The Representation of Violence in the
Colombian Context.
Analysis of Los incontados: un tríptico
by Mapa Teatro
Name: Jorge González Tejedor Student Number: 12771600 Course: Master Thesis
Program: MA International Dramaturgy Academic Year: 2020 - 2021
Contents
Introduction………..p. 3 Chapter 1. Colombia: Historical Context……….p. 8 Chapter 2. Violent Pluralism: subnational actors and international forces. Decolonial
gestures……….p. 18 Chapter 3. Images, media and violence………..…p. 26 Chapter 4. Analysis Los incontados: un tríptico………p. 32 Conclusion………..p. 44 Bibliography.………..…p. 48!
Introduction
Mapa Teatro, founded in Paris in 1984 by Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden, and established in Bogotá since 1986, defines itself as an artists’ laboratory dedicated to trans-disciplinary creation. In 1
all their productions (actions and performances, text-based plays, sound and video installations, operas and cabarets, among many other forms) this Colombian groups deploys a huge range of ar-tistic disciplines. This is also the case of the theatrical montage Los incontados: un tríptico (2014), the object of study of the present analysis. Departing from the use and research of what they call “Live Arts”, Mapa Teatro looks for the transgression of geographical, linguistic and artistic borders, conveying both local and global issues in a process they call “thought-montage” operations. In this sense, as Kati Röttger notes, Mapa’s name is programatic for it points to the attitude of mapping not only a reality, but also a cartography of the limits (if there are) of the performing arts. With the 2
combination of performance, new media and scientific investigation, they conduct experimental work that deals with collective and past memories, present experiences, documents, archives and fiction, all of them connected and brought to live through and within visual and auditive images, and through the knowledge of different trans-disciplinary artists as well as people from local com-munities working together. All these aspects form what they call their Laboratory of Social Imagi-nation.
In this laboratory experimental temporary communities are established, where individuals, groups and the city can interact. According to Heidi Abderhalden, inside the laboratory and the new-formed community the interaction is always done around one particular question, used as a departing point, establishing a central topic that allows them to merge micro-politics and poetics by means of multi-form visual and auditive dramaturgies. The present study will be mainly focused on these two areas: the micro-politics of the topic that will be analyzed as part of the content of Los incontados: un
tríp-tico and the poetics present in its scenic dramaturgy. Although both aspects will be separated for a
theoretical reflection, I will demonstrate in the concluding analysis how they are deeply intercon-nected and cannot be separated in the final result that Mapa Teatro presents to the spectators.
For further information visit their official webpage: https://www.mapateatro.org
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Kati Röttger: Dramaturgies of Decolonialisation. Script of the lecture Dramaturgies of Decolonialisation
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Los incontados: un tríptico is the third of the four plays that conform the series Anatomía de la vio-lencia en Colombia (2010-2017), compiled of Los santos inocentes (2010), Discurso de un hombre decente (2012), Los incontados: un tríptico (2014) and the final play, La despedida (2017). This
series of plays reveals three sides of Colombian political violence —paramilitarism, narco-violence, and guerrilla— through the motif of festivities and parties. According to Mapa Teatro, parties have been infiltrated inside the society by actors of the violent conflict present in the Andean country for several decades now, hence, these parties have become a device for celebrating both life and death. Therefore, the topic and question that links all of them is, as I have mentioned, political violence, exploring how it has affected the spheres of the public, the private and the intimate, irrupting th-rough and permeating all layers of Colombian society. Los santos inocentes analyses how that vio-lence affects a community, localized in Guapi, a village of Colombian pacific coast. Discurso de un
hombre decente focuses on the public sphere and explores how narco violence affects a whole
so-ciety, while Los incontados: un tríptico, the one that will be further analyzed, is deeply focused on the most intimate sphere, exploring the consequences of political violence on the lives of the unk-nown, those who are not spoken of, who have been left apart from official history as the name itself expresses (The Unaccounted). These three plays are conceived as a triptych, through which diffe-rent faces of the conflict are exposed and revealed. Later on, this same formal idea of the triptych will also be adopted as a dramaturgical concept for the play Los incontados: un tríptico.
