The memory of earth and land dispossession in Urabá

Abstract

In this article, the authors discuss their work in Coquitos from 2019–2021 with the Colombian Truth Commission and Forensic Architecture. They consider conflicts around land tenure, violent land dispossessions and land grabbing as the sedimented articulation of multiple environmental, legal, economic, and violent processes that are drawn out over decades. Their mode of analysis is based on a visual methodology using ‘situated testimony’ of ‘earthly memory’ that reflects the need to combine modes of seeing and understanding earth systems through the historicity of such slow violence. This focus on earthly memory allows for an approach to violence that resists the commodification of the environment and its reduction to an inert object, or a mere prize of war (what is often reduced to a ‘conflict over resources’). Rather, by focusing these situated testimonies on the theme of earthly memory, the authors pursue an analysis that underscores the environment as an active agent in the conflicts and forms of violence that are at the heart of land dispossession. The environment should be understood, they argue, as both a mode and medium through which violence is conducted, rather than a passive victim on which violence is executed. This is how they arrive at a method of situated testimony that could be employed as a way of addressing the role of earthly memory in the long history of the Colombian war.