Embodied Performance Practices in Processes of Reconciliation, Construction of Memory and Peace in Choco and Medio Pacifico, Colombia

Lead Research Organisation: Royal Holloway University of London
Department Name: Drama, Theatre and Dance

Abstract

This project examines the role that embodied performance practices have on post conflict memories in order to aid the processes of reconciliation and peace-building among the majority Afro-Colombian communities affected by the armed conflict in four municipalities in Chocó and el Pacifico Medio. Its main objective is to co-create a digital archive with the vulnerable communities most affected by the armed conflict that features a collection of their oral testimonies, memorabilia, video footage of workshops and discussions, and embodied performance work.
This project asks the following research questions:
1. What is the impact of embodied artistic practices in the discourses of post-war reconciliation in Colombian context?
2. How do the communities and the performance artists co-create memories together through embodied practices?
3. What role do these practices have for the vulnerable communities affected by the armed conflict?
4. How will these archived practices intervene in established discourses around memory, trauma, and practices of reconciliation?
This investigation into the embodied practices led by Colombian arts and performance makers in these four municipalities considers the impact that hearing and learning about one another's memories and experiences via the digital archives will have. It seeks to facilitate a space for critical reflection and reconciliation among the marginalized vulnerable stakeholders while also proposing innovative collaborative models for community building and of co-creating an archive with vulnerable stakeholders. This can enrich the field of dance, theatre and performance studies by showcasing embodied work done by communities normally kept out of official disciplinary and archival frameworks.
By working with our key project partner, Corp-Oraloteca (a research, documentation and dissemination center of the Technological University of Chocó, which seeks to identify, make visible, valorize, and safeguard the oral, sonic and embodied expressions and knowledges of the peoples of the Colombian Pacific), as well as other artists, teachers, community arts workers, dancers, and members of these affected communities, this project will create digital archives about the embodied practices, the arts workers, and the communities affected by the armed conflict. It will then disseminate these archives through a variety of events: community events in the affected areas in Colombia, an event at the headquarters of Corp-Oraloteca in Quibdó, workshops at Universidad de Antioquia, and university talks and lectures in both Colombia, UK and the US. The goal of this research project is to generate spaces (virtual and actual) so that the communities affected by the conflict can use their shared experiences in order to help develop their own community awareness projects, and generate interest in and pursuit of embodied methodologies that can help with the complex processes of reconciliation, reparations, and the construction of peace.
Memory functions as a mobilizing factor for experiences, sensibilities, cultural expression, and everyday practices within these communities. In other words, how did citizens not only experience the armed conflict, but how do they remember and memorialize it now? Additionally, to recuperate or reconstruct postwar memories implies the evocation, creation and materialisation of ideas that these communities have about what their culture is and what is important to remember. By working alongside artists already engaged in embodied practices in/with the affected communities, this research project facilitates a way for members of the affected communities to make sense of their present historical moment through embodied engagements with their respective memories. Through the digital archive and community events produced through this project, we anticipate the creation of spaces for dialogic and embodied exchanges in pursuit of peace and reconciliation.

Planned Impact

This research's ultimate goal is impact: social, economic, and intellectual. It has great potential to influence a variety of beneficiaries and most, importantly, the vulnerable stake-holding communities in the four municipalities where the research will take place. It will benefit new partnerships between the arts community makers and teachers and UK and Colombian universities, and between the scholars at the respective institutions. These partnerships will enable academics, arts practitioners and community members to learn from one another, thereby enhancing their practices. We have divided the impact into the three groups who will benefit from this research:

1. Community participants in the four municipalities of Ungia, Bojayá, Guapi, and Buenaventura;
2. Arts educators, community organisations and community organizers including but not limited to Corp-Oraloteca and the four municipalities;
3. Post-conflict communities within and outside of Colombia