In this regard, I analyse the concept of political violence in Colombia, from the perspective of mi-cro-politics as suggested by Mapa Teatro. Their laboratory’s social and artistic research and further productions are very much interested in studying the violent conflict from the bottom up, what it means to explore not the big events and dates that appear in official history, but to immerse them-selves (and the spectators) in the consequences of this conflict on common people’s lives. For a bet-ter understanding of this reality, in chapbet-ter 1 I will contextualize the play from a historical point of view, explaining in a general way the social and historical context in which Los incontados: un
tríp-tico is situated. I will go through the formation of the main violent actors that have played a role
(and still do in some cases) in Colombian political violence and that are present in Mapa Teatro’s 2014 montage. I will focus on the context of the creation of guerrillas and paramilitary forces, very much present in rural areas, as well as the influence of narco violence. After an essential historical contextualization, in chapter 2 I will approach the concept of violence from the perspective of the micro-politics that interests Mapa Teatro. For this purpose, I will rely on the concept of ‘violent plu-ralism’ suggested and developed by Arias and Goldstein (2010). Their perspective helps depart from
the understanding of violence as a direct consequence of how democracy and the different institu-tions have been established and developed from their origins, what has led to a very much intricate and violent situation key to the configuration of present Colombian identity. However, is also im-portant to stress the role of international and colonialist forces, who have highly influenced Colom-bia’s democratic structure. The plurality in the use of force and violence by both official and non-official armed actors, has had a great impact on people’s lives, and that is exactly what Mapa Teatro suggests and analyses in its play Los incontados: un tríptico.
However, we cannot neglect the fact that Mapa Teatro, which is deeply focused on Colombian ac-tuality, also looks beyond its borders, understanding their country’s reality inside the bigger picture, specially taking into consideration how determinant colonialism has been and still is in the configu-ration of Latin American identities. In this regard, Diana Taylor has been one of the main scholars to relate theatre in Latin American context with colonialism, and I believe we can understand the work performed by Mapa Teatro as a development and a follow-up of what Taylor defined as a Theatre of Crisis that started to gain power and relevancy in the 1960s and 70s (1991). In this text, 3
she speaks of several kinds of theatrical activities in the south American continent that underwent a widespread process of revision, turning their powers of investigation on themselves, in a productive attempt of examining their role in colonial cultural domination, of forging a constructive native identity and hence, reshaping themselves into an instrument of decolonization, such as Walter Mig-nolo subscribes 23 years later in his essay “Looking for the Meaning of Decolonial Gesture” (2014). So in order to deeply understand Mapa Teatro’s politics is also crucial to understand their work as a ‘decolonial gesture’, a movement, an action which carries a decolonial sentiment and/or intention, that is engaged in the project and processes of re-exitence, re-surgence and re-emergence of the ways of living that coloniality repressed, suppressed or disavowed in the name and justifica-tion of ‘modernity’ as salvajustifica-tion (Mignolo 2014). All in all, the first two chapters will conform the theoretical framework of the content of the play, from local to global violent realities, what constitu-tes a crucial part of Mapa Teatro’s dramaturgy.
However, their dramaturgy is not only developed from the content of the play, but also from its ‘vi-suality’ and ‘audibility’, from its formal elements. As I have explained before, Mapa Teatro as a
The main reference suggested by Taylor for this Theatre of Crisis in Colombia is Enrique Buenaventura.
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See chapter 5 “Destroying the Evidence: Enrique Buenaventura” in Taylor, Diana. Theatre of Crisis. Drama
community of creators are not only concerned about the scientific research they conduct around a particular topic, but also about the way the different ‘live arts’ they use can interact together for sta-ging that particular topic, while exploring their capacities and limits. In this sense, they are creators of images and imagery. Through the combination of theatrical forms, live music, pre-recorded sounds, and new media, they create what Daniel Villegas Velez defines as dramaturgy of pastiche, consisting on the combination and superposition of elements which do not offer an easy identifica-tion or recogniidentifica-tion, however, it has the power of referencing a violent reality without representing it. The mise en scène of Los incontados: un tríptico unveils through a very particular party the fra4
-gile threshold that separates celebration from violence in Colombia, and how this last one literally invades not only a family’s living room, but also the life and the imaginary of a little girl, what re-presents the future of the country. The dramaturgy of this mise en scène is based on the concept of the triptych of the pictorial art: a formal device consisted of three different sections that are articula-ted by hinges. Following this image, Mapa Teatro creates a montage in which they gather elements from the previous plays (Los santos inocentes and Discurso de un hombre decente) to see how they irrupt inside the private space of the living room and the intimate space of the girl’s imaginary.
