8:24
This was an experience for me to make, as I went through hundreds of testimonies of victims (or their families) who suffered from the violence from the Colombian military, to the ELN, to the different paramilitary groups, to the FARC and female victims of assault through the different periods of armed conflict. I have done a lot of projects recently on the idea of constructing archives and stories, and something that has been on my mind a lot recently is the lived experiences of victims and the numerical definitions of massacre and collective trauma. So in this project, I created a clock that through the period of ten minutes, displays a unique version of these stories. To be able to view this clock, the left-most side displays the current minute represented by the number of words, the middle column represents the ten’s place digit of the seconds (thus it changes every 10 seconds) and the rightmost column represents the one’s digit.
The hardest part of this piece was trying to find a way of approaching this sensitive topic in a proper and respectful way, I translated a lot of the anecdotes at first quite literally, but many of the stories were violent and incredibly difficult to digest. There is also often a difficulty in trying to describe the violence that exists in Latin America without make it the defining quality of these nations. It often feels like as a Colombian, so many of our conversations are focused on avoiding the armed conflict as a topic, it felt uncomfortable to make this piece but I still made it because it is a very real struggle for many, and for those who live it every day through memories.
4:10-419
10:00
here is an earlier revision! CW: More explicit mentions of sexual assault and violence.
NOTES:
(CW: Mentions of violence)
EDIT: 9/17/2020
I edited the text to be slightly bigger, and added more variation to the statements so that it doesn’t feel as repetitive!