Upon completion of the funded research, several outputs will be legacy projects: the archive, the embodied work and practices. The main one, the digital archive, will be available for consultation and viewing by other Colombian communities, teachers, and universities and will also be accessible outside of the country for comparative analysis in countries with similar post-conflict memory, peace and reconciliation concerns. It can be consulted by policy makers in order to learn how communities engage in activities through their bodies to re-engage as citizens and communities. The digital archive will be maintained by the PIs and RA in association with experienced technical staff in the respective PIs departments at Universidad de Antioquia and Royal Holloway. It will also receive further exposure through links on Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies' e-journal site, already maintained and supported by the Dance Studies Association, and Corp-Oraloteca's website, already maintained and supported by Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó. The digital archive will offer significant insight into how Colombian communities struggling with post-conflict memories and experiences engage in embodied artistic practices after conflict. Furthermore, the strategies demonstrated in the embodied practice work can be implemented in classrooms, homes and even community centers around the municipalities, other cities and within the country allowing a sharing of effective practices for reconciliation work.

It is fundamental to understand that the processes through which society registers in bodies and these in turn produce meanings are highly contentious and conflicting. In this sense, in contexts of violent conflicts, such as those experienced by the communities participating in this research, it is imperative to understand how these conflicts have affected everyday relationships, experience, ways of making sense of the world, and how they are embodied. It is also in this sense that embodied performance practices have the potential to propose alternative forms of expression, to re-imagine themselves, to tell stories, to leave evidence, to relate and to create possibilities of being-in-the-world where life prevails over death, and reconciliation over violent conflict.

While we are not keen to concretize one particular method or methods on how to do embodied arts practices for civic memory, peace and reconciliation work, we do want to offer our archive, interviews, and strategies for dialogue and negotiation, as possible ways to expand upon by other community artists, organisers, methodologies and pedagogies in the pursuit of embodied arts practices within vulnerable post-conflict communities in Colombia (and internationally). It is anticipated that our outputs will inspire a group of people who will then generate or manage a process or output themselves.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Description As of March 2021 our project is dealing with delays of outputs due to COVID-19. We should have had the archive/website done by October 2020 and made public by December 202), but we are still finalizing due to delays with the UdeA team. Postdoctoral Researcher position had to be extended through the end of October 2020 but that did not produce any relevant speed in terms of deliverables. She was subsequently hired by the UdeA team but her contract ended 1 March. The website is almost complete for transference to the domain and we are hosting a digital premiere event with Sentarte, an indigenous filmmaking collective, on 20 March 2021. There will be two subsequent events focusing on fieldwork and territories, and digital performance workshops in early May coordinated by the UdeA team. The content of the website is slowly being built and added. What we must discuss before the end of the UdeA grant (June 2021) is whether the archive will remain closed/finished or we will grant access to communities to continue to use and populate it with content.

Our fieldwork was impacted by COVID. We had to cancel our second field trips (Buenaventura was underway in March 2020 but was cancelled, Unguia was cancelled) so we only had material from Bojaya and Guapi for the archive. The material from Buenaventura was slowly gathered virtually from August until about December 2020. Unguia material was gathered virtually or via independent research done by Isabel Restrepo (UdeA Main Research Assistant) and Colombian Co-I Marta Dominguez. In Bojaya, the UdeA research team was able to receive personal archival material from the Diocese that attested to the genealogy of theatre practices in the territories which were then studied and analysed in order to then appear in the Corpografias site.

We cancelled our June 2020 UK conference and re-conceptualized it as a three week, 2x a week virtual event that took place over the span of three weeks in October 2020. We featured pre-recorded videos, YouTube presence and designed a WordPress website for the event that we have subsequently paid our web designers of Corpografias to turn into a more professional looking and longer use site under new name: www.perbodigital.com [launch forthcoming]. This conference had a wide international audience:

181 RSVPs to the conference represented 31 countries.
The conference website had 556 visits representing 42 countries.
The conference's YouTube channel had 196.8 hours watched with 17% of viewers in Colombia and 10% of viewers in the UK.

Because we no longer had access to travel funds or the ability to travel, we decided to re-allocate these funds to help the communities we were working with and help assuage the financial burden of the pandemic given their reliance on the informal economy. RHUL team provided opportunity and funding for an original animated film short, Mugan Boe, to be produced by indigenous feminist filmmaker, Olowaili Green, for inclusion in Corpografias. This was delivered in November 2020. We also provided funding to Sentarte, an indigenous collective, to help with planning and producing final Corpografias launch events to premiere the short, Mugan Boe, virtually and host one other virtual event to introduce multiple publics to Corpografias. These events will take place March 20, 2021 and April 30, 2021 respectively. We are currently planning these.