In chapter 3 I will analyze the poetics of the play in terms of Image Studies. I will rely on the con-cepts of image, media and body —a triangle suggested by Hans Belting (2005)— that I believe very much relevant for analyzing Los incotados. These three elements are at the core of visual and audi-tive dramaturgy. As aforementioned, Mapa Teatro deals with multiple images, through multiple me-dia and with and towards a multiplicity of bodies, both on stage and as spectators. Theatre as a spa-ce and medium offers the possibility of staging images characterized by their ‘prospa-cessuality’, mea-ning that they ‘happen’ (Belting 2005, 302) in present time and space. This particularity offers the spectators the possibility of witnessing the instant formation of images. Hence, it gives the audience an insight into their mediality. Media, according to Belting makes sense of the agent by which ima-ges are transmitted. In other words, they transmit the very form in which we perceive imaima-ges (Bel-ting 2005, 302). Nowadays, in a globalized and networked world, images have become essential for international cultural communication. However, media is usually controlled by institutions and ser-ves the interests of political power. Hence, theatre offers a space of reflection of the medial violence in images by making this relationship visible. As Kati Röttger and Alexander Jackob state, political theatre is hardly conceivable without an explicit criticism of images and their media (Röttger and
Villegas Velez, Daniel,"#Orpheus & Mapa Teatro”, (Lecture, Universiteit van Amsterdam – Bushuis, 16th
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Jackob 2007, 2). I believe this idea is useful in approaching the images produced by Mapa Teatro. As aforementioned, by combining different art forms they deploy a multiplicity of images through multiple media revealing this interconnection, making it visible. This way, a new possible interac-tion with images emerge as a political act. Images, both audible and visible, happen in front of the spectators during the limited timeframe of the performance, allowing us to reflect on how violence is not mainly contained in them, but on the way they are distributed by the different media. Media that are controlled by the different actors of the conflict. Hence, going back to Villegas, Mapa Tea-tro deploys on stage a chaotic invasion of poetic images that makes reference to a chaotic and vio-lent reality without mimetically representing it.
Chapter 4 then will consist on the analysis of Los incontados: un tríptico. Taking into consideration the theoretical elements discussed in the previous chapters, separated in content and form for an ea-sier study, I will then put them in conversation with one another and with the performance itself in order to speak of the political aesthetics deployed by Mapa Teatro, what configures their very artis-tic identity. I will demonstrate how in the case of this Colombian theatre company, aestheartis-tics are put at service of a political position and message that speaks not only of local matters, such as poli-tical violence and how it affects local people, but also of global ones, such as colonialism and the influence and relation of international forces in the development of a violent oppressed society.
Chapter 1. Colombia: Historical Context.
In order to have a better understanding of the sociopolitical context which Mapa Teatro relies on for their research and creation of Anatomía de la violencia en Colombia, and concretely of Los
incon-tados: un tríptico, I am going to address the history of Colombia focusing on the emergence of the
different armed actors that conform that violent anatomy: guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffic-kers; attending to aspects such as the relationships between them and the State, and how they have influenced and affected Colombian citizens. It is important to stress the fact that this historical con-text does not pretend be a detailed comprehensive analysis of the violent situation in which the An-dean country have been immersed, but to present and understand the different armed actors that conform Colombia’s violent cartography, with the purpose of recognising them later on in Mapa Teatro’s play. Colombian history is one of the most complex ones in Latin America, and maybe in the world, so this chapter could never do justice to that history. At least I will try to highlight the main leads for understanding this ‘intractable’ conflict, as Heidi Burgess and Guy M. Burgess defi-ne it (2003) .
Heidi and Guy Burgess describe ‘intractable conflicts’ as those that are impossible, or highly com-plicated to resolve, or those who stubbornly elude resolution (Burgess and Burgess, 2003). This does not imply that they are hopeless or that they are not worth of dealing with. On the contrary, extensive and deep analysis and understanding are needed in order to tackle them. Jenny Pearce in her book Colombia, inside the labyrinth (1990) tries to unravel the widespread image of Colombian conflict as a tangled knot with no discernible beginning or end. She traces that knot back to Bolívar, because as she states ‘some of the fundamental dilemmas of building a nation were posed during the struggle for independence and never subsequently resolved’ (Pearce 1990, 4).
