Políticas sentimentales. Analítica de la musealización del conflicto armado en Colombia.

Abstract

This creative research takes as reference the so-called memory boom, or Memorial Turn, a global and national need (and even obsession) for the consignment or storage of cultural memory (Huyssen 2002, Guash, 2014). Which for a few decades has activated numerous artistic exhibitions internationally, being increasingly recurrent in Latin American countries, as a strategy to revisit the past, given the multiple situations of political violence, military dictatorships, armed conflicts, among other events. Colombia has participated in this scenario for more than a decade, with multiple artistic exhibitions on the memory of the armed conflict, today in ferment after the signing of the Peace Agreements (2016) signed by the Colombian Government, under the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos. and the guerrilla Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-FARC-EP People's Army, whose intention is to contribute to the visibility of the victimized people in the context of the conflict as well as contribute to the construction of a new image of the nation. I analyze two exhibitions in which memory is museumized: The Memory and Nation Room of the National Museum and Fragments, Art and Memory Space, by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. The purpose is to problematize musealization, which in both cases is configured as a visibility device (a way of showing and representing the victims and the armed conflict), and as an affective machine (that makes possible the production, circulation and consumption of affections, to challenge their visitors) that work together in the construction of a national moral contract. I propose that both exhibitions operate as a series of selective, visual, discursive, rhetorical, corporal, affective, political and moral practices, which center the presence of the visual for the construction of a new visual/sentimental narrative of the nation aimed at reproducing the culture of peace and reconciliation for the country. Through an analysis of musealization I examine the articulation between its institutions, practices, techniques and discourses. Center the experiences of its visitors on visits scheduled by the museum's educational area. I highlight the narratives of the inclusion of otherness and pain/healing on the victims, respectively, and point out how the moral economies and sentimental rhetorics, in each one, make invisible the governmentality of the emotions arranged there, as a way of operating. of power outside the ideological apparatuses of the State and as neoliberal technologies of current governments that work on the modeling of affects.