Abstract

From 1980-1995/2000 Peru underwent a civil conflict that pitted various armed groups (including the state) against each other, while exacerbating internal community tensions. Like most conflicts, the subsequent national historical accounts are confused, limited, and partisan. While the work of the Peruvian truth commission (CVR) is in many ways exemplary, it faced challenges and limitations. In the present-day, the work of the CVR is largely disparaged by Peru’s political elites. In the on-going national debate over the past, local memories are often elided or sidestepped.

This presentation analyses the narrative structure of a series of artworks, which emerged as the result of NGO initiatives in the Peruvian highlands. The first corpus comes from a “campesino” (rural folk) art contests held during the 1980s, another contest held in the wake of the CVR (Rescate por la memoria), and the third comes from arpillera textile workshops run by REDINFA, an NGO network for women and children in Peru, in 2004 and 2008. In these art series, temporal and thematic structures frame the everyday memory practices about recent past violence. With one eye to the past, and another to the future, artist-participants reflect on their reality. The focus of this presentation is on the content of these artworks as a means to access local memories and their view on social repair and reconciliation. As well, this paper considers the methodology in play: the use of artistic and visual representation techniques by NGOs as social repair and transitional justice mechanisms, as well as the ways historians might make a visual turn in their analysis of past human rights violations.

Bio

Cynthia E. Milton works on history in the Andes, in particular on historical representations of violence in contemporary Peru and perceptions of poverty in colonial Ecuador. She is the author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in 18th Century Ecuador (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), winner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize of the Conference on Latin American History, a co-editor of The Art of Truth-telling about Authoritarian Rule (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), a co-editor of Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2011), and editor of The Arts of Truth telling in Post-Shining Path (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). She presently holds a Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship at the Latin American Institute of the Freie Universität (Berlin), and is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Latin American History in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal.