The Contemporary Artist in the Communication of Unofficial History: Rhetoric of Disappearance in the Colombian Conflict

Abstract

The emergence of laws of historical memory in different countries with a silenced or distorted dramatic past is a reflection of the work that different social agents have undertaken in the field of recovery of memory. In contemporary artistic production, new narrative models have been developed from documents or traces from the past that have been recovered and brought to the present, and which have carried out a work similar to that of historians. e particular vision offered by Colombian visual artists, who focus their activity on the field of history, documenting the events of the armed conflict, puts into question the dominant narratives of the country. Among the different alternative strategies of narrating history, in this study we focus on the poetics of absence, used as a metaphor for disappearances and flight. We conducted an analysis based on the work of four Colombian artists (Miguel Ángel Rojas, Doris Salcedo, Óscar Muñoz, and Mariana Varela), who echo personal drama and establish a social and emotional link with the victims and their families. In these projects, the absence of the body, emptiness, is used as a form of resistance to oblivion that is able to shake the viewer’s gaze and rescue them from the amnesia in which they are immersed.