Museums, Exhibitions, and Memories of Violence in Colombia: Trying to Remember

This book explores how recent Colombian historical memories are informed by cultural diversity and how some of the country’s citizens remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the internal war (1980-2016).

Its chapters delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and what not to represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth case study, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their way of remembering, which emphasizes peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. By bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, this text contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. By drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, Jimena Perry shows how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society.

This volume is of great use to students and scholars interested in Latin American and public history.

Jimena Perry is a Latin American Scholar. She earned a BS in Anthropology from the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a public historian and the Project Manager of Explorers of the International Federation for Public History since 2018.