were already well known for their innovative street theatre practices, with their theatre performances regularly taking place in various high-profile streets and squares of the city. Crucially, in their proposal document Zoscua and the TEB were sufficiently vague as to leave room for doubt as to the exact nature of the mnemonic intervention proposed. Given the TEB’s previous work, the authorities were accustomed to reading proposals which described interventions within the city space; the proposal was accepted, and permission for the construction of the wall initially given. However, according to a representative from Zoscua when interviewed, there was subsequently an attempt to rescind this permission, when the councillors realised – too late – that it was a real wall that was being constructed, and not a theatrical metaphor:

When the construction of the wall started, when the councillors realised it was a real wall, a wall where clay pieces would be put, where photos of victims would be put, they attempted to rescind the permission they had given us to create it.

Thus Zoscua made a tactical alliance with an organisation already known for theatrical take-overs of the city space, and used this alliance in order to create not a temporary take-over of public space through theatre, but a permanent memory wall – an example of how smaller, grassroots organisations can create temporary alliances to achieve their aims.

Regarding the location of this memory wall, it is situated in the city of Tunja in the Parque Pinzón, a small urban park situated in the northern part of the historic centre. The location is significant, I argue, both due to its contemporary usage, as well as its historical resonance and symbolic importance. Regarding the first of these, as a representative from Zoscua comments when interviewed, the Parque Pinzón is a highly visible place in Tunja: ‘it’s a street that many people have to use to get to the Plaza de Bolívar. Buses, cars [. . .] it’s a very busy street, very visible, and it’s very near the centre of Tunja’. An important consideration for selecting this as the location for the memory wall, therefore, was that, as a main thoroughfare in the city centre, leading upwards to the central square of the city, the high volume of traffic and pedestrians passing through ensure that the monument will gain visibility.

Regarding the second of these points, it is particularly important to note that the location of the memory wall in the Parque Pinzón has historical and contemporary significance. The historic centre of Tunja as a whole is often revered as bearing traces of Tunja’s glorious past, while the particular park in question, the Parque Pinzón, has notable symbolism, taking its name from General Próspero Pinzón Romero (1856–1901), a Conservative general who fought in the War of a Thousand Days (17 October 1899–21 November 1902). Pinzón led 16,000 government troops in the brutal battle of Palonegro, widely recognised as one of the battles with the highest death toll of the war (Meisel Roca and Romero Prieto, 2017: 6), and seen as a decisive Conservative victory (Bushnell, 1993: 150). Pinzón thus has symbolic resonance as one of the nation’s heroes, and as embodying Conservative values – values often associated with the department of Boyacá itself.

If such is the significance of the military leader who gives the park its name, the construction of the park itself was also closely linked to national discourses of military heroism. The mandate to create a park in Pinzón’s honour was passed in 1903, with construction of the park starting later that decade, and continuing into the 1910s – this being a period of urban modernisation in Colombia (and indeed across Latin America) which involved the reconfiguration of public spaces, within which the construction of urban parks played a key role, having civic and didactic functions.⁸ As Velásquez (2017: 153) notes, in Colombia during this period,

local elites and governmental institutions envisioned the park as a natural shelter within the city, with benefits that could have a double positive impact: keeping the citizens–especially the youngest ones–far from corruption and immorality, and offering local residents the proper leisure for them to increase their productivity when they returned to their daily labour.

Influenced by theories of social hygiene, and promoting new models of socialisation, the urban park thus formed part of a national civilising project that symbolised the new social order of the nation.

More specifically in the context of this particular park, the Parque Pinzón was constructed during the run-up to the centenary celebrations of Colombia’s independence, and partially finished during these celebrations. These centenary celebrations were, in the words of Romero (2019: n.p.) ‘a fundamental tool to promote, from a symbolic perspective, the integration of the recently dismembered Colombian state’, with the creation of the National Centenary Commission to oversee these celebrations constituting an ‘attempt to construct the foundations of a national memory for Colombians’. Regarding the city of Tunja in particular, the centenary celebrations were restricted not just to 1 year, but covered the entire decade from 1910 to 1920, and became an opportunity to ‘promote the values of the positivist, academic, social and patriotic history that was consolidated in the first decade of the twentieth century’ (Martínez Martín and Otálora Cascante, 2012: 117–118). The Parque Pinzón, thus, was created as part of a broader national-patriotic project, promoted by the nation-state and endorsed by the political elites of the city, in order to generate national pride, produce ideal citizens, and celebrate national and regional heroes.

