New Approaches to Memory, Bodies and Images in Latin America

Organised by the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (CCM)

This event will centre the image and the body as sites in which historic memory is preserved and struggled in Latin American contexts. It will discuss different objects such as films, performance, photography, software development, and digital maps, among others, to point out how the act of remembering is a collaborative, multisensorial, and creative practice. The presentations will look at violent phenomena that are part of contemporary Latin America: the internal colonialism of the ethnographic gaze, the way in which political and environmental violence are intersected, and the silencing of voices fighting for Human Rights. Participants will shed light on how all these phenomena threaten to erase the voices of subjects that fall outside what Sylvia Winter calls the “human category”. They will bring to the forefront creative proposals for remembering such as the new technologies used by Forensic Architecture, decolonial approaches to ethnography through film and embodied actions in the frame of the assassination of the black activist and feminist Marielle Franco in Brazil. These approaches centre bodies and images as possibilities to build memory in a sensorial and collaborative way. 
 
Chair: Joseph Ford (ILCS/CCM)
Discussant: Jamille Pinheiro Dias (ILCS/CLACS)
 
Speakers:
 
Courtney Crumpler (Duke University) and Rafael Rezende (Instituto Marielle Franco): 'Marielle Gigante: Transnational Actions to Preserve and Amplify a Collective Memory of Marielle Franco'
 
Nicoly Monteiro dos Santos (Duke University): 'Memory, subjectivity and surrealism in Laura Huerta’s El Laberinto (2018) and JIIBIE (2019)'
 
María Paula Molano (Duke University): '“La memoria de la tierra es la memoria de la guerra”: Violence, Memory and the Environment in Colombia’s Banana Plantations'

Jeferson Scabio (ILCS/CLACS): 'A Body That Remembers: Reclaiming Loss in a Militia Territory'


Tea and coffee will be available from 2pm, with the event starting at 2.30pm

Image: Photograph of Marielle Franco's statue at Buraco do Lume, in Rio de Janeiro, on July 28, 2022, the day after the statue's inauguration