THE TEAM
BOOKLET II
As part of our efforts to document grassroots transformation towards repair and healing, we turned to think about what creative expression offers those affected by war.
When traditional justice processes are unable to create complex and accurate narratives of the conflict, artistic performances and collaborations can provide space to do so.
Introduction
Some activists, artists and scholars argue that creative expression can offer a form of ‘transitional justice from below’ that can translate emotional pain from the conflict into physical forms. In this way, art can contribute towards healing by voicing experiences that are not represented in mainstream judicial processes. Instead of prioritizing individual or one-sided narratives of the war, artistic license can help paint a more complex and subjective picture of violence, as well as charting radical hope for the future.
We issued a call for papers in 2021 that focused on creative responses to violence. Creative expression has always been central to anti-war efforts and other movements resisting violence. The articles in this special issue illustrate how embodied creativity and cultural production work towards healing and repair in post-war spaces.
The WRAW project also provided small grants to several projects that explore how various communities use art as forms of resistance, mobilization, and care. These projects explore the expressive, creative, and affective ways that community power and solidarity is built. They include performance and dance; collage-and mural-making; art installations and exhibits; and literature and story-telling.
Tierra
By Enkele
Enkelé’s song, Tierra, highlights how dancing and music performance can help to recover a diversity of truths during armed conflict while offering alternative spaces to speak these truths and to contest official narratives. The song also invites us to question how the arts might respond to official history’s failings. The song thinks about the music of oral tradition, the truth from the peripheries, and women’s stories. In regions of Colombia that were particularly affected by the war, Enkelé uses music and choreography to narrate alternative stories of violence to seek justice and repair.
A paper published in our Special Issue in Security Dialogue, written by Maria Martin de Almagro Iniesta, Priscyll Anctil Avoine, and Yira Miranda Montero, focuses on musical performance, testimony, and healing in the aftermath of war in Colombia. The authors examine how cultural and artistic groups like Enkele can support and contribute to the effectiveness of transitional justice and peacebuilding efforts.
Mujer Migrante,
Lucha Constante
Migrant Woman, Constant Struggle
This short documentary takes us behind the scenes of “Orgullosa de Ti,” a contemporary dance performance by the Dance Conservatory of Mexico in collaboration with the migrant shelter Espacio Migrante. It begins with footage and testimonies from a dance workshop at the shelter, where participants wrote messages of encouragement to other migrant women, and then translated those messages into movement. The documentary highlights scenes of the filmed and live performances of “Orgullosa de Ti” which was a public adaptation by ballerinas at the dance conservatory in Tijuana of the migrant women’s messages-in-movement. We hear from migrant women as they interpret the meaning and significance of the performance and of dance in their lives.
A paper published in our Security Dialogue Special Issue, by Leslie Meyer, Abigail Andrews, and Paulina Olvera Cañez, discusses how the thousands of asylum seekers who have been waiting for “protection” at the US-Mexico border enter into relationships, start jobs, learn new languages, make art, pray, dance, and sing. They term these practices resiste gozando – resistance through joy – and theorize what these practices mean for eroding the violence of the migratory process.
Literature & Storytelling
I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth. The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have--that story can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended. The story becomes the thing needed.
Dorothy Allison, Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure, p.3
To experiment with several creative approaches in ways that refuse academic disciplining is a privilege the WRAW project enjoys given institutional support and multiple streams of project funding. Another way to engage with artistic creation is to turn to the written word, where for example, otherwise-worlds exist in lines of fiction, poetry, or letters. Several of the papers produced in relation to the WRAW project explore these ideas.
In her contribution to the WRAW forum in the Journal of Genocide Research, Gnei Soraya Zarook considers how a short story, “The Missing Are Considered Dead,” by Illankai Tamil author V. V. Ganeshananthan makes space for the contradictions that post-war reforms and policy struggle to hold together, reminding us that fictional stories are a vital archive and pedagogical tool for scholars to approach negotiations of war and its aftermath more ethically.
Q’s paper for our Security Dialogue Special Issue engages the letters of jailed political activists and the poetry and other writing of marginalized communities in India from the past few years to examine how people are made “unmournable,” as well as how the medium of poetry – or of ‘grief writing’ – not only allows for more visceral forms of communication and expression, but also serves as a form of political mobilization and action.
Relatedly, Misha Choudhry’s contribution to the Security Dialogue Special Issue reads three lyric poems – 19 Varieties of Gazelle and You & Yours by Naomi Shihab Nye’s and LOOK by Solmaz Sharif to examine how “the Muslim” has been created as a religio-racial formation in the US after 9/11, and how artists and writers from Muslim and Black Muslim communities in the United States “language a world” beyond America’s forever wars and empire.
Fiction cares for others; it is compassion, and gives others voice. It time-travels the past and the future, and pulls the not-now, not-yet into existence.
– Maxine Hong Kingston, Fifth Book of Peace, p. 62
We want to honor some books that help us pull “the not-now, not-yet into existence.”
We invite scholars to embark on their own exploration of literature, and to use literature as a conduit to think outside the boundaries o f their academic disciplines.