During the colonization period, gold became the main export of the so called New Kingdom of Granada (1564 - 1718) and the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada (1718 - 1810), and two Colombias emerged during this period, a separation that lasted until the first decades of Independence. The part of the west, where the mining was done by means of slave-owning structures, and the east part, fundamentally agricultural and manufacturing. However, a landowning elite based mainly around Bogotá dominated both parts. Colonial society was hierarchical and stratified, this generated many social tensions. Between 1810 and 1824 the Independence War took place. Simón Bolívar, the first president of Gran Colombia, searched for a formula which would create a strong, coherent and
ef-fective state, but his attempt was thwarted by local elites, who immersed themselves in their own power struggles during the post-independency years.
During the 19th century, Colombia lived through a permanent war, as the historian Gonzalo Sán-chez describes (2006). The 14 years of the struggles for independence were followed by other ar-med conflicts such as civil wars, uprisings, two international wars with Ecuador and several coup d’état. The two political parties responsible for this warfare, the Liberal and the Conservative, who-se formation date officially from the late 1840s, still dominate Colombian political life. According to Pearce, at the very beginning, neither party could be identified clearly in terms of distinct eco-nomic or social interests, and their relation with the church became the only issue through which both parties could be distinguished. Conservatives were more inclined to maintain the status quo, for which the church was a guarantor of social order, while Liberals sought to modernise the state and saw the church as a stronghold of privilege. However, both parties together with landowners formed the political, social and economic elites who tried to establish a democratic formulae inside a political reality profoundly elitist, undemocratic and unstable. The beginnings of República de Colombia were defined by an exclusionary republicanism, where only a small portion of the popu-lation was allowed to vote —mainly the elites aforementioned—, while the remainder (mestizos, mulattos, indigenous and black people, who constitute the vast majority) were largely excluded from political participation and court protection (Caballero 2006). All in all, we could assert that the roots of Colombia’s present instability lay in a history defined by three centuries of violent colonial subjugation, and a century of social and political warfare that must have had an inevitable impact on the country’s political culture, and that lead us directly to the 20th century and the emergence of new violent actors that configure the present situation.
As a result of the arrival of significant immigration from Europe and Asia, the increase of the indus-trial sector and the consequent empowerment of certain segments of an urban working class, differ-ent political movemdiffer-ents and parties emerged that challenged the two traditional parties, demanding greater inclusion in political participation and collective rights. Before the Cold War most Latin American countries were considered democratic, normally under the form of a democratic social-ism. However, this was interrupted during the aforementioned period, when in many Latin Ameri-can countries military coups took place and developed in further dictatorships that once more used violence and new technologies of repression in order to crush and impose themselves above social movements and sectors that were seen as threatens to national stability.
Nonetheless, this was not the case of Colombia, which never suffered clear and long periods of dic-tatorships. This is the reason it is considered one of the oldest democratic countries in Latin Ameri-ca. After a period of two decades of conservative hegemony, another of the Liberal party took place from 1930 to 1946. However, this de facto duopoly and oligarchy based on clientelism monopolised wealth and political power, favoring an economic progress for social elites while the majority of the population was living in poverty. For this reason among others, during the 1940s the migration from rural to urban areas grew up quickly. New leaders emerged, such as Gaitán, who was ahead of one section of the Liberal Party and who started to speak clearly about the rift that separated the ‘mas-ses’ and the ‘oligarchy’ and urged the first to confront the second. In this new age of radio (an ele-ment that acquire a lot of relevancy in Los incontados: un tríptico), political messages spread wi-dely and quickly. The assassination of Gaitán in 1948 provoked a spontaneous uprising, now refe-rred to as the Bogotazo, and the country began its terrible and cruel period of La Violencia (1948-1965). Its first phase (1948-1953) was the most cruel and violent when almost 200,000 peo-ple died. Not only the poorest sectors of the urban areas rioted, but also workers, small traders and the lower middle class, who found in the Liberal party their political identity. During those years, the violence generated was done in name of the political confrontation between Liberal and Con-servatives. Although at one level La Violencia appeared once more as a political problem between the two traditional parties —where the last ones were in charge of the state and the former ones tried to mobilize their majoritarian support to overthrow them—, on deeper level, the conflict un-leashed a host of other conflicts: social, political, economic and even personal. Repression fell hea-vily upon the uprising movements, both in the cities and in rural areas. In order to ‘maintain order’ armed forces became a crucial actor in the country, and states of exception started to be used by the government as a mechanism to legitimize those military actions against political opponents and even civilians. Repression and executions led to the formation of leftist social movements, the so 5
called self-defense guerrillas, that tried to resist the persecution of the Conservatives. These groups, along with campesino movements grew stronger in rural areas, where the presence of the State was lower.
