Generales

By: Natalia Piedrahita, Olimpo Restrepo and Johansson Cruz Lopera

Amid confrontations and wars, these women have delved into the pain of a country where the armed conflict determines the course of many families. The notebook, the camera and the book are the repositories of the stories of the communities with which these narrators build pillars for memory. 

Photos: Montage by the Communications Office, Universidad de Antioquia. 

On the occasion of International Women's Day, March 8, the Alma Mater newspaper highlights the role of some UdeA graduates who contribute to the construction of memory about the Colombian conflict through their creative, narrative or investigative role. Photographer Natalia Botero Duque, researcher Elsa Blair, journalists Patricia Nieto and Marta Ruiz and artist Libia Posada are part of this special.

Each tells why she is interested in the Colombian conflict and how she has related to it. Among their feminine words, one glimpses how their creative work plays an important role in understanding the violent context of the country.

Libia Posada: anatomies/geographies of pain

"I do an exercise of camouflage and contamination of photographs from collections of certain museums to question how these institutions represent women and to evidence that gender violence is a historical and cultural issue."

The confluences of medicine and art are the substratum of the work of physician and artist Libia Posada —Medellin, 1959— who establishes a plastic dialogue with the silence and memories engendered by the war in Colombia. "Cardinal signs", "Thinking is a luxury", "Clinical evidence" and "Gray matter or the inoperability of reason" are some of the installations in which she has addressed basic questions about life, death, pain and transience, thought and so on. Through a work in which she blurs the demarcated boundary between science, art and humanities, she establishes a reflection on the roots of human pain.

She has drawn different maps of Colombia: maps of minefields, migrations and forced displacement. Through questions about the body and disease, she has uncovered the violence that many women suffer in Colombia. As part of her medical practice, scars and pathologies are explored from different angles in her work.

For this artist, there are complex issues with situations that occur collectively and are connected to the social body and are evidenced in the form of disease. In turn, the violence associated with gender is seen in marks on women's bodies, but it is hidden in our cultures. "In ‘Clinical Evidence’, I do an exercise of camouflage and contamination of photographs from collections of certain museums to question how these institutions represent women and to evidence that gender violence is a historical and cultural issue", stated Posada. 

Natalia Botero: reading the conflict through a lens

"I am searching for something and, in that search, I find meaning in working with communities and, most especially, with women. Seeing the suffering in the loss of a child or family member makes me feel as if it were also my own. Being a woman has given me empathy."

Since she entered the paths of journalism and human rights in the 1990s, Natalia Botero Duque —1970— has photographed different memories of the conflicts in Colombia. In contrast to the scandalous and cold figures that the war has left in the newspapers are her images, which provide a more intimate look at those who have suffered and resisted it in different parts of the country. 

Through exercises related to the exploration of family albums of the disappeared, Botero Duque has brought about a reencounter with the life stories of the searching family members, many of whom are women. Photojournalism pointed out to her the hostility of the media's immediacy towards the victims, and from her experience, she has dedicated herself to working with the communities. "I am in that same place of enunciation: I am a woman and a mother and head of a family. I am also searching for something and, in that search, I find meaning in working with them. Seeing the suffering in the loss of a child or family member makes me feel as if it were also my own. Being a woman has given me empathy", said Botero Duque.

Some of her testimonies of the war appeared in the pages of newspapers such as El Tiempo, El Colombiano and Semana magazine. Her photographs are remnants of the forced disappearance, the paramilitary and guerrilla war, the demobilization processes and the portraits of the disappeared and their searchers. It has been difficult for her to find moments of peace, but she has sown hope through teaching at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Eafit and Universidad de Antioquia. More recently, she has dedicated herself to working with the communities in which she portrayed the conflict through workshops that question memory and sow perspectives of reconstruction. 

Patricia Nieto: a birthmark 

"I am proud to practice the journalism I learned. And the journalism I learned from Juan José Hoyos and others, which is to go to the place, listen to the people, read, study, put together a universe and tell it seems so simple, but it takes years of practice and experience".

