Performing Bogotá: Memories of an Urban Bombing

Abstract

In this chapter I want to explore a particular instance of the way con-testing narratives relating to the memory of human loss in the context of the Colombian armed conflict played out in the city of Bogota. In other words, how this city — in which I lived for ten years — located in the geographical heart of Colombia, performed different ways of under-standing the memory of acts of war and its politics.¹ For this, I will focus on a single violent event and an exhibition of artworks arising from it. The event and its aftermath concern the rebuilding of the social club El Nogal after it was bombed by the leftist guerrilla organisation FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) on 7 February 2003,² and the exhibition is of a series of 12 photographs and a 12-hour durational video installation that were produced shortly after the bombing. The artwork, by the Colombian artist Maria Elvira Escallón, is entitled Desde Adentro (From Within, 2004) and was exhibited for the first time 19 months after the bombing of El Nogal. The way in which this violent event was presented to the public, along with the way the edifice was rebuilt and how the related artwork responded to the incident, provide an opportunity to examine how the memory of the victims of violence in the context of armed conflict in Colombia is incorporated into everyday urban life, as seen in the relationship between the architectural performance of memory on the one hand, and memorial works that contest the former on the other.