All of the in-person workshops planned for April 2020 and August 2020 had to be cancelled and reconceptualized virtually. Up until March 2021, one digital workshop has occurred and produced material that has not yet been vetted by the UdeA team for Corpografias. There is another event forthcoming in April or May 2021 by the UdeA team and Project Partner La Corporaloteca that will produced material for Corpografias focused on embodied acts of collaboration and memory construction, peace and reconciliation. This may be included in Corpografias if ready by June 2021 the anticipated end date of the UdeA/Colciencias grant.

The Colombian team has been working on populating the archive with the plethora of research material we have and has produced a good quantity of information boxes (cajas) with images, audiovisual material and personal archival material. Corpografias also features four "Storytellings" that have sound, GIFs, photos and archival material alongside a narrative about each specific region that was part of our research project: Bojaya, Buenaventura, Unguia and Guapi. These have been translated to English (with leftover monies from RHUL) and will also have a space on the website in order to increase the viewership/readership.

***

As of March 2019, we have completed two field trips. The first one was in November 2018 to Quibdo, Choco where our project partner invited us to some performance events at the Universidad Claretiana. We also had meetings with a variety of community organizations, leaders, and artists based out of Quido, and academics and historians affiliated with the Centro Nacional de Memoria Historica in Bogota, the Universidad Javeriana, and other Colciencias-Newton Fund awarded recipients at Universidad de Antioquia. We also met with the performance specialist at the Ministry of Culture in Bogota. In February 2019, we continued our administrative work with the primary job being the organisation of future field trips to Guapi and Ungia. We met with the BA and MA students in Colombia who are assisting with the project. Lastly, and significantly, we went to Buenaventura, one of the four targeted cities of our grant, and met with community organizations like FUNDESCODES, Escuela Poeta de la Gloria, and Corporacion Centro del Pastoral Afrocolombiana. Currently, UK PI Blanco is shortlisting the PDRA applicants for upcoming interviews. We are looking to hire the PDRA for a September 2019 start. Additionally, the Colombian and UK team are working on the planning, organisation and execution of our April workshop. UK Co-I Dr Lease will be traveling with UK PI Blanco to participate and attend.
[further detailed explanation of the grant from April 2019 - March 2020 appears elsewhere]

The main finding is that conflict still persists in the 4 municipalities analysed and the promises of the peace processes seem to be distant. Armed groups are still present in the territories and the absence of the Colombian government is evident. A significant number of community leaders and former FARC guerilla fighters have been killed, complicating even more the implementation of the peace agreement. The current government has changed their approach towards the implementation of the agreements signed in 2016, implementing also radical changes in the institutions responsible for the implementation of the process. The most significant one is the National Memory Centre (CNMH) and the Museum of Memory that are to some extent overshadowing the memory of the communities to pay attention towards the national army and the cattle landowners affected by the conflict.
Communities are thus demanding the need to denounce conflict, to claim attention from the government and international bodies towards the situation of violence they are living and more importantly to prevent the repetition of massacres and violent episodes in their territories. Artistic processes are highly committed with the new situation, using their platforms to denounce conflict and finding solutions.
Up to this point, we have observed four main roles that embodied performance practices are playing in processes of memory and reconciliation:
1. An alternative and safe scenario to express themselves and to denounce conflict
2. A place to come together as an artistic group and as a community
3. Re-signification of rituals and traditions
4. To keep alive their worldviews and customs highly threatened by conflict and modern societies

These findings are as a result of the field visits and workshops which I shall enumerate below:

In June 2019, the Colombian team and UK PI visited Guapi and Unguia for preliminary visits and to begin our initial contact with city officials and city cultural workers who we might include in the archive. We conducted interviews with a theatre maker, a choreographer, a governor of an indigenous tribe who teaches dance to the women and a head teacher at another indigenous reservation. While we were there, we were informed that on 15 June there would be a dance festival at Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien. We could not attend, but we sent one of our Colombian research assistants to attend, interview, film and photograph the event. This Dance Festival, sponsored by the Instituto Colombian de Antropologia e Historia (ICANH) gave the communities a chance to come together over historically contested land and reclaim space to share their specific cultural dances. The indigenous communities came to dance as did the Afro-Colombian communities. Dr Blanco writes about this event in a chapter of a forthcoming edited volume called Dance and Political Economy (Bloomsbury Press, UK).

