Melted Weapons, Poisoned Fish, and Embroidered Pañuelos: Tales of Crafts to Think with Care through Reconciliation

• In Event: Interrupting the Care/Violence Nexus in Times of War and Peace – II

Abstract

With the signature of the peace agreements in 2016, possibilities of transiting towards other forms of nonviolent sociability in Colombia open. Various discourses highlight the need for civil society to get involved in reconciliation practises as mechanisms to collectively care for the peace process. These discourses, however, are seldom defined by taking as a stand point the complex ways in which reconciliation and the struggle for peace are carefully crafted locally. In this paper we present three tales of healing, survival, and restoration of dignity that embody relations of coexistence and contradiction between violence and care. This, allows us to think through the complexities of reconciliation in contexts of fragile transitions towards peace. First, the story of women, victims of sexual violence in the midst of the armed conflict, invited by the artist Doris Salcedo to forge tiles using the melted weapons handed in by FARC, for the creation of an anti-monument that symbolises the transformation of wounds of war into art. Second, the tale of the communities around Atrato river who deliberately continue to fish, cook, and eat fish that is poisoned by illegal mining, as a way to resist to cultural extermination and continue living in their territory. Lastly, the initiative “Ojo de la aguja” that seeks to embroider pañuelos with the names of social leaders assassinated after the signature of the peace agreement, as a way of exposing the massacre in order to end it, but inevitably failing in the attempt, since the temporalities of embroidery cannot keep pace with of the ever faster rates of murder

Authors

• Natalia Quiceno Toro, Universidad de Antioquia

• Isabel González Arango, Universidad de Antioquía

• Tania Pérez-Bustos, National University of Colombia