As with the naming of the park itself, so, too, similarly, the monuments within the park are of significant figures in Colombia’s history. These comprise a bust of Pinzón himself and a monument in honour of Antonio Nariño (1765–1824). Created some decades later than the opening of the park itself, both pieces were made by local sculptor Eduardo Malagón Bravo, who, since the 1980s, has been honorary cultural advisor to the First Brigade of the Bolívar Batallion, based in Tunja (Rueda, 2016: 96), and is thus closely associated with the celebration of national-heroic values. Nariño is of even greater stature than Pinzón, and is revered as one of the (proto) fathers of the nation and ideological precursor to Colombia’s independence, particularly due to his translation of The Rights of Man and Citizen from French into Spanish in 1793, and his subsequent advocacy for complete independence from Spain. The revering of Nariño and the elevation of him as a patriotic figure is, moreover, closely linked to the centenary, with Nariño becoming particularly esteemed in this climate of nationalist sentiment (Vanegas and Carrillo, 2016: 2) and lauded as an incomparable hero of the nation (Bermúdez, 2009: 35). This consecration of Nariño as the forefather of the Colombian nation includes statues and monuments erected in his honour, with the most prominent being those erected jointly in Bogotá and Pasto in 1910 as part of a symbolic celebration of the centenary (Vanegas Carrasco, 2017: 10). The monument in honour of Nariño that is located within the Parque Pinzón in Tunja, while on a much smaller scale than the statues of Bogotá and Pasto, and being created several decades later, nevertheless continues in this notable trend of revering Nariño as a precursor or father of the nation.

Hence, along with the bust of Pinzón, the monument to Nariño again reinforces the Parque Pinzón as a space which showcases official, state-sponsored monumental portrayals that honour dead leaders, as part of an exaltation of the hombres de la patria – notably, of course, a gendered term. The official monumental space of this urban park thus exemplifies what Huyssen (2003: 41) has observed regarding monuments, in that they attempt to create a ‘deep national past’, and constitutes a top-down vision of the nation, as envisaged by the elites who conceived of and sponsored its creation, and who formulated the space of the urban park as one of containment, of the imposition of civic values, and of the celebration of national heroes. That Zoscua choose to locate their grassroots, bottom-up memory wall within this location constitutes, I argue, a tactical take-over of this mnemonic space, to commemorate the lives of everyday victims of the armed conflict, bringing vernacular expressions of memory official monumental space, and so counter the official, monumental narrative that is conventionally portrayed by this locale.⁹

In this way, Zoscua’s intervention interrupts the spatial continuity of the Parque Pinzón and, in so doing, also disrupts its chronology. If Huyssen (2003: 41) has argued in relation to the traditional monument that it ‘guarantee[s] origin and stability as well as depth of time and space’, then the spatiality of the monumental urban park attempts to ensure a particular temporality. Indeed, this can be witnessed in the mnemonic landscape of the Parque Pinzón, which reveres the heroes of the nation in a chronological chain, with the forefather Nariño inevitably leading to Pinzón. Similar to Jens Andermann’s (2012: 172) observations of how monuments in the Southern Cone that interrupt spatial continuity also point to the impossibility of a reconciled temporality, Zoscua’s memory wall, interrupting the spatial continuity of the Parque Pinzón, also disrupts the established temporality that this park stands for, inserting the voices and imagery of grassroots, everyday victims into this landscape.