In August and November 2019 the Colombian team visited Bojaya, Colombia. In November the team was present for the return of the human remains of victims from the 2002 massacre. This event garnered high national coverage and lasted almost two weeks with community funeral rites, state sponsored events, a vigil, and most importantly for us, the creation, rehearsal and performance of a play that engages with memory, reconciliation and the resilience of the communities who experienced the devastation of the massacre through the loss of family and/or friends. The entire team (except for UK Co-I Bryce Lease who was traveling with another grant commitment) met in London for a symposium we hosted at Senate House on Friday 22 November. We had over 40 people in attendance with some researchers who are part of the our same grant scheme. We were able to discuss the impact and findings of our projects alongside other invited guests whose research specialities lie within the intersections of performance & conflict, transitional justice, gender and violence in post-conflict communities, and Colombian political science in general.

Building up the team
On the 2nd of September 2019 the PDRA started working as part of the team to conduct research on digital humanities and the design of digital platforms in collaboration with the communities, to support the UK PI to coordinate the work between COL and the UK, and to organise two academic conferences in London (November 2019 and June 2020) and support research-related activities in Colombia like conducting fieldwork and supporting the administrative labor/organisation of two workshops planned for April 2020 and September 2020 in Colombia.

Three more researchers joined the team to work in the design and development of the digital archive. A Colombian filmmaker based at Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, who is recording audio-visual material in the 4 municipalities and producing mini-documentaries that will be uploaded in the digital platform; these audio-visual pieces are evidence of the creative practices analysed and aim to disseminate the research findings in a form closer to both academic and non-academic audiences. By March 2020 she finished the edition of 2 documentaries out of 4 from Bojaya (one of the territories analysed) and received feedback from the research team. Also two artists, experts in the development of digital platforms to disseminate research findings, based in Bogota will be responsible for the technical and visual design of our archive: www.corpografias.com.
In January 2020 the Colombian and UK team met in Medellin for 2-weeks intensive workshops and work sessions to analyse the material collected in the first fieldwork visits to the four territories and the culmination of Bojaya. These meetings took place from the 12 to the 24 January, and featured participatory sessions where every member of the team, including Colombian BA and Masters students, was responsible for leading a session to communicate and advance their main tasks assigned in the research. We have UK PI and PDRA as project managers of the archive; we have Colombian PI as project manager of the Encuentros; and we have Colombian CoI as the project manager for the 2nd field visits. UK CoI assists the UK team with administrative, financial matters as well as sharing his expertise in archive building and memory studies. The January meeting included the sharing a first draft of edited film material of the material collected in Bojaya. This was discussed by the team. We set a common agenda and working plan until July 2020, re-assigning responsibilities and working teams according to the main research findings and new priorities.

Digital Platform
The team is now actively working on the design and production of material for the digital platform. We chose 'corpografias' to name the platform and bought the domain and security for 5 years. We have a content proposal, a list of filters to organise the archival material and a selection of documents and information for Bojaya. This territory will serve as the pilot study and from this one, we will then develop the overall structure and data visualization of the digital platform. We expect to have the visual and navigation proposal by July 2020. We are also working closely with the website team at Universidad de Antioquia that will host the digital platform. The institutional email corpografias@udea.edu.co has been allocated as well as the structure to develop a wordpress website for the project.

We are conducting research in the areas of digital humanities and digital ethnography that can inform the development of the archive, the data collection and the construction of the platform in collaboration with the communities. We elaborated a working document on the topic, identifying the contribution of our research to these fields of study. Our document also provides examples of digital platforms designed with communities, ethical issues to consider when working with social media and digital resources, as well as other topics that are central to the analysis.