On October 18, 1998, while the other journalists were leaving the village of Machuca, in the municipality of Segovia, Antioquia, after recording the massacre that the ELN had carried out by blowing up an oil pipeline and putting this point on the map for Colombians, Patricia Nieto (Sonsón, 1968) arrived with her notebook and tape recorder to be with the families of the 84 victims of this episode of violence in the country. 

Back in Medellín with her notes, she believed that this was the turning point to abandon the subject of the armed conflict. She had felt it before when, as an intern at the newspaper El Mundo, she was sent to the city morgue to make a list of the dead left by the car bomb that exploded in the old La Macarena bullring on February 16, 1991. That day she saw a dead body for the first time. It was the corpse of Luis Alfonso Agudelo. That day, she even rethought her profession as a journalist. 

"My generation had a birthmark in journalism, which was to have become a journalist in a university with so much state repression, where drug trafficking was the main protagonist in the country. Medellín was, then, a city of bombs and attacks", said Patricia.

For this chronicler, having a female perspective on the events of the armed conflict is very important because it implies an ethic of care and consideration for others, solidarity and "a persistence in oneself. This profession implies a lot of work and self-reflection, almost pulling oneself apart and reconstructing oneself every time one does a report. One builds the world every time one writes a chronicle", she said. 

Marta Ruiz: a forced change in warfare

"For me in particular, because of my history, because I had always had a lot to do with the conflict, I ended up in journalism. It's not even a decision, it's an outcome."

Marta Ruiz —Urrao, 1966— lived through a period in which the armed conflict was everything in her life, so she could not devote herself to writing chronicles and reports on daily life, which was what most attracted her since she began studying Social Communication at UdeA in the mid-80s. A decade later, she got fully involved in the journalistic investigation of the country's internal war.

The armed confrontation led her to shake off the journalistic coverage that was traditional until then, in which the official version prevailed —especially the judicial perspective— and the other parties and victims were hardly listened to, nor were other perspectives, such as the political one, considered. That is why, since she chose this path, she has always intended her work to contribute a different view and to the analysis of the conflict from a broader, more comprehensive construction. This does not mean, however, that she wants to justify the facts. She simply tries to put them in a context so that they can be better understood.

She is convinced that the war and its narratives are dominated by macho male gazes and considers that the fact of being a woman who follows armed conflicts brings a different perspective and creates more solid trust with some sources in the places where the actions take place.

Elsa Blair: a way to put the violence at a distance

"It can be interesting to produce a lot of knowledge within an academic elite, with a specialized language, that goes to some journals, to some readers, not to society in general. But this has changed in recent years."

Dedicating almost her entire professional life to the study of the Colombian armed conflict was for Elsa Blair —Medellín, 1956— a strategy to avoid experiencing it firsthand. She dedicated herself to researching this topic at the Center for Research and Popular Education (CINEP) in Bogotá, and later at her home, UdeA, where she worked at the Institute of Political Studies and the Institute of Regional Studies (INER). She also participated in the creation of the Culture, Violence and Territory Research Group.

Although she has always had contact with certain populations in the performance of her work, she considers that some of her research, especially her early research, did not have a high impact on society. She thinks that it was her recent work, done before retiring, that put her in contact with several communities directly affected by the conflict. For this reason, she is critical of this work, as she believes that, although it contributes knowledge and makes important discoveries, it often remains stuck in a specialized academic language that only reaches some very small circles.

This resulted in the four books Un itinerario de investigación sobre la violencia (An itinerary of research on violence) (2012), Muertes violentas: la teatralización del exceso (Violent deaths: the theatricalization of excess) (2005), Conflicto armado y militares en Colombia. Cultos, símbolos e imaginarios (Armed conflict and the military in Colombia. Cults, symbols and imaginaries) (1999) and Las Fuerzas Armadas: una mirada civil (The armed forces: A civilian view) (1993). The numerous articles written for specialized magazines both in Colombia and abroad also bear witness to her work. These articles reflect the viewpoint not only of another academic but also a woman who researches the conflict and the military, which was rare in the 1980s when she took on this task. It was rare not only because few women approached this subject from different disciplines but also because, Blair believes, the feminine sensibility made it possible to introduce differentiating, more human, less rational elements in the studies on violence.