Resounding Epistemologies of Conflict: Auralities in Colombia’s Historical Memory

The situation here is intense; we’re surrounded by M-19 personnel. Please cease fire immediately! Let the public hear this, this is urgent—it’s life or death. Can you hear me? […] The President of the Republic needs to give the order to cease fire right now![1]

— Alfonso Reyes Echandía, Broadcast on National Radio

The bloody conflict that has taken place in Colombia throughout the 20th and 21st centuries is partially a consequence of civil wars inherited from the nineteenth century and partially the result of the conflicts of the colonial period. The combination of a colonial caste system that established a social and hierarchical racial order, classifying people according to their proportion of Spanish blood, the struggle for territorial and political control of the nascent republic by elites from different regions of the country and, in recent decades, the so-called war on drugs, have produced structures of exclusion that result in a breeding ground for internal conflict and political instability. This article focuses on the aural memory related to certain historical events and processes. It then addresses ways in which contemporary artists have used sound, as both strategy and material for resisting and deconstructing metanarratives, and the practice of listening as a political act, in the creation of other possible worlds. The aural component of Colombian conflict is understood here from various perspectives: the construction of memory through mass media such as radio, the use of audio recordings in the clarification of truth, testimony and subjective narration as an aspect of symbolic reparations, and works of art that question official narratives, contrasting hegemonic and subordinate horizons of meaning to reveal intersubjective realities. 

Act I.

Radio has played a significant role in modern Colombian history, but I will focus on two key events: The Bogotazo uprising (1948) and the Palace of Justice siege (1985).

On April 9, 1948, the radio played a central role in a popular uprising incited by the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a left-wing political leader and presidential candidate for the Liberal Party. The uprising led to hundreds of deaths and the destruction of a significant part of downtown Bogotá[2]. It may have been the first time that radio connected all Colombians around a single event: Liberal leaders from the Junta Central Revolucionaria de Gobierno (Central Revolutionary Government Junta) broke into the National Broadcaster, took microphones away from journalists, and called for the insubordination of government forces all over Colombia. Radio broadcasters from downtown Bogotá reported on the events with ire; all over the country, the news spread like wildfire through local and underground broadcasters. Using hand-made equipment, they informed the public about current events while encouraging resistance, coordinating attacks on institutions, and reporting dubious revolutionary victories across the airwaves:

Audio 1. Radiodifusora Nacional – Transmisión 9/Abril/1948.

Audio 2. Registro Sonoro 11 – Toma De La Radio Nacional – 09 De Abril 1948.

Revolutionary and leftist forces of Colombia, the revolution carries the day in Cali and Medellin. It carries the day in Barranquilla. Leftist forces have taken over the government in the capital of Atlántico […]

From Corinto, from Puerto Tejada, from every place along the eastern Cauca Valley, from the south, to bring about a victorious revolution […] Liberals, take up all of your positions, and all of your employees or workers who can use a weapon must make them available, in the service of the people.

A liberal from Boyacá speaks to the people of Boyacá who have been the first victims of the slogans of blood and fire […] I want the provinces of Santander to be alert and stand guard, to arm all the men of the countryside, to find money and put together a revolution.[3]

Figure 1. Radio espectros. Courtesy of Leonel Vásquez.

Radio espectros (Radio Spectrums), (2013), by the Colombian sound artist Leonel Vásquez, is a bicycle-drawn, travelling radio device that takes over the frequency of the Colombian National Broadcaster and plays recorded radio broadcasts from April 9, 10 and 11, 1948, interspersed with music and radio dramas from the period. Vásquez reinterpreted and activated archival audio from the National Sound Archive by creating situations for it to be listened to in public spaces, such as parks and streets. Words are not the only important element of the sonic message visitors listen to: in addition to the energy and alarm heard in the agitated voices, attention is paid to environmental sounds, and to the glitches generated by low-quality transmissions and their eventual recording onto a physical medium.

The work is based on the notion of sound as a physical and public space, limited by the state’s policies for bandwidth allocation. The events of April 1948 revealed the power of radio in processes of popular uprising and the state’s inability to control radio bandwidth. These “pirate” radio stations played a central role in popular organization and had both direct and indirect impact on the armed mobilization that followed. After the Bogotazo, a series of reforms limited bandwidth access to transmitters (like community or amateur broadcasters) that were not connected to a business structure, making access subject to prevailing power structures.