In this way, I argue, the location of the memory wall within the Parque Pinzón troubles the discourses of national heroism that are embodied in the figures of Pinzón and Nariño, and portrayed in the park as a whole – and, in so doing, implicitly disrupts the linear temporality of park. For the model of heroic, bellicose masculinity, portrayed by Pinzón as leader of the armed forces, and by Nariño as a heroic figure resisting Spanish rule, is, of course, the model that still underpins Colombia’s armed conflict today.¹⁰ The model of bellicose victory in the name of the nation that is embodied in Pinzon is thus undercut by the fact that Zoscua’s memory wall conveys the ongoing death toll of an armed conflict that is very much still present, and that it pays homage to victims of bellicose masculinity in a space originally envisaged as honouring this same trait.

Artistic content of the memory wall: indexicality, embodied practice and intimacy

If such is the importance of the tactical process of the creation of the wall and its location, in terms of its contents, the wall depicts victims primarily through two means: photographic and artistic portrayals. First, the side of the wall facing inwards towards the Parque Pinzón, and away from the traffic, contains 9 rows of images, comprising 119 images in total at the time of writing – with the lowest row containing blank spaces for future images.¹¹ The wall is thus an ongoing memorial, which conceives of space for new victims in its design – an example of a memorial which, to borrow the words of Cara Levey (2012: 205), ‘cast[s] doubt on the notions that memorials mark closure with the past’. In the case of Zoscua, the memory wall deliberately does not give closure to the past, but remains open-ended, indicating that the memory work that Zoscua undertakes is ongoing, and that closure is not (yet) possible.

The images employed by Zoscua are reproductions of photographs, each showing the faces of one of the victims of the armed conflict in Boyacá, and taking the format of the classic identity photograph, with the individual captured in head and shoulders shot, and, in the majority of cases, staring straight into the camera. A legend below each photograph displays the full name, a date, and the victimising fact for each victim. The photographs are rendered in grey on transparent acrylic material, such that we both see the photographic image itself, and the contours of the wall behind it.¹²

The similarities with other activist groups who have used the identity photograph as a memory prop are immediately recognisable and thus recall, in a movement of mnemonic solidarity, the work of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. For the Madres the identity photograph functioned, in the words of Moira O’Keeffe (2009: 528), as a ‘prop of witnessing and of protest’, with the choice of this specific photographic format – instead of, say, a holiday snap – lying in ‘the worth of the photograph as evidence of a life’, since it enabled the mothers to provide proof of the existence of the individual, in the face of the regime’s denial. Zoscua’s tactic here is, I argue, an instance of what Lim and Rosenhaft (2021) have termed ‘mnemonic solidarity’ (p. 6), referring to the ways in which ‘identificatory narratives about the past generated in one place or by one mnemonic community – can be and have been appropriated by cultural and political actors outside that community’, in a form of ‘productive interchange between communities of memory’. By appropriating this immediately recognisable head-and-shoulders identity short format, Zoscua implicitly establish a link of mnemonic solidarity with the Madres, making their (Zoscua’s) intervention globally readable.

Moreover, the identity photograph also has important resonances of the bodily, given its indexicality, since the photograph is created by the actual presence of the physical body whose light rays touch the film negative and then generate chemical changes. The photograph is, thus, in the words of Barthes (1981: 80), ‘literally an emanation of the referent’ since it is made ‘from a real body, which was there’. This paradigm is particularly poignant since it entails what Seppänen (2017: 122 and 123; my emphasis) has called the ‘the bodily and emotional aspects of the trace’, with this ‘material trace provid[ing] an anchoring point for the photograph’s bodily and material significance for the observer’. The indexicality of the photographic identity shot thus carries with it material traces of the body and an appeal to the emotions – features that, as we shall see below, come to the fore in other aspects of this memory wall.

