Sound and Memory: listening to the sound artifacts of Colombia’s Truth Commission. 

Recordings from https://comisiondelaverdad.co/volumen-testimonial  

This 3-part listening session offers a close listening at the sound artifacts included in the Testimonial Volume of the Final Report of Colombia’s Comisión de la Verdad (2018-2022), interspersed with commentary by Daniel Villegas and academic guests from Colombia. The recordings are reproduced in their entirety, respecting the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license that covers the materials of the Truth Commission.

One of the most important events in the recent history of Colombia is the Peace Agreement reached in 2016 with the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia—People’s Army, known by their acronym in Spanish as FARC-EP. The agreement sought to bring an end to the civil war that, since the 1960s, had ravaged the country, involving revolutionary groups, paramilitary armies often acting in collaboration with the military, and local populations caught in the crossfire. 

As part of the peace agreements, the Colombian State launched a four-year Commission charged with clarifying the multiplicity of causes of the armed conflict with the aim of achieving what the peace agreement called “a long-lasting peace.” This effort is known as the Comisión de la Verdad, or Truth Commission. Less than a unified narrative, the 11 members of the “Truth Commission” sought to compose a broad, multi-layered and plural account of a conflict that extended over half a century, by centering the voices and experiences of those who most suffered the consequences of the war: farmers, children, women and LGBT+ people, Black and Indigenous communities.

The results of this endeavor—carried out between 2018 and 2022—are precisely as staggering as their subject matter: the final report spans ten volumes and over ten thousand pages of testimony, a historical account of the period between 1948 and 2016, exhaustive investigations of the human rights violations that were prevalent in the conflict, as well as 66 recommendations to avoid a new civil war by transforming the structural causes of the armed conflict. These volumes are complemented by a multimodal website containing interactive infographics, audiovisual documentaries, and a section of field recordings or “sound artefacts,” the focus of this radio emission, that amplify the contents of the Testimonial Volume, one of the most important outcomes of the final report for its focus on victims’ voices.

sound and memory [re.01-018]

Sound & Memory - Listening to The Sound Artifacts Of Colombia's Truth Commission, Ep: 01. By Daniel Villegas Velez first aired on June 10 at 18h00 (CET)
Radio Elsewheres transmitted June 2-24, 2023 from Center KRAK in Bihać, BiH.

Alejandro Jaramillo is a social anthropology PhD student and fellow at New York University (NYU). He holds a MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin and a certificate in Culture and Media from NYU's Tisch Cinema Studies. He freelances as a photographer and filmmaker for various outlets. His research examines the role of cultural production, commercialization, and objectification of memory in contexts of enduring violence and transitional justice. He is a section editor for the Visual and New Media Review and curator for the Screening Room at Society for Cultural Anthropology's Fieldsights.

[re.01] Sound & Memory, Ep: 1. Daniel Villegas Vélez with Alejandro Jaramillo Hurtado

Sound & Memory - Listening to The Sound Artifacts Of Colombia's Truth Commission, Ep: 02. By Daniel Villegas Velez first aired on June 16 at 18h00 (CET)
Radio Elsewheres transmitted June 2-24, 2023 from Center KRAK in Bihać, BiH.
 
Lina Álvarez Villareal is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Universidad de Los Andes and holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Université Catholique de Louvain.She is currently part of the Colombian collective Transicionada por el Valle del Cauca, of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and was a member of the steering committee of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. Her research lies at the crossroads of decolonial thought, feminisms of the Global South, philosophy of economics and political ecology. She has published articles on Frantz Fanon's thought and environmental justice in decolonial perspective.
 
María del Rosario Acosta López is a Full Professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies in UC Riverside. Her most recent publications (2023) are a co-edited volume on transitional justice in Colombia (Justicia transicional en Colombia: una mirada retrospectiva (Planeta)) and the monograph and compilation of interviews Memory Work in Colombia: Past and Present Experiences, Legacies for the Future (World Humanities Report) which is entirely available online in both Spanish and English. María conducts work on historical memory with survivors of police torture in Chicago and with survivors of political violence in Colombia. This work has informed her current book project, Grammars of Listening: Philosophical Approaches to Memory after Trauma. She is completing two forthcoming books, one in Spanish on community in Hegel, Nancy, Esposito and Agamben (Narrativas de la comunidad: de Hegel a los pensadores impolíticos), and one in English, The Unstoppable Murmur of Being-Together, co-authored with Jean-Luc Nancy and the Group on Law and Violence, and working on a long-term project on Friedrich Schiller titled Aesthetics as Critique.

[re.01] Sound & Memory, Ep 2. Daniel Villegas Vélez w/ Maria del Rosario Acosta & Lina Á. Villareal

Sound & Memory - Listening to The Sound Artifacts Of Colombia's Truth Commission, Ep: 03 By Daniel Villegas Velez first aired on June 23 at 19h00 (CET)
Radio Elsewheres transmitted June 2-24, 2023 from Center KRAK in Bihać, BiH.

Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar is associate professor of anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. He has significant ethnographic experience in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies. His work has dealt, over the last 20 years, with the impact that different forms of violence have had on the existential landscape of human experience. In this context, he has conducted fieldwork in Colombia and South Africa among victims’ organizations and former combatants. Professor Castillejo-Cuéllar was also international observer to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru as well as consultant to the National Commission for Reconciliation in Colombia. Since 2011, he has also led the Critical Studies Program on Political Transitions (PECT), an interdisciplinary academic initiative and network of researchers from the global South interested in the study of the social worlds that emerge during the aftermath of violence, with particular attention to the questions of subjectivity and everyday survival.

María del Rosario Acosta López is a Full Professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies in UC Riverside. Her most recent publications (2023) are a co-edited volume on transitional justice in Colombia (Justicia transicional en Colombia: una mirada retrospectiva (Planeta)) and the monograph and compilation of interviews Memory Work in Colombia: Past and Present Experiences, Legacies for the Future (World Humanities Report) which is entirely available online in both Spanish and English. María conducts work on historical memory with survivors of police torture in Chicago and with survivors of political violence in Colombia. This work has informed her current book project, Grammars of Listening: Philosophical Approaches to Memory after Trauma. She is completing two forthcoming books, one in Spanish on community in Hegel, Nancy, Esposito and Agamben (Narrativas de la comunidad: de Hegel a los pensadores impolíticos), and one in English, The Unstoppable Murmur of Being-Together, co-authored with Jean-Luc Nancy and the Group on Law and Violence, and working on a long-term project on Friedrich Schiller titled Aesthetics as Critique.

[re.01] Sound & Memory Ep 3. Daniel Villegas Vélez w/ A. Castillejo-Cuéllar, M. del Rosario Acosta

The stream archive of an event-based radio art project Radio Elsewheres 
[re.01] transmitted from Center KRAK, Bihać, BiH, June 02-24, 2023
[re.02] transmitted from Kuma International, Sarajevo, BiH, June 07-28, 2024
[re.03] upcoming, Art Windsor-Essex, Windsor, ON, Fall 2025