Thirty-seven years later, in 1985, the radio broadcast across the entire country the pleas of Alfonso Reyes Echandía, president of the Supreme Court of Colombia, as he spoke from a telephone under his desk in the Palace of Justice while gunshots were heard in the background[4]. That November 6, bus drivers in Bogota turned up the volume on their radios as their passengers listened with surprise, while the families of those who worked in the headquarters of the Supreme Court followed the events, minute by minute, from their homes. A few hours earlier, the M-19 guerilla group had entered the building and taken the magistrates, workers, and visitors hostage. Now, the army and the police surrounded the building and were beginning an operation to retake it, which would last until the next day. The process of retaking the building left nearly a hundred dead, including civilians, armed forces, and guerilla fighters, and at least eleven missing persons, whose disappearances remain unresolved.

The demands of the M-19 guerillas included the right to a daily television spot or an hour per day on the national radio. Meanwhile, the radio stations broadcast live calls from hostages inside the Palace. The broadcast audio is multidimensional: not only are the interviewees’ voices heard in the foreground, but the voices of the guerillas, echoing bursts of gunfire, and explosions are also heard in the background. Time is an important dimension too. As the day wears on, the conversations become more agitated, the gunshots louder, and pleading voices are heard shouting, “Don’t shoot!”[5]

Towards the end of the first day, the country’s main radio stations received a call from Noemí Sanín, then the Communications Minister, ordering them to interrupt their transmissions and broadcast a soccer match instead. Yamid Amat, director of the Caracol station, said that he would follow the order if other broadcasters did the same. The minister replied that if he did not interrupt his transmission, she would order the army to take over the station and turn off the transmitters. Also interesting are the actions of Pablo Montaña, a blind musician and radio aficionado who lived just a few blocks from the Palace. Using a walkie-talkie, Montaña intercepted conversations between the military commanders of the operation to retake the Palace and, realizing that these contained important information, recorded several cassettes until noon on November 7.

Figure 2. Script for Llamado de guerra. Courtesy of the artist.

Llamado de guerra: archivo sonoro del conflicto (Call of War: An Audio Archive of the Conflict), by Esteban Ferro, is an archive of key moments in the political conflicts of Latin America in which radio and audio recordings played an important role. In 2019, Ferro addressed three events in Colombian history: the Leticia Incident of 1932, the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and the Palace of Justice siege[6]. Including both fiction and non-fiction, the project investigates mediatization (re)produced by radio reporting, based on an analysis of the influence these have on the development of the events they report. The archive recreates these processes in a series of transmissions, performances, listening sessions and print publications.

Figure 3. Llamado de guerra. One person manages the archival audio, three speakers, and improvised environmental sounds provided by fellow artist Ángela Marciales. Photograph courtesy of Esteban Ferro.

To Ferro, the difficulty of obtaining the rights to reproduce original audio recordings became an opportunity to understand how media discourse (in this case radio) is built through production strategies that include the creation of scripts, the broadcast of live interviews and soundscapes, and the use of sound effects, Foley sounds, music, and both live and pre-recorded sound design techniques. In this context, three aspects of production are especially interesting: the construction of a fictional narrative based on reenactment, the development of a script/score in which the analysis of radio stories is translated into a series of notations, and the final performative-sonic action per se, which involves a combination of archival material, incidental sounds, constructed texts and live speech. Performers bring the past and present together by interacting with “dead” voices from the original recordings and including elements related to the present, such as vuvuzelas in the soccer match section.

Both Ferro and Vásquez use archival audio recordings to problematize the medium of radio as an agent in historical processes, deconstructing sonic narratives through a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and demanding active listening from the public. According to Jesús Martín-Barbero (1993), mediations are a “place” where it is possible to understand the interaction between the space of production and that of reception. They are non-dualistic communication processes—ever-evolving interactions between the media and the listeners, with political and cultural implications.

Radio is a field of power relations during conflicts: whoever is in charge can project a specific message and influence the listeners’ emotions about a certain situation. Like other mass media outlets, radio reproduces ideas and feelings that help in defining both collective identities and intersubjective realities. However, as historical events develop, listeners construct a subjective existence in relation to those events that also exert an influence on subsequent discursive outputs by mass media.

Act II.

Stories related to systematic violence, such as displacement, massacres or forced disappearance, are sometimes recorded not by mass media outlets, but as part of criminal court cases, transitional justice, or symbolic reparations. Between 1977 and 2015, at least 60,630 people were victims of enforced disappearance[7] in Colombia⁸. By 2018, Colombia had registered 7.7 million victims of forced displacement⁹, making it the country with the highest number of displaced persons in the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, or ACNUR in Spanish-speaking countries). In 2020 alone, 76 massacres accounted for 292 deaths (UN, 2021).