Above these photographs and serving as their framing device lies a large white plaque with black lettering, reading: La muerte de cualquier hombre me disminuye porque estoy ligado a la humanidad; por consiguiente nunca preguntes por quién doblan las campanas: doblan por ti. A quotation from the work of English metaphysical poet, John Donne (108–109), these lines appear in his prose work Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, written after a major illness in late 1623, and are taken from the XVII Meditation:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Appearing in a Devotion in which the poet imagines his own death as he hears funeral bells being rung for another individual, these lines are taken up by Zoscua and reinvested with new significance, with the tolling bells now referring to the remembrance of victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. Moreover, Zoscua also builds on the metapoetical qualities of Donne’s words; as scholars of Donne have noted, the bells ‘operate as a metaphor for the Devotions, which conveys Donne’s ordeal – and therefore the message of mortality – to the reader as much as the bells convey the ordeal of the neighbor to Donne’ (Reeder, 2016: 99). The metapoetic qualities of the bells – an emblem for the endeavour of the Devotions – now become a metapoetic comment on the memory wall itself: if Donne’s bells were an image of his writing and his creative craft itself, now, for Zoscua, the bells become a statement on their own practices as memory agents, and on the role of the wall as speaking the voice of these victims.

Again, as with the identity photograph, the use of these lines also serves as another moment of mnemonic solidarity, as Zoscua mobilises what are highly recognisable lines that bring with them existing transnational resonances of memories of conflict. Famously re-used by Ernest Hemmingway for the title of his 1940 novel about a US volunteer fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and subsequently adapted into a film with the same name in 1943 starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, the phrase ‘for whom the bell tolls’ is immediately recognisable, and makes reference to a prior armed conflict located elsewhere in the globe. This resolutely local monument to the memories of victims of this individual department in Colombia thus mobilises two already immediately recognisable mnemonic props or tropes – the identity photograph popularised by the Madres, and the quote from Donne which has come to stand for the toll of the Spanish Civil War – as transnational mnemonic hooks to convey their message.

If such is the side of the wall facing inwards towards the park, the side of the wall facing the traffic contains thirty hand-crafted, artistic pieces created out of baked modelling clay and affixed to the wall, with differing themes. Some depict the natural world (an insect; a bull; a starfish; a turtle; an ammonite fossil), some are man-made (a motorbike; a car; two images of a football), and still others depict the human form (a woman and a man dancing; two images of a human mouth; an image of a human hand) (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Monument for Memory, Dignity, and Life, Tunja, Colombia.

These artistic pieces in clay were created in a collective process, in which 40 family members of victims were invited to participate in an event held within the grounds of the Fundación Pedagógica Rayuela in Tunja, for which Zoscua provided the clay, and also secured the voluntary work of a local art teacher, who taught the families how to work clay. Participating in the same space and sharing materials, the families created a clay piece or pieces that portrayed their victim, which were subsequently fired in a local brickworks who lent the use of the oven, and then painted. Again, this practice – securing voluntary work, the free use of a firing oven – is an example of the temporary bringing together of resources and expertise that characterises grassroots memory actors.¹³

Each of the resulting artworks are thus related to the memory of the victims who are shown on the other side of the wall in photographic form. For example, one clay piece, made by Respondent B, the aunt of a woman victim, depicts a female figure dancing one of the traditional dances of Colombia. The aunt chose to portray her niece in this way to convey her love of dancing, and links this to her niece’s passion for social justice: ‘she was someone who danced, who did societal work despite her age. She liked to bring joy to people who needed it’.

Another piece depicts a taxi, and was created, along with a piece depicting a tortoise, by the widow of a male victim, and other family members. The family members explain that ‘we made a piece that symbolized the taxi that my dad drove for many years [. . .] and a tortoise that he had as a pet’ (Respondents C). The first of these pieces ‘represented his passion for his daily work which was driving’, while the latter ‘represented the love that he had for animals’. Elaborating on this, the creators of these two pieces explain that ‘these were objects and beings that he loved, and that made him feel happy. They are important for us because they remind us of the little things that made him feel happy, his love for animals’.

A further set of clay pieces comprises a boot, a cooking pot used to ferment chicha (a traditional, home-made Colombian drink), and a cross. These three pieces were created by Respondents A, the mother and sister of a young male victim, and aimed to capture key symbols of his life: the boot conveys the fact that he had a limp, but that this ‘didn’t prevent him from getting on in life, fulfilling his dreams, playing sports’; the chicha cooking pot stands for his mother’s homemade chicha which he would sell in the university where he studied to help finance his studies; and the cross illustrates the family’s hope that he is resting in peace. As the mother and sister explain, ‘we wanted to convey the most representative memories of him’.