The team is actively working and mentoring the group of BA and MA students, not only in research activities, but also in the recording and edition of digital material. They are also conducting fieldwork and actively involved in the classification and analysis of the archival material.

Conferences
On 22nd November 2019, we organised and hosted a one-day symposium to present the initial research results and to build up a network of researchers in the field. The symposium took place at Birkbeck college on 22nd November 2019, bringing together 14 international scholars to discuss arts-based initiatives focused on the construction of memory and the representation of unheard voices in museums, textiles, traditional dances, memory parks and more. The role of arts and performance in reclaiming cultural citizenship, embodied methodologies and the processes of mourning as part of reconciliation guided the debate. What has emerged from the encounter is a pressing need to explore alternative modes to disseminate the research to wider publics beyond scholars and communities. The symposium was opened by Dr Clare Parfitt, from the advisory board of the project, and three projects on memory funded by Colciencias and the Newton fund took part. 68 people registered for the event.
Following the results of this conference, in December 2019 we distributed the call for papers for the second conference that will be hosted at the RHUL on the 25-26 June 2020: 'Performance, Embodiment and the Digital Archive: Collaborative Research in Sites of Conflict'. A two-days conference that focuses on the strategies and resources that artists, performance practitioners, scholars and communities use to increase the visibility and connectivity of their work. We have a particular interest in the design and development of digital resources and the use of social media in recording embodied performances, engaging communities and disseminating their voices. By March 2020 we have a draft programme of talks, performances, workshops and screenings by 25 speakers confirmed. They include Dr. Victoria Fortuna (Assistant Professor in Dance Studies, Reed College) and Dr Sarah Quinton (Reader in Digital Society).

Fieldwork, selection of case studies and work with the communities
In April 2019, we held a series of workshops at the Universidad de Antioquia, Medellin that took place from the 4-8 April. We invited theatre and dance practitioners, faculty in philosophy, sociology, anthropology and the arts, as well as community dance and theatre practitioners and activists to attend. Theatre artist Felipe Vargas and Dance artist Juana Ibanaxca Salgado along with Dr Luis Carlos Sotelo led workshops around community theatre, dance, and oral histories respectively. There were also a series of talks centered around the role of memory and the arts play in different contexts that featured choreographers, scholars and activists. Students were also in attendance and this is significant because many of them have professional positions as dancers, choreographers, social justice workers, and arts activists so we began to collect some impact data on the material experienced and shared at these workshops. The next workshop to be held in Medellin will be September 2020. There will be one in Quibdo, Choco in April 2020 and planning is underway for this by the Colombian team. The objective of this workshop in April is to bring together artists and cultural workers from each of the four municipalities and engage in embodied workshops with them, share knowledge about the processes of archiving material, teach them basic rubrics of film and camera work so they can go back to their communities and collect material with their phones or cameras, and to film these workshops (Known as Encuentros de Experiencias) so that we can eventually use them/upload them into our archive.

In addition to the initial fieldwork trips already reported, in November 2019, the team conducted the final visit to Bojaya where they attended a commemorative event of the 2002's massacre where a theatre performance was produced and presented to the public as part of the commemorative event. This was a 10 days visit, to record the rehearsals of the play and the final presentation on the 17th November. We video-recorded interviews with the performers and other relevant community members, enquiring for the creative process, the 20-years process of theatre making in the region to denounce and process conflict and the meaning of the play and the scenic elements used.
By December 2019 we selected an initial list of cases of study in each territory, following the results of the first round of visits. The list helped to program the next fieldwork trips. As of March 2020 we finalised the fieldwork and analysis of the case of Bojaya and conducted the second fieldwork trips to Guapi (5-13 March) and Buenaventura (15-22 March). The final trip will be to Unguia (6-10 April).