In the artist María Alejandra Ordóñez’s sound installation Retratos no hablados (Unspoken Portraits), exhibited in Bogotá at the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in 2016, visitors answer telephones that ring randomly and reproduce intimate stories about the mourning of close friends or relatives of the disappeared. Ordóñez’s interest is “to problematize the concept of disappearances from its different semantic possibilities, as well as a strategy of concealment of the intentions, facts and ways in which the conflict was narrated” (Akil, 2019).

The use of telephones creates a close relationship between the listener and the victim while also establishing distance by means of the impossibility of responding to the message heard. The selection of the telephone as an object also connects with the artist’s memories—her grandfather asked his family to ensure the line was always open, in case a phone call from the artist’s uncle, one of the disappeared, was received.

Paisajes invisibles (Invisible Landscapes), by Colectivo Radiolaboratorio (Mauricio Prieto and Sandra Jaramillo), was a mobile and collapsible structure comprising of a bicycle-like vehicle that transported plastic tubes that were then installed in public spaces to delineate a space in which passersby were interviewed by the artists with microphones, recorders, and a speaker. Between 2016 and 2017, this temporary, participatory installation travelled to plazas in Cali, Bogotá and Medellín (the main arrival points for displaced persons). Supported by local organizations, the project invited visitors to think about soundmarks from the places they were displaced from, and then imitate or describe them, so that these memories could be recreated, remixed, and amplified by the artists. The project was based on the idea that a landscape can be narrated, recalled, and reconstructed through oral histories, despite being vacated or having ceased to exist due to conflict. Paisajes invisibles was organized around a mechanism for editing and publishing audio material, the insertion of which into public spaces aimed to bring people together to exchange memories and replay the resulting soundscapes. Radiolaboratorio defined their project as an “open museography” because it evolves as it encounters the dynamics of a place in dispute, its size is adaptable, and the soundscapes that are both created and reproduced at the installation are enriched in every new place it inhabits.

Figure 4. Paisajes invisibles. Photograph courtesy of Mauricio Prieto.

The sound installations El canto de los yarumos (The Song of the Yarumos), (2015) and Cantos silentes en cuerpos de madera (Silent Songs in Wooden Bodies), (2017), by Leonel Vásquez, use voice recordings, soundscapes, and the chants of victims’ relatives to stress listening as a political act and as a central part of the dialogue surrounding reconciliation and symbolic reparations.

Figure 5. El canto de los yarumos. Photograph courtesy of Leonel Vásquez.

The first piece was installed in the three yarumo trees (Cecropia peltata) planted by victims at the Bogotá Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation (known as CMPR, from its initials in Spanish), while the second work was created in Santo Domingo (in the department of Arauca) as part of the symbolic reparations after the government was condemned by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for the massacre it perpetrated against this community. In both cases, Vásquez relates corporeal and tactile experience by placing transducers on the roots of the trees, using the mechanical conduction of sound through the tree trunks to propose a form of listening based on physical contact. At the CMPR, the artist installed chairs next to the yarumos, which subtly interrupted the quotidian nature of the space and made it so that, when visitors casually took a seat, they began to feel the sounds that vibrated through the trees. Both works took as their jumping-off point questions of what we should learn from these events, what to say to someone who might want to reconnect with these experiences and the messages behind them. The answers, made up of poems, songs, and stories, proposed a close and personal relationship with the listener.

The anti-monumental and the notion of intimacy are key ideas within the works by Ordóñez, Radiolaboratorio, and Vásquez mentioned above: Both Vásquez and Radiolaboratorio emphasize the anti-monumental as a fundamental axis for working in spaces of collective mourning, with listening as a multidimensional experience that implies temporal, corporeal, tactile, and emotional layers. These installations dialogue with the physical and social space they inhabit. Additionally, they recognize a difference between subjective memory and the ideal of truth in processes of reconciliation. All these works understand Memory as a subjective process based on open stories—non-definitive and created in direct dialogue with victims. Radiolaboratorio uses temporary, pop-up actions in public spaces, while Vásquez boosts the symbolic meaning of materials and places, creating subtle and intimate listening experiences that go beyond the acousmatic and recognize them as tactile-body experiences. Intimacy is also fundamental for Ordóñez, although explored from a nostalgic perspective and from the bodily experience emerging from an interaction with certain types of telephones (mostly those commonly used in the nineties).

Act III.

Carlos Castro and Fabio Melecio Palacios are artists whose works connect the violence of the colonial past with contemporary processes of exclusion. Rooted in a colonial caste system that established a social and hierarchical racial order, contemporary Colombia continues to deal with classism and racism inherited from the colonial era.

