Narratives of the Future: Senses, Creativity and the Arts of Dwelling and Survival in Colombia’s Truth Commission is concerned with creative forms of narrating the future through different languages of collective pain as particular modes of articulating experience, whether these languages are corporeal/performative, visual, sonic, textual or others. This project is sustained on a vision of ‘peace on a small scale’ that seeks to transform of the imaginaries ossified over years of war and armed conflict.

After four years of intensive work, on 28th July 2022 the Colombian Truth Commission presented its final report on nearly six decades of widespread civil conflict in Colombia. Truth Commissions, in general, have as a key aim to listen and to hear people's experiences of violence. This requires an ethical act of attunement and calibration: in the best of circumstances, it is a deep, polyphonic, polychronic, multimodal listening. Experiences of war are rendered intelligible (and audible).

One of the twelve volumes of the report, the Testimonial Volume “When Birds Didn’t Sing: Stories of Colombia’s Armed Conflict” compiles 260 “stories within stories” of war. We are interested in the textures and modulations in which this Testimonial Volume of Colombia’s Truth Commission Final Report is mediated, reinterpreted, or socially appropriated. During the development of the Testimonial Volume, it was clear that we needed to develop a method that could allow us to tackle testimonies in a more complex way. We needed to find other ways of knowing that could capture the diversity of forms in which testimony takes shape and that often are expressed in the languages of image, sound, or touch. The Testimonial Volume constitutes an integrated effort that bridges the written book (a collection of short stories) and a sonic platform called Sound and Memory, which includes several sound spaces, podcasts and sonic narratives. As a form of circulation of the Commission’s work, and in an effort for public engagement, the method developed for this volume also includes ritualised readings, spaces in which sounds and testimonies are intertwined and shared to different communities around the country. In other words, sound, and performance are combined.  

Within ART, we aim to continue exploring arts as a form of testimony and as a creative platform to challenge the traditional forms in which testimonies have been used in  the analysis of war and conflict.