A critical Analysis on "Purgare": One of Many Colombian Stories on Social Cleansing
Abstract:
Every year, thousands are selectively killed and displaced in social cleansing campaigns in Colombia announced in publicly-posted pamphlets. Also known as the “black hand”, the selective killings have become a hallmark of the country’s poorest neighborhoods. Often perpetrated by neighbors, under the auspices of paramilitary groups and with the complicity or even participation of local police, these murders are touted as the necessary procedures of order in places where official justice cannot reach. Drug users, petty criminals, LGBTQ folk and especially trans women, are the preeminent targets of such campaigns. Already largely labeled as deviant or marginal, those whose lives are threatened and who dare make official complaints are dismissed by those institutions tasked with their safety.
Purgare invites a consideration of social cleansing not from the perspective of the violence of its perpetrators, but through those who stand in resistance against it. This project accompanies a group of trans women who, faced with the extra-legal and legal dismissal of their lives, take recourse to magic to protect themselves and to reassert a modicum of agency. Bringing together photojournalism, anthropology, and artistic representation, the series and essay inhabits the magically real space created by these women, illuminating the powers they conjure in the worlds they create. Purgare stages the journeys of transformation crafted by these self-styled witches through their manipulations of plants and energies to forge lasting and powerful connections between new peoples and novel worlds.
Purgare is imagined between disciplines and knowledges in an effort to expand the bounds of story-telling traditionally produced about violence. It builds a space in which those who struggle against structural violence can meet to create new representations of themselves and together weave novel images of power and possibility.
Based on the stories of Stefania Grajales, Paola Caicedo and Catalina Lozano.
Fuente:
Biblioteca Virtual Banco de la República
Formatos de contenido:
Tesis