States of exception were transformed from a provisional measure into a technique of government (Agam
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-ben 2005, 2), a mechanism used by the State to achieve a long-term institutional stability. This state of ex-ception has been a reality in Colombia from 1949 until 1991, when the current Constitution was signed, for-ming a cumulative total of 30 years of state of exception (Agamben 2005, 539).
In 1956 both Liberal and Conservative parties reached a new agreement called Frente Nacional, by which they would alternate in power every four years during a minimum period of 16 years (Pierce 1990, 61). Although this pact officially brought La Violencia to an end, the same elite that had been in charge before this cruel period, emerged once again, in full control after it. Social and economic reality changed profoundly, as the uneven and unrestricted expansion of capitalism brought wealth at the same time that it accentuated poverty. However, the political elite remained incapable of ad-dressing the process of change. As a consequence, two conflicting economies emerged: a ‘formal’ and measured one with statistics of economic growth, and the other, the so-called ‘informal’ econ-omy, where the majority of people lived and worked. As the still increasing urban population was not supported by employment opportunities and the provision of fundamental services and housing, a substantial middle class was left out of the ‘success’ of the measured economy, what enlarged even more the difference between classes. Middle and lower classes whose economic wellbeing 6
could not be guaranteed, were unable to match their ‘capitalist’ aspirations with concrete economic gains, what provoked an increase of criminality in the cities, and generated, parallel to that ‘irregu-lar’ economy, a violent underworld.
Furthermore, many political ideologies were left outside from the Frente Nacional agreement as well as from political representation. For this reason, and all the aforementioned —lack of land, poor working conditions, lack of social measures, clientelism, corruption of the institutions, repres-sion, states of alarm and the extreme cruel violence that had been going on for over 10 years during La Violencia— favored the apparition of guerrilla movements in the early 1960s challenging the domination of traditional parties and proposing an alternative ruling order. In 1964 the First Guerril-la Conference of the Southern Front took pGuerril-lace, led by the Communist Party, and in 1966 the exis-tence of the group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) as a guerrilla army was fully institutionalized. They began to expand their influence by entering in different regions of the country as a social movement, but remaining for most of the decade mainly as a defensive organisa-tion, with roots among peasants that after La Violencia kept facing constant harassment by powerful landowners and ranchers that were supported by the army. Peasants for whom communism was less a political ideology than a strategy for survival, found in this group the leadership of their self
It is important to stress that classes were also (and mainly) defined by the color of the skin. As the Nigerian
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activist Chika Okoró explains, ‘colorism’ began with slavery. The mass violation of black slave and indige-nous women by white colonizers gave birth to ‘mulatos’ and ‘mestizos’. In the colonial context, privilege was given to those whose skin color was ‘whiter’, creating also a hierarchy inside the oppressed communi-ties. This ‘colorism’ keep existing nowadays statistically favoring ‘whiter’ people in the access to education or in economic incomes as the scholar Hunter (2002) demonstrates.
fense. Roldán (2010) and Gutierrez (2004) explain as an example the situation in the Oriente Antio-queño region, where FARC and ELN set camps during this first decade of guerrilla movements. At first these guerrillas occupied a space that had been left blank by the State, dealing with local prob-lems and community conflicts. Hence, the proximity between these insurgent groups and the civic population, added to the isolation from central power, and the mutual assistance needed for their development, all forged a first natural relationship between them. As guerrillas were non-legal movements, their economic financing was done by means of kidnaps, targeting people with political or economic influence, a revolutionary taxation to landowners and ended up drawing on the cultiva-tion and produccultiva-tion of illegal coca crops, what allowed them to increase in size and power during the following years.
The ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional) was set up in 1964. Its first public appearance was in 1965, holding the town of Simacota for two hours, although, according to Pearce, time after, they looked at their beginning years with self-criticism (Pearce 1990, 168). The ELN gained a great deal of publicity and sympathy when a radical priest, Camilo Torres, joined its lines at the end of 1965. Torres is a figure that will appear on Los incontados: un tríptico, through the radio, where he re-peats the message: “Vamos a acabar con el carnaval, y empezar ahora en serio la revolución”. Befo-re taking up the armed struggle, TorBefo-res attempted to build a political movement to unify all hostile groups to the Frente Nacional. Camilo’s charisma generated an initial wave of support. He launched a newspaper in which he asserted the need for the people to unite against the stablished political or-der, leaving aside any possible division and exclusion and looking for a more democratic participa-tory system (Torres 1966). The movement was anti-nothing, but the objective was to change everyt-hing (Torres 1966). But the more Camilo Torres spelled out his program, the less unity it generated, so he decided to join the lines of the ELN by the end of the year. In February 1966, during his first armed operation, Camilo was killed by the army. The ELN was characterised as having an authori-tarian vertical structure, centered around few key leaders. Inner tensions and conflicts began to ap-pear between those who stressed the need of political work in urban areas and those who defended the military action within rural areas, where most believed the revolution was going to start. In 1973 the army mounted its biggest counter-insurgency operation, mobilizing 33,000 troops and wiped out the ELN movement. The same end suffered the Ejército Popular de Liberación (EPL), established for some years in the Colombian north-west.
After the collapse of most guerrilla groups in the 1970s, except for the FARC, a new organisation emerged during what Pearce classifies as the second guerrillas’ generation between 1974 and 1982. After a fraud committed during the 1970 elections, student radicalism grew fast upon a big legacy of political and social frustration. Unlike previous non-official armed organisations, M-19 took into consideration the demographical change that had been taken place in Colombia for the last decades (in the 1970s 60 percent of the population already lived in urban areas). Hence, they established a strong presence in the cities offering their security services in poor neighborhoods. Armed struggle was reborn in the guise of M-19, who did not belong to any left-wing tradition, and sought to build an anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist mass movement (Pearce 1990, 171).
By the late 1970s the marijuana age was coming to an end and in its place came cocaine. Coca plants were imported from Peru and Bolivia, and peasants saw an unprecedented opportunity to im-prove their lives and strengthen their economy. The FARC and M-19, that also began operating in rural areas, took a pragmatic position on this ‘new’ drug, strengthening their law and order in their areas of control, and in return, producers and traders of those areas had to pay a percentage of their incomes. However, although is certain that some guerrillas used coca crops for their economic sup-port (a connection that have been reinforced by terms such as ‘narco-guerrilla’ coined by US am-bassador Lewis Tamb (Ramírez 2010, 92)), according to Pearce, there is well-documented evidence from the DAS (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad) and Amnesty International (1989) that suggests that the drug mafia has had a closer connection with the right wing than with the left, spe-cially in financing around 140 paramilitary groups present in Colombia (Pearce 1990, 256) as we can read in the following text:
“The Procurator-General’s Public Ministry and civilian security agencies have initiated investiga-tions into the composition of paramilitary groups and the source of their financial support. Through such investigations, evidence has emerged that many paramilitary ‘death squads’ are financed by landowners, industrialists and alleged drug traffickers and operate in coordination with, or under the authority of, sectors of the Colombian armed forces” (Amnesty International 1989)
Colombia in the late 1970s and 1980s became the centre for processing and marketing coca, selling it to both the US and Europe. In a few years, drug barons built up criminal empires in Colombia’s main cities, what had a profound economic, social and political consequences. Some estimates put the number of people directly or indirectly employed by the drug mafia at over half a million, which equals the numbers employed in manufacturing industry (Caballero 2016). By the late 1980s, the
cocaine barons became what Pearce describes as ‘narco-burgeoisie’, tremendously rich people eager to legitimize themselves as businessmen and to ally themselves with the ruling elite in defending its class interests. One of the highest demonstrations of cocaine’s barons power was the assassination of Luis Carlos Galán in 1989, through which they send the message that they had the power to de-cide who might or might not be a presidential candidate. Cocaine infiltrated all layers of society. It corrupted and destabilised not only political institutions that were already vulnerable to partisan in-fluences, but also the army and police forces, and introduced new violent acts and relations on a ‘lower’ scale. A violence that has its biggest repercussion in the poorest sectors of society such as Zavala demonstrates through an analysis done in Mexico by the Centro de Análisis de Políticas Pú-blicas, which shows that the common profile of drug-related deaths were young poor men between 25 and 29 years old (Zavala 2018, 6).
