Exhibitions, toolkits, and materials: The transmission of difficult knowledges of the Colombian armed conflict

• In Event: Tras el conflicto: verdad, justicia y memoria- Parte 1

Abstract

The efforts to find peace in Colombia have proven difficult across the years. Disagreements among the negotiating parties, competing political discourses, and the society’s widespread confusion and disenchantment with the results of the negotiations are the main contributors to the country’s environment of polarization. The Colombian peace agreement referendum of 2016 precisely proved that concepts such as peace, reconciliation, and transition can be polemical and divisive. Memory (and its construction) is not alien to this polarizing environment, especially when memorialization processes become the origin and the destination of difficult knowledges to be transmitted.
This paper explores how a museum exhibition in the city of Medellin, Colombia, a pedagogical toolkit of memory, created by the National Center for Historical Memory, and the mobile game Reconstrucción use specific rhetorical and spatial moves to transmit the difficult knowledge of Colombia’s armed conflict. In spite of being three different modes of delivery of such difficult knowledge, a commonality between these instruments of memory transmission directly appeal to the senses and to a greater capacity for empathy and affect. In this regard, the paper analyzes the language, images, and forms of encoding/decoding that the creators and curators use to inform or sensitize audiences and consumers of these products.

Author

• Felix A Burgos, Indiana University East