Natural History of Silence
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Dates2018 - Ongoing
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Author
- Location Colombia, Colombia
Hundreds of people in Colombia have silenced, fictionalized, or made up their family stories. What is it that they have silenced? Why have they done it? The fight against drugs has built a war regime during the last five decades, protected by a legal, political, economic, and media structure. Perhaps the most subtle of all the scaffolding is the social control that operates from morality and ethics. The narrative of good guys and bad guys has been consolidated. Natural History of Silence investigates the generations born in the 80's and 90's who grew up accompanied by relatives who were part of criminal dynamics. They saw, listened to, and lived through complex and everyday events and quickly learned to keep quiet or change their stories to have an "normal" everyday life. I have worked for the last 5 years on projects that reflect on drug policies in the Latin American region. For the last 4, I have been building an oral archive that contrasts with the story compiled in the newspapers, the narrative from which all the narrators who write the grandiloquence of the drug phenomenon drink.
The project seeks to reconstruct personal stories such as those of Marcela, Natalia or Manuel, whom I have met in recent years, tracing the surviving material culture of those times and contrasting the stories with the news archives of each city and time. I use the metaphor of natural history museums to point out the violence exerted on bodies in a war that takes life hostage and the illusions of survival. Likewise, I understand that silence has been a naturalized exercise, part of our recent history. A silence that says a lot about who we are as a contemporary society.