by Erika Márquez
The Gallery of Memory, a street exhibit organized by Colombian activists affiliated with the Victims of State Crimes Movement to memorialize human rights violations, connects individual cases of human rights abuse with a larger critique of state violence. Through this exercise, activists bring together earlier and current violations of human rights and provide a framework that situates present undemocratic currents within the trajectory of the state’s politics of exception and its correlates, national security and the internal enemy. Critical reflection on the potential for place-based, coproduced resignification of security measures in a context of systemic violence suggests that the Gallery has become part of the movement-based human rights repertoire for democratizing citizenship in Colombia.