An important part of Carlos Castro’s oeuvre comes from the resignification of objects loaded with trauma. In 2013, Castro took inspiration from the confluence of three powers within the history of Colombia: the state, the church and drug traffickers. Right next to each other, in the borough of Los Mártires, stands the Basilica of the National Vow (Voto Nacional)[10], the Headquarters of the National Army’s Recruiting Command, and the “Bronx,” the city’s main illicit drug dispensary. The installation took place a few blocks away, in the colonial era church of Santa Clara, today a museum.

Figure 6. Capilla blanca. Photograph courtesy of Carlos Castro.

Capilla blanca (White Chapel), (2013) is a police squad car that replicates the interior decor of the church. In an experience that sits somewhere between claustrophobia and confessional, each visitor is “captured” for several minutes in the car in a sonic ambiance that integrates radio broadcasts, religious sounds (such as the Angelus), melodies from the military bands that play at certain times of day next to the church, plus a violent sound of knocking in the car.

Colombia is a predominantly Catholic country consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotional image of Jesus that refers to the metaphor of suffering and sacrifice. Potencias (Powers), (2013), part of the Legiones (Legions) series, features knives made by hand, using found materials such as rubber, wire or glass, that have been confiscated by the police. The artist uses these knives to build melodic percussion instruments, in which each knife plays an individual note in religious songs such as “Sagrado corazón en vos confío” (Sacred Heart in you I Trust) or “Tu reinarás” (You will reign). The name Potencias, derived from the religious iconography inherited from the colonial period, is taken from the Catholic argot that refers to the three golden flames placed on the sacred heart of Jesus. Castro updates the meaning of these melodies by contrasting them with hand-made knives that are the only means of defense for those who are not protected by the police, the state or the dominant religion.

Raíz (Root) follows a similar strategy to Potencias, although using a melody of indigenous origins found by the artist’s brother and collaborator in Les Flûtes Indiennes d’Amérique du Sud, a French compilation of melodies from different South American countries. Two sound sculptures are built out of basuco pipes (used for smoking unrefined coca-paste, some decommissioned, others bought by the artist directly from users) that revolve around a motor that emits puffs of air. This movement produces an earthy sound that recalls Andean wind instruments like the quena or the siku, while outlining the ritual melody “Nos Cedron” (composer unknown).

Placing this sound sculpture in the church provides a reading of the colonial power imposed on ancestral cultures that resulted in their eradication, removal from the public visibility, obscurity, and marginalization, and subjected the indigenous population to processes of urban, political, social, and cultural exclusion. Furthermore, the relationship between the sound produced by basuco pipes and the Andean melodies and timbres evoked speaks to the process of profaning coca, a sacred plant for various native cultures, progressively transformed and degraded into cocaine and basuco (coca paste).

Figure 7. Potencias. Photograph courtesy of Carlos Castro.

Figure 8. Raíz. Photograph courtesy of Carlos Castro.

The word “instrument” may be key to interpreting Castro’s works: the musical instrument, weapons as instruments of defense and protection, the instrument for consuming narcotics and, in a wider sense, religion, war, the police, the state, and music itself as instruments of domestication, persecution, marginalization, or oppression.

The work of Fabio Melecio Palacios is also related to long-term processes, defined by a particular geographic, historical, and social context. Fabio was born in Barbacoas, Nariño but moved as a young child to San Antonio, Valle del Cauca when his father found employment as a sugar cane harvester at the Central Castilla mill.

Valle del Cauca is known for its extensive sugar mills. This industry is rooted in colonial haciendas, with their production originally based on slave labor. Since at least the seventeenth century, the ownership and accumulation of land in the Valle del Cauca region has been concentrated primarily in the hands of the descendants of colonial settlers, as a direct consequence of the looting of indigenous societies that occurred during the colonial period. From the nineteenth century onwards, the social pyramid continued to be dominated by the landowners, while the material base of society passed from enslaved labor to the work of peons and tenants, combining the old colonial structure with other pseudo-bourgeois elements, in a process that slightly improved work conditions over time.[11]

In the 1980s, the reapers of Palacios’ father’s generation were hired directly by companies that provided benefits for their families. However, when the 1991 Constitution came into effect, with Colombia’s entrance into the global neoliberal system, new social relations of production—such as the concept of external hiring—came about, leading to precariousness of employment, deregulation and reduction of rural salaries (Castillo & Castaño, 2021). Contracts were shortened, workers had no guarantee of being hired again every year, and previous benefits such as paid school for workers’ children were lost. This change notably worsened conditions for reapers, who lost job stability and the certainty of pensions upon retirement.