Companion Reading
& Restored Languages
Murals and Graffiti
in Bogotá, Colombia
This mural is the result of a two-day project facilitated by Colombia’s Corporación Desarrollo Solidario and the grassroots organization Alas Moradas, which works with women victims of violence and war-related displacement in Bogotá. Most of the women who belong to this organization were born in conflict zones and moved to Bogotá to escape the war. In Bogotá, they have faced sexual violence, sexual exploitation, and lack of material conditions to live dignified lives. In this two-day project, displaced women and women survivors of violence gathered to talk about care, migration, displacement, and joy in the midst of violence and hardship. Local social workers from Barrio Santa Fe (one of Bogotá’s most marginalized neighborhoods and where many displaced women end up living) discussed how women understand care and self-care. Drawing on their reflections and experiences, they designed a mural with Liza, a feminist graffiti artist from the same neighborhood, before collectively painting the mural.
Because this was meant to be a life-sustaining activity, the women were provided with food and personal hygiene kits, and activities were planned for the children that many women brought along. A local rap artist, Kinny Mon Ciel, created a song based on the mural.
Maria Ximena Dávila’s article in the Security Dialogue Special Issue documents how, in the war-ravaged region of Montes de María in Colombia, a lack of state involvement has meant that women’s collective action has “sprouted in the middle of guns” to form a new sort of localized state. This nascent form of organizing is attentive to women’s victimizations and designed to fill their needs, demonstrating how continuing to live after life-altering violence is made possible through ordinary struggles that combine into a more livable mode of existence.
Srebrenica Heroines and
Mother’s Scarf Installation
Bosnia
“Srebrenica Heroines” is a multimedia and artistic program that aims to document the stories of women survivors of the Srebrenica genocide, their heroic fight against the impunity of perpetrators, and their efforts to preserve the truth about genocide. The project focuses on empowering Srebrenica women survivors and especially mothers of Srebrenica in scaling up their work and influence on the regional and international level. The project also pays tribute to all survivors, activists, and decision-makers who supported the women’s fight in BiH. Implemented by the Association “Movement of Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa enclaves” in partnership with the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) and the Srebrenica Memorial Center, in 2022, the Srebrenica Heroines included the production of the art installation “Mother’s Scarf”, an international conference on women in Srebrenica, and a photography exhibition “Scarves of Remembrance,” all to mark 27 years since the Srebrenica genocide through the experiences of women. Photographs by Denis Ruvić.
Women's Rights After War
through collage
Throughout the WRAW project, our team found ways to explore the topics of our research in ways that reached beyond the confines of our academic disciplines. In a Winter 2021 team retreat, we convened in Denver, Colorado under the guidance of Lares Feliciano, a multimedia interdisciplinary artist who uses animation, filmmaking, and collage to bring attention to the important work of memory and in-between spaces in the lives of marginalized people. We created collages to speak to ideas that most resonated with us when we thought about war, power, violence, rest, healing, repair, and justice. Below are some of the results of our experiments with creative storytelling and of moving our intellectual work from words to visual representation when we thought about “Women’s Rights After War”.
Tranformative Aesthetics
In July 2023, in collaboration with Anna Corrigan and Samuel Ritholtz and Cuarto Estudio, we coordinated a collage workshop in Bogotá, Colombia. The workshop was designed to think about the aesthetics of repair after war, and it was led by Lucila Quieto, an Argentine artist who lost her father during the dictatorship in Argentina and whose art has centered on integrating images of him into images of her life since his death. At one point in the workshop, Quieto encouraged participants to allow their loved ones to continue taking up space in the present. The collages were a chance for victims to construct their own vocabulary of repair, using their hands to ensure their loved ones’ ongoing presence in their lives. By the time they were finished, the collages were heavy from items representing life – letters, lyrics from favorite songs, wedding invitations, fabric cut from favorite shirts, jewelry. At the center of each collage were images and photographs of loved ones who had been killed – sons, husbands, a sister, a mother.
At the end of the day, we hung the collages in a gallery space in what became a stunning exhibit honoring the vibrancy and fullness of the lives lost. On the opening night where we exhibited the collages, one of the participants came up to us. She gestured to the room and said in Spanish, “This felt more like justice than anything the state has ever done.” Nothing about the workshop had involved the state, justice institutions, or the possibility of formal redress.
This workshop was inspired by an article in our Security Dialogue Special Issue by Anna Corrigan and Samuel Ritholtz that examines how Latin American artists Lucila Quieto and Doris Salcedo shape possibilities for repair after violence by bringing forward the intimate material of domestic life as a way of echoing traces of loved ones who were disappeared during the wars.
“After this workshop I believe that if we continue in this path, other women who are suffering like we have will also hear us.”
– Gladys Acevedo
“What impacted me the most was seeing in my collage, and in those of my peers, the journey we have undertaken and what we truly have achieved.”
– Rosa Milena Cardenas
“Being featured in an exhibition is something new for me. I felt an empowered woman. At that moment, I realized the value I truly have as a woman.”
– Ana Rocio Chacón
