Resumen de Remembering Place: Memory and Violence in Medellin, Colombia
This article examines the connections between people, memories and violence through an ethnographic account of the ways places are rendered meaningful in Medellin, Colombia. In this city, daily life has been profoundly affected by a multilayered violent conflict where multiple armed actors, scenarios and forms of violence interplay. The article describes practices of place-making such as landmarking, place-naming, soundscaping, and imagining that invest places with significance and maintain a local implicit knowledge that allows circulation and survival in the city. Through these practices of place-making, memory has become a bridging practice that restores a sense of place to the experience of displacement that violence inflicts in peoples lives. These processes, however, are at risk of becoming emptied of meaning by the power of widespread violences to suppress and fragment and by the ways terror and fear are remaking, the social landscape.
