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TITTLE:
VOCES, IMGENES Y MEMORIAS. Mxico-Colombia: 1980-2017 / VOICES, IMAGES & MEMORIES. MexicoColombia: 1980-2017
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Voces, Imgenes y Memorias. Mxico-Colombia: 1980-2017. (Voices, images & memories. Mexico-Colombia:
1980-2017 in Spanish) is a symposium proposed by the UNAMs Arts and Design Faculty based investigation
group: Image and Violence in Latin America (GI-IVLA by its acronym in Spanish), as an alternative approach to
the Violence phenomenon and how it has affected (and continues doing it) the cultural processes, visual
constructions and artistic production in a context that is constantly faced with the narco-violence. The symposium
pretends to be a tool that helps to identify and understand the differences between the social, political and
economic causes and consequences of the violence and the drug smuggling in both Mexico and Colombia as it
also explores the influence of this phenomena in the culture, the visual and artistic production in these countries.
This is achieved by rethinking each context nature through an open discussion with a highly qualified panel of
speakers from different disciplines that will help to understand the structure of each case with the objective to
reestablish the actual moment of Narco and its influence on the culture, specially, on the visual culture in Latin
America.
The symposium will take place between September the 20 and 22 of 2017 at the Contemporary Art University
Museum (MUAC by its acronym in Spanish) in Mexico City, seeking to analyze and answer: How is art response
before violence and drug smuggling in both countries? What is the Narco in each context? How is it established?
What are its [Narcos] processes and who get involved in them? Which cultures derive from it? Which characters
are generated? And what is Narcos actual moment in both nations?
CONCEPTUAL GUIDELINES:
Voices:
In both cases the term dao colateral1 is referring to the consequences that the conflict infringe over the bodies;
indifferently if they are directly or indirectly infringe: death, abduction, disappearance or torture, rips off the identity
and transforms the victims into voiceless entities. The Colombian memory construction exercise is a successful
restoration act of a social tissue tornned of by an armed conflict for almost half a century, but what happens when
collective memory is object of violence? This happens in Mexico where the response before this kind of memory
construction exercise and social demand organizations are blocked by the implementation of forgetfulness as a
political strategy that prevents a long-term social cohesion. In the other hand, the art has found in the memory a
creative source for its statements, seeking the reconstruction of those voices and versions of non-historic truths,
turning the spotlight over specific facts to give voice to the voiceless ones.
Images:
The image production processes are directly related with the ideology that constructs them as well as this ideology
is to its time. Nevertheless when this images are displayed as a domination strategy seeking the strengthen of the
hegemonic ideology using the mass culture and promoting conductual models as they legitimate the speeches,
like it occurred with Christian morality on the colonial times (and even today keeps a vast influence over most of
Latin Americas popular culture) the pretended normalization of violence, by the hegemony, as a way of life
presents a serious problematic and thats what happens with the Narco when it becomes a cultural reference of a
nation2.
Thats why the starting point of this event is the confrontation of two kinds of images that are related with the
violence: Those that expose explicitly Narcos violence and show those cuerpos rotos3. And the other one, th

(collateral damage) La narcomquina y el trabajo de la violencia: Apuntes para su decodificacin.

Rossana Reguillo. Reviewed 02/25/2016. http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/es/e-misferica82/reguillo
2
As, llegamos al siglo XXI y nos encontramos integrados como latinoamericanos va el narco(...)/
In hat way, we reach XXI century and we find ourselves integrated as Latin Americans by the
Narco() Omar Rincn. Todos llevamos un narco adentro. Un ensayo sobre la
narco/cultura/telenovela como modo de entrada a la modernidad. MATRIZes. Vol 7 No 2. (So
Paulo, Brasil 2013). p.2
3
(Broken bodies) Rossana Reguillo op. cit.

diverse cultural manifestations against that violence, specially, the images originated from the arts that demands,
provokes and asks along for a reflection over the conflict.
Narco:
How to think about the last decades in Mxico and Colombia without referring to Narco? The historical
development of this phenomenon prove that the term must be established parallel to the facts. Violence,
displacement, abductions, disappearances, deaths and war emerge as consequences that cannot be reduce just
to drug smuggling. Its evident that its about a system, sometimes explicit, always unexpected and still
undeciphered, theres a mafia that uses this systemic violence and in occasions is the government who gets
involved in its execution of the violent actions. The system of the Narcomachine where the idea of the Narco is
constructed and problematized from a transdiscilinpline suggests a first attempt to understand its mechanism and
a possibility to dismount its operational capacity.
State:
Only through a State with a specific set of characteristics its possible to explain the existence of Narco as a
phenomena and its diverse consequences over specific populations, as it happens with violence. In Mexico, as
well as in Colombia, the large list of crimes against humanity 4 shows that persons and public officers have get
involved not only on the execution of those crimes but also as intellectual authors of them. The empowerment of
armed corps reflects the implementation of necropolitics5 that through the activation of the States of Emergency
try to legitimate the use of violence and death, elaborating speeches, narratives, Historical Truths that only
complicates more the recognition of the guilty ones as this has happened in the Guerra contra el narcotrfico. To
point a narco-state means to stablish another perspective from where to study the topics referring to violence and
mafia.
JUSTIFICATION:
The importance of comparing Mexico with another Latin American country where the violence produced by the
drug smuggling is recognized at an international level lays in the need to create a conjunct panorama of both cases
through a historical review that emphasizes in the causes and consequences that brings us to Mexicos actual
moment: the conflict or war against the Narco. From here we can discuss the different phenomena around violence,
drug smuggling and culture, those that makes them more complex, those that construct them and the cultural
processes that derive from them.
OBJETCIVE:
To open a space of dialogue between experts, academics, researchers and artists from Mexico and Colombia to
expose, analyze and compare the social, political and causes and consequences of the drug smuggling and
violence phenomena in Mexico and Colombia and how they influence over the cultural and artistic production
processes in a context of Narcos extreme violence.
Further than strengthen the links between Mexico and Colombia through the academic dialogue, as a step to find
a conjunct answer to the violence situation on Latin America, we seek to strength to relations and work between
the UNAMs institutions, in this case the Contemporary Art University Museum (MUAC) and the alumni of the Arts
and Design Faculty (FAD)...
4

Inconsistent as the forced disappearance of the 43 students in Iguala, Mexico; the break of Mexicos
greatest drug lord from a maximum security prison and the constant abuses from the state forces as
well as the threatening situation of the journalists in the country.
5
Lo us para referirme (...) a aquellas figuras de la soberana cuyo proyecto central es la
instrumentalizacin generalizada de la existencia humana y la destruccin material de los cuerpos y
populaciones humanos juzgados como desechables o superfluos (...)en las cuales el poder, o el
gobierno, se refieren o apelan de manera continua a la emergencia, y a una nocin ficcionalizada o
fantasmtica del enemigo (...) Que por estar amenazados podemos matar sin distincin a quienes
juzguemos como nuestro enemigo. / I used it to refer () to those sovereign figures whose central
project is the general instrumentalization of human existence, the material destruction of the bodies
and human populations pointed out as disposable or superfluous () in where the power or the
government, refer or appeal in a constant way to the emergency, and to a fictionalized or ghostly
notion of enemy () That only for the threaten we can kill without distinction to those we judge our
enemies
Achille Mbembe, Necropoltica, una revisin en Esttica y violencia: necropoltica, militarizacin y
vidas lloradas. (Ciudad de Mxico: ediciones MUAC, 2012) p. 135.