Several key elements come to the fore in these interviews and their corresponding images. First, the extracts cited here, and others like, them emphasise the homespun and the everyday. The images selected – a rustic cooking pot used to ferment a home-brewed drink, an orthopaedic boot worn to correct a limp – are not exalted images of high status, but every-day, homely items. The images convey the private face of the individual, making references to pets, to home cooking, to dancing, and so emphasising the intimate. Second, where professions are depicted, these are not the grandiose occupations of the monumental heroes of the Parque Pinzón, but low-key, unsung professions of a precarious nature, such as that of taxi driver, or seller of home-brewed local drink.

Third, there is an emphasis on intimacy and emotions: in these extracts, and throughout all the interviews, there is a high incidence of emotive words used by the interviewees to describe the pieces themselves, their process of elaboration, and the resulting memory wall. As can be seen in the extracts already cited above, lexicon relating to the emotions, such as ‘love’, ‘happy’, ‘passion’, and ‘joy’ recur when the respondents talk about the pieces they created, and how they relate to the person depicted. This is, similarly, reflected in their comments about the process itself of making the pieces. For example, Respondent A, when asked to describe this process, says: ‘it was a lovely process, it made us think about the things that most represented our loved ones, about the feelings we wanted to portray in it, so that it would last a long time, so that the people who saw it would remember our relatives’, and then later going on to say that ‘I think all the pieces involved putting some of our feelings into their making, letting the emotions that we felt as we remembered our loved ones emerge, thinking about what thing would be the right one to portray because we knew it would stay there for a long time, so it’s very emotional thinking about it, visiting it, seeing it; despite the fact that it is sad, knowing that their memory stays alive is a very beautiful feeling’.

Similarly, Respondent C when describing the experience of creating the piece says: ‘it was very pleasant, when creating that figure I felt them closer to me, I felt that affection and the warmth of an embrace. I gave a lot of myself and my affection in that piece’. Respondent D, also talking about the process of creating the pieces, says that ‘a sort of family was created, one big family, where many victims came together [. . .] And people started to tell their stories, they laughed. That is, it was an enjoyable day’. What can be seen in these extracts is how the process of creation involved an emotive connection both with the other participants in the workshop, and with those depicted in the resultant artworks. In this way, the images and the practices by which the family members created them demonstrate how these artefacts on the memory wall aim not to exalt monumental heroes of the patria, but create an intimate, emotive connection with everyday individuals.

From the analysis of both the practices of creation and the pieces themselves, it therefore becomes clear that this memory wall implicitly resists the dominant discouse of the park in which it is located. As discussed above, the official iconography located within the park – the bust of Pinzón and the monument to Nariño – were created by a recognised professional sculptor, who, moreover, is closely linked with official discourses of patriotic, bellicose nationhood, in his role as honorary cultural advisor to the First Brigade of the Bolívar Batallion in Tunja. That the creation of the Zoscua’s memory wall, by contrast, is artisanal, and that instead of bronze casts, it displays hand-made clay pieces, contests the official, state-endorsed mnemonic landscape of the urban park. This contestation is visible in the very materiality of the monument itself, since the memory wall of Zoscua, and the artworks within it, are evidently the result of working with hands, with thumbprints and rough edges clearly visible on the resultant artworks on display. Through their unmistakable handcrafted status, their collective creation, and their focus on intimacy and emotions, these pieces claim their status as artisanal, as handicraft, and thus resist the high-art model that characterises sculpture as monumental creation. In contrast to Malagón’s monuments, which subscribe to the single, auteurist model of high-art, artistic creation – a model which, if we follow the arguments of Peter Bürger’s (1984: 40) still influential Theory of the Avant-Garde, rests on the cult of genius and is a fundamental strategy in the detachment of art from the praxis of life, deliberately ‘obscur[ing] the historical conditions of this process’ – Zoscua’s creative practice is collective, and does not bear the aesthetic authority of a single, masterpiece creator. Instead, Zoscua’s memory wall foregrounds the material conditions in which it was made, and deliberately brings to the fore the bodily presence of its creators. Thus, within the content of the images as much as in the practices themselves, which leave physical traces of the participants’ bodies in the form of fingerprints and other markings, Zoscua’s memory wall contests the accepted mnemonic regime of the Parque Pinzón.