We designed the methodology for the creative encounters that will be held in Quibdo (23-26 April 2020) and Medellin (tbd September 2020) with representatives from the artistic practices involved. They will be an intense workshop and programme to produce archival material for the digital platform, to exchange creative processes, and to validate part of the information and audio-visual material that will be hosted in 'Corpografias'.
Exploitation Route The main significance of our eventual outcome (the digital archive at www.corpografias.com) will be how it presents a way to collaborate with communities and utilize their systems of knowledge and aesthetic understandings of the world to do data visualization work in the digital humanities. We are also demonstrating the ethical considerations involved in cross-cultural digital humanities projects (UK - Colombia). Most importantly, the digital archive will serve as a resource and tool for the cultural workers in the municipalities to highlight their work, share it, engage in pedagogical innovation, and we would like to think that their communities will be noticed beyond the staid state sanctioned narrative of victimhood and conflict which has marred their relationships to the state since the escalation of the armed conflict in the Choco area in the 1990s.

Our project provided support to make the theatre play in Bojaya and financially contributed to the buying of costumes and props. We also facilitated a collaborative and reflective space for the community in the making of the play. This has been a significant healing aspect of this collaboration of which we have documentation of and will use as part of our archive. The Colombian team applied and received extra funds to help support the creative process.
Our project has contributed to the design of audio-visual workshops for the communities to collect their own digital material to document their practices. They can then go back and use these skills learned amongst themselves and share them with others to continue their own processes of documentation..
We have noticed changes in the memory politics in Colombia and how this has affected those involved in the museum of memory (three of which are our collaborators for the workshops and for the construction of the archive). Our research project opened up the possibilities for those curators working on the construction of the memory museum in Colombia (and who were subsequently laid off from their jobs due to the change in the Administrative Director of the museum), to continue working on the subject and disseminating their work. Despite the delays and changes occurring currently in the development of this new museum for memory due to the new administration/Director, these curators have been able to continue their own work by being attached to our project.
Sectors Communities and Social Services/Policy

Creative Economy

Education

Culture

Heritage

Museums and Collections

 
Description March 2021 The most impact we have seen so far is the building of networks between the communities with whom we have worked. Corpografias is not public yet so we cannot elaborate on the impact that his website will have, if any, but the relationship between the communities who have contributed to the validation of the material in Corpografias has strengthened since the project has provided virtual spaces for them to get together and read/share about their work (digital encuentros of August/Sept 2020). We have virtual events scheduled for 20 March & 21 April 2021 and the UdeA team has several events in May 2021 with communities where we will gather appropriate information for impact and audiences beyond the academic. At our October 2020 closing event for the digital conference, members of all four territories and their respective community groups all attested to the ways in which the virtual spaces the grant project set up helped them see one another and work together. This had been made impossible due to COVID, but also in general, it is difficult for them financially and geographically to travel so the use of the virtual provided opportunities to be intimate and creative. March 2020 Because our project is still ongoing, we don't have tangible findings per se, but we have seen the impact of our relationship with communities and curators. Our project provided support to make the theatre play in Bojaya and financially contributed to the buying of costumes and props. We also facilitated a collaborative and reflective space for the community in the making of the play. This has been a significant healing aspect of this collaboration of which we have documentation of and will use as part of our archive. The Colombian team applied and received extra funds to help support the creative process. Our project has contributed to the design of audio-visual workshops for the communities to collect their own digital material to document their practices. They can then go back and use these skills learned amongst themselves and share them with others to continue their own processes of documentation. We have noticed changes in the memory politics in Colombia and how this has affected those involved in the museum of memory (three of which are our collaborators for the workshops and for the construction of the archive). Our research project opened up the possibilities for those curators working on the construction of the memory museum in Colombia (and who were subsequently laid off from their jobs due to the change in the Administrative Director of the museum), to continue working on the subject and disseminating their work. Despite the delays and changes occurring currently in the development of this new museum for memory due to the new administration/Director, these curators have been able to continue their own work by being attached to our project.
First Year Of Impact 2020
Sector Creative Economy,Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural

Societal

 
Description Workshop and Screening 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact Indigenous students in Unguia (one of the 4 territories where our research was based) participated in media and audiovisual training workshops and interviews and were also shown the short animated documentary, Mugan Boe, that is part of our Unguia section in the website Corpografias. This just occured February 27-5 March 2021, so I do not have the complete record of it from our project partner Sentarte/Olowaili Green, but this was an important event for developing our relationship with the indigenous community leaders in that area.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021