Figure 9. BMR. Photograph courtesy of Fabio Melecio Palacio.

Figure 10. In a nearly ritual procedure, each reaper puts a red, brushed-cotton cloth on his leg, grabs the machete and puts on his protector. Photograph courtesy of Fabio Melecio Palacios.

Palacios’ sound installation from 2011, BMR (Bamba, Martillo y Refilón),[12] emerges from a desire to pay homage to his father and vindicate his labor as a sugar cane reaper. BMR and a previous piece, Bamba 45, are based on the everyday, personal act of sharpening a machete.

In BMR, 582 machetes hang from the ceiling, at a height that nearly brushes against the heads of visitors. A bright, repetitive, metallic, echoing sound of blades is reproduced in the space to reinforce the threat they pose to those who pass under the machetes and smell the soot from the burnt cane that comes from their old blades. This sound is a recording of the in-situ performance of three reapers sharpening their machetes—among them the artist’s father—and who seem to maintain a pace with the metallic clang of their blades as they knock off the soot every so often. Although it doesn’t belong specifically to a musical piece, this ritual does have melody and rhythm, and these turn into a kind of mantra as they repeat, over and over, in the room.

It’s those things that weigh on you, that sometimes you can’t knock down, take off or get rid of. From the reaper’s perspective, there are the working conditions: they have their tools, but the issue of hiring, their day to day, their way of living together in the same space, their cultural life, their identity is constantly under threat. That’s where the idea of entering a space where you feel threatened comes from. […] I thought that there was a performative action [in the act of sharpening the machete]. […] It becomes a nearly silent act: there is no voice, but there is the sound of a tool. That’s where I feel there is strength, in the cries of those who are gone, but the noise remains in the ear, in the mind. Each time you hear the sound of sharpening, there is an act of remembering. (Fabio Melecio Palacios, personal correspondence, 2021)

In contrast to the sounds of BMR, which were recorded by only three reapers, in Bamba 45 (presented in Cali in 2008, at the Museo La Tertulia and Beethoven Concert Hall), Palacios’ father, together with fourteen fellow sugar cane reapers, created a sound performance based on the gesture of sharpening their machetes in a sort of minga (an indigenous means of organizing collective labor).

Subtly, Palacios’ and Castro’s works refer to several layers of culturally and historically charged content through sound. Palacios recalls a familial inheritance and tradition passed down from father to son, but also a society that still maintains ways of operating that are based on extractivism and the precarization of labor, bringing to mind the labor of slaves on the colonial hacienda. On the other hand, in an almost anthropological approach, Carlos Castro is interested in cycles, roles, and characters that reemerge throughout history. His work establishes a connection between processes of colonization and expulsion, and between collective and individual dynamics, such as the users of the knives or of the used pipes in the instrument-machines. As Carolyn Birdsall has said, sounds of the past can be constituted as “echoes” in the present, in terms both of interviewee sound memories and of broader cultural narratives concerning social memory and identity. Rather than fix a determined linear narrative or image, sound can be drawn upon to prompt certain moods or feelings (Birdsall, 2009).

Epilogue

On April 28, 2021, an unprecedented social upheaval began in Colombia. The spark for this was a tax reform that sought to impose a tax increase on the middle and lower classes. At night, we heard shots and the intimidating sounds of helicopters, and watched an infinite scroll of videos mentioning the dates, times and places of police outbursts. By day, the street sounded of harangues, newscasts, Molotov cocktails and “less lethal” gunfire in a loop that echoed the complex fabric of Colombian conflicts and triggered social traumas within the population, in what Ben Anderson has called involuntary remembering, that enables the past to be re-encountered primarily as a value, unsystematic, [sic] attitude or mood rather than through a representation (2004). I would add that this social trauma is not only triggered in those who directly experienced the war in Colombia, but also in a wider population that has lived the conflict through the media, and through the memories of family and acquaintances.

There is a lot to listen to, here and now. Aural memory is constituted by a complex network of listening perspectives and sonic stimuli such as testimonies, soundscapes (both present and remembered) and every-day sounds, mediated by mass media, or devices such as sound art installations, sound sculptures, and music. Listening is a political act of opening up and reconciling. Still, there is a tension between audio’s promise to provide a neutral, just, and objective record, and the interests of whoever is recording and transmitting. Understanding the auditory dimension of conflict and critically listening to the past allows us to become aware of our agency in building the worlds we inhabit. At the same time, it puts into perspective the influence of subjective narrations, mass media, and telecommunications in the narratives we tell, the images and sounds we remember, and the way we construct the present.