These very visible traces of the human bodies that touched the clay and created the artworks thus function, I would argue, in a similar way to what scholars have observed in the practices of other non-official, counter-monuments and mnemonic practices in Colombia by grassroots organisations. Mathilda Eliza Shepard (2019: 77), for instance, discussing the mnemonic practices of the Tejedoras de Mampuján, argues for an understanding of tapestry as a ‘means of communication that challenges the static contours of official memory which are present in the feeling of closure created by [. . .] the monolithic figure of the monument’. Instead, Shepard argues, the creation of tapestry by the Tejedoras de Mampuján is not a static monument, but a ‘living monument’ in which ‘the weavings are linked to the repertory of corporeal memory’. Similarly, Chris Courtheyn’s (2016: 937) analysis of the commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names undertaken by the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó demonstrates that these initiatives constitute ‘embodied-material memory practices’, while Riaño-Alcalá (2015: 284) has developed the notion of ‘emplaced practices of witnessing’, to refer to the annual ceremony undertaken by the Wayuu community to commemorate the 2004 massacre of Bahía Portete. This dynamic – of the emphasis on the bodily nature of mnemonic practices from below – can, similarly, be seen in Zoscua’s practice in this memory wall.

In Zoscua’s memory wall, the thumbprints and handprints in the clay thus retain the traces of the embodied practice of the wall’s construction. In this way they function as a complement to the indexicality of the photograph on the reverse side of the wall: where the reverse of the wall, through the indexicality of the identity photographs, references the bodily traces of the victim, this side of the wall bears the bodily traces of the victim’s family. In so doing, Zoscua’s memory wall attempts to reverse what James Young (2013: 14; my emphasis) has observed regarding memorials, when he noted that ‘as an inert piece of stone, the monument keeps its own past a tightly held secret [. . .] monuments seem to remember everything but their own past, their own creation’, and thus argued that it is necessary ‘to make visible the activity of memory’ in monuments. In Zoscua’s case, the memory wall monument itself does indeed foreground the practices of its own creation via the thumbprints and rough edges, with the activity of memory itself as an embodied practice – the marks and traces of its making – visibilised on this wall. In so doing, the memory wall of Zoscua implicitly resists the dominant state narrative of this urban park, bringing to the fore its embodied practices of creation.

Alongside these handcrafted artworks, towards the lower right of the wall can be seen four transparent plaques displaying the sponsors of the wall – Zoscua, the TEB, the Alcaldía de Tunja, and the Gobernación de Boyacá – visualising the dynamic between the various actors in this mnemonic landscape. Those of the Alcaldía de Tunja and the Gobernación de Boyacá are two of the most prominent authorities with which local residents deal in their daily lives, and are represented on the wall by their official logos, complete with their coat of arms, with the former dating from the colonial period in which the title of city was given to Tunja by Charles the Fifth of Spain in 1541, and the latter of more recent design, created in 1986, showing the highlights of the region of Boyacá, including the Puente de Boyacá at which one of the key battles of independence was fought.¹⁴

In the case of Zoscua, rather than a formal, established coat of arms, the logo is of more recent creation and comprises a block line drawing, with little detail or flourishes (Figure 2). Although there are no markings on the image, it is immediately recognisable as the broad outline of the department of Boyacá, the department which Zoscua represents, with the map traversed from bottom-left to top-right with a gash, taking the shape of a sword or machete cutting across the map, symbolising the armed conflict.

Figure 2.

Zoscua logo on the Monument for Memory, Dignity, and Life, Tunja, Colombia.

