Invisible Voices: Women Victims of the Colombian Conflict
María Mencía
This project is the outcome of my current research as Co-Investigator of the project ‘Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict’, funded by the AHRC and undertaken in conjunction with an interdisciplinary team of experts working in different fields of research.
The website presents the research process through photographs of the workshops, installations, sound, videos and slide shows and the digital art outcome.
We invited members of the Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres (women from across Colombia) and from the corporation of Zoscua (from Boyacá) to take part in co-creation workshops in Bogota, to discuss through storytelling and creative practices, their experience as victims of the Colombian conflict. This is the fruit of this amazing collaborative experience of exchange, learning and empowerment with the voices of black, indigenous, white, women of different ethnicities; fighters with resilience, dignity and strength to stand up every day to create a better, more equitable, fairer world, and with this, a new future for their families and communities.
Keywords: women, memory, race, discrimination, sexual violence, pain, salvation, injustice, human rights, struggle, gender gap, empowerment; storytelling, inclusive, multimodal, translation.
About the Artist
María Mencía is an Associate professor in Media and Course Leader of the BA in Media and Communication at Kingston School of Art, London, UK. She is one of the executive members of the Electronic Literature Organisation Boards of Directors (ELO) and book editor for the "Electronic Literature" series with ELO- Bloomsbury Press.
She is the co-investigator of the research project Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict, funded by the AHRC. Her role is leading the creative team working on the artistic research project titled Women Invisible Voices with the aim to make women participants in the construction of historical memory.
Her field of research in language media-arts, in the area of e-poetry and digital arts, has a focus on the techno-poetic-aesthetic space of multimodal textualities. She has been the runner up of ‘The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature’ with The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic, (August 2018) and ‘The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature’ for her publication #WomenTechLit (2017).