Recently, the Army and FARC-EP guerrillas widely deployed aerial bombardment and improvised landmines in Colombia as warfare technologies to control territories and contain adversaries. These devices kill and mutilate bodies and also penetrate and scar landscapes. What can explosive military technologies and their aftermath tell us about how morgue doctors, demining surveyors, and campesinos temporalize the materiality of war? This paper is a collaborative ethnographic exploration of retazos—stories that we craft of the explosive-related fragments we collected and produced from our separate fieldwork in state morgues and minefields. We offer a pair of retazos that illustrate how these practitioners give meaning to the material traces of war, and how these materialities—and the ways they are experienced—are shaped by temporal configurations. Together, these retazos show how people and their environments endure war, live despite the war, and make life out of war.
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