The word Zoscua appears above the image, with below it their slogan, Desalambrando fronteras. A relatively uncommon verb in Spanish, the compound word desalambrar combines the prefix des- (equivalent to the English suffix ‘un-’ or ‘dis-’), with the noun alambre, meaning (barbed) wire, thus literally meaning ‘to remove the barbed wire from’. The slogan as a whole therefore means ‘to remove barbed wire from borders’, and, with the barbed wire standing as a synecdoche for conflict, is an image of undoing conflict.

Notably, the term desalambrar also has specific resonances of social justice and (leftist-inspired) resistance, given its use in the title of an iconic song, ‘A desalambrar’, first composed by Uruguayan singer-songwriter Daniel Vigliette, and popularised by Chilean Víctor Jara in the 1970s,¹⁵ one of the leading figures of the nueva canción chilena, a musical style and movement whose proponents supported Salvador Allende’s election campaign and subsequent presidency.¹⁶ Recognised as one of Jara’s songs advocating agrarian reform (García, 2019: 90), the lyrics of ‘A desalambrar’ denounce inequality between landowners and peasant workers, with the image of ‘desalambrar’ itself urging the tearing down of the barbed wire that marks out the land belonging to the wealthy. This term, therefore, has connotations of militancy and of taking action against social injustice, and constitutes another example of Zoscua’s tactic of mnemonic solidarity, as they build on the transnational resonances of this phrase as a call to arms, reworked for their own context.

Conclusion

The analysis above has aimed to reveal how this mnemonic intervention by Zoscua can be understood as a form of memory practice ‘from below’, involving tactical negotiations and contemporary alliances by grassroots organisations to create possible avenues for collaboration, infiltrate officially sponsored events (such as the Theatre Festival), and partially take over public space to achieve their aims. Through negotiation with state or sub-state authorities, Zoscua managed to further their aims, revealing how bottom-up strategies undertaken by community groups and top-down initiatives promoted by authorities can coalesce, evidenced both in the practices and negotiations involved in creating grassroots memorials, and in the resulting materiality of the memorial wall under discussion.

Second, the article has also demonstrated how smaller actors in the mnemonic space can mobilise mnemonic solidarity to gain visibility: using the oft-cited phrase from Donne, the identity photograph format, and the Jara song reference, Zoscua anchors their resolutely local work in wider transnational frameworks of memory and protest. Third, the article reveals how such counter-memorial memory work is open-ended, offering space for new photographs, and, in so doing, refusing closure with the past which is often the premise for official monuments; indeed, given the context, Zoscua’s memory wall is not about the passing of time, but is about memory work in the context of an ongoing conflict. Fourth and finally, the article has demonstrated how Zoscua’s practice constitutes a memorialisation of the everyday, resisting the monumental, official discourse of the urban park to present instead a collaborative, intimate, handcrafted portrayal of everyday victims.

Through these multiple techniques, tactics and negotiations, Zoscua attempts a tactical take-over of the monumental space of the urban park, with grassroots memory being inserted into what is conventionally a top-down space conveying official, state-sponsored national values. Zoscua’s memory wall, thus, constitutes an example of how community groups engage in memory-making from below, and how these practices may generate alternative projects that counter official monumental narratives – a narrative that in this case is overtly that of the past (Nariño, Pinzón, the centenary of the early twentieth century), but which implicitly critiques this same model of bellicose nationhood in the present.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was undertaken as part of an AHRC-funded project on Memory, Victims and Representation of the Colombian Conflict, AHRC grant ref AH/R012873/1.

ORCID iD

Claire Taylor

Notes

Author biography

Claire Taylor is Gilmour Chair of Spanish and Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is a specialist in Latin American culture, with a particular interest in two main areas: literary and cultural genres being developed online by Latin(o) Americans and memory studies, memory practices and transitional justice contexts in Latin America, especially Colombia. She is PI on an AHRC-funded project focusing on memory, victims and representation of the Colombian conflict, as well as two follow-on funding projects on archives of human rights, and the development of community museums and processes of co-curation.

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