Remembering Place: Memory and Violence in Medellin, Colombia

Abstract

This article examines the connections between people, memories and violence through an ethnographic account of the ways places are rendered meaningful in Medellin, Colombia. In this city, daily life has been profoundly affected by a multilayered violent conflict where multiple armed actors, scenarios and forms of violence interplay. The article describes practices of place‐making such as landmarking, place‐naming, soundscaping, and imagining that invest places with significance and maintain a local implicit knowledge that allows circulation and survival in the city. Through these practices of place‐making, memory has become a bridging practice that restores a sense of place to the experience of displacement that violence inflicts in peoples lives. These processes, however, are at risk of becoming emptied of meaning by the power of widespread violences to suppress and fragment and by the ways terror and fear are remaking, the social landscape.

Deploying Youth: Colombian Peacebuilding in Performance

“…Thousands of poor youth were recruited by illegal armed groups as child soldiers, sicarios , and informants. They were lured by the possibilities of wealth and social status (Downing ; Riaño‐Alcalá ), and affirmed the association of young men with violence in the national imaginary (Riaño‐Alcalá ). Meanwhile, guerilla and paramilitary groups inflicted unique gender‐based violence on women and girls, committing rape and sexual assault as a tactic of warfare and intimidation.…”

“…Marginalized urban youth in the mid‐late–twentieth century used punk and heavy metal to critique political and drug violence, the influence of the Church, and traditional, conservative values (Hortua ). By the 1990s, punk subculture became embroiled in drug trafficking, with many adherents recruited to work as sicarios (Hortua ; Riaño‐Alcalá ). Media representations, including the film Rodrigo D: No Futuro , helped to cement associations between punks and metal heads with criminal violence (Hortua ).…”

“…Nevertheless, not all fans of these genres turned to work as hired assassins (Hortua ). Riaño‐Alcalá states that “throughout the 1990s, rock, rap, punk, and hip‐hop brought together very important cultural movements and musical propositions” (:160).…”

“…In addition to liberal peace initiatives directed by the state and free market (Neufeldt ), which focus on governance, international law, and security (Richmond ), peacebuilding involves a constellation of activities that aim to repair devastated communities while interrogating the roots and impacts of violence (Neufeldt ) . Although the place of youth in peacebuilding has long been overlooked in academic literature, there has been a growing body of work in recent years that examines the roles young people play in constructing sustainable peace (Berents ; Borer, Darby, and McEvoy‐Levy ; Hayes‐Conroy and Montoya ; McEvoy‐Levy ; Pruitt ; Riaño‐Alcalá ). This article bridges conversations on performance, institutions, and peacebuilding to shed light on how NGO practices position urban youth as central to postaccord Colombia.…”

Where the Air Feels Heavy: Boredom and the Textures of the Aftermath

“…However, the way everyday life accumulates the residues of terror is a dense and textured experience of complex associations, of subtle and banal forms of engagement and dealings with the marks and traces of harsh events (Riaño‐Alcalá ). These aspects of the ordinary suggest that making the event of terror part of the workings of the everyday, that is, making something from the extraordinary into the ordinary—rather than understanding agency as the possibility to escape it—is what creates the space for the recovery of life (Das ).…”