Furthermore, during the same decades of the expansion of cocaine, the setting up of neoliberal eco-nomies along the world kept reinforcing social inequalities. It forged an individualist concept of the self and society, this had a huge impact on non-privileged social communities. Within this new eco-nomic system, the main task of the State was to provide a secure field for transnational investment and individual self realization. Hence, social movements appeared as a counterpoint to neoliberal policies, that were repressed once more by means of states of exception. The consequences and answers to these repressions were, from one side, the strengthening of new leftist insurgent groups, and from the other, the use of dirty-war techniques (control of the population to expose the rebels, cordon, search and research for information in organized operations with clear targets, among other military tactics) as main form for a counter-insurgency campaign led by the right wing. Extreme paramilitary associations that began to proliferate already in 1935 within the catholic-conservative right wing axis, from the late 1980s onwards became more systematic in their armed confrontation and elimination of guerrillas and suspected civilian sympathisers. Autodefensas Unidas de Colom-bia (AUC) was a non-official paramilitary armed force whose purpose was to fight against guerri-llas in those places where the state had lost its power and influence. This new group was initially promoted and supervised by Colombian armed forces and were strengthen by the State in order to maintain the status quo and furthermore, were hired by powerful land owners and drug traffickers to protect their lands from insurgent groups. Hence, paramilitaries started to gain power in towns and villages, while the guerrillas had to move deeply inside the forest and the outskirts of those civilized areas. In 1994 the State issued a decree to legitimize what was called Convivir groups, formed by paramilitary forces, what allowed to support them with weapons and gave them the capacity of
as-suming military functions previously only reserved to the State. Many academics, NGOs and popu-lar leaders have considered these groups as a mechanism of State terrorism (Medina Gallego and Téllez-Ardila 1994 in Ramirez 2010, 90).
All that violence provoked by the confrontation between guerrillas and paramilitaries, affected Co-lombian citizens in a profound way. Earlier I referred to the particular case of Antioquia as an example of the relation established between guerrillas and peasants. In this same area, according to Roldán (2010), as the conflict between both armed groups started to escalate, citizens found them-selves trapped between the paramilitaries that controlled the center of the towns, and the guerrillas who had control over the rural areas. The violence suffered by the citizens in this concrete area was not selectively targeted towards political interests anymore. Instead, it became brutal and massive. Even children from humble families started to be recruited to fight, and massacres of citizens star-ted to be common, provoking the displacement of more than half of the population of the region. 7
This open violent conflict added to the increase of social inequity from the government who instead of investing in social justice and reforms, kept financing a war that at that point had nothing to do with the vast majority of the population. This situation led to new social mobilizations in the early 21st century, in which different state groups called for reforms. At this point not only the population claimed responsibility to the State, but the guerrillas (FARC and M-19 among others) kept fighting for their political inclusion, and paramilitaries (AUC), with a strong territorial control, tried also to legitimized themselves as a political force in order to enter into the political negotiations with the state, as they published in Corporación Arco Iris (2007).
In 2001 the US government that had already, in 1989, declared the ‘war on drugs’ against coca pro-duction in Colombia for being a threat to public health and national security of their country, decla-red the “war on terror” post 9/11. In Colombia this implied that all the coca growers and armed ac-tors, not only the insurgents and guerrillas, but also the paramilitaries, and different drug traffickers, were subject to US pressure, started to have even more military presence than before. Many have questioned the efficacy and even the purpose of these interventions (Ramírez 2010 and Zavala 2018) for it is known that US has been strategically interested in Colombia, among other countries,
According to Caballero (2016) at the beginning of the 21st century Colombia was suffering one of the
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highest displacement rates in the world: more than 5 million people were displaced inside the country, and over 6 millions had to leave its borders.
due to its huge potential for coal, oil and natural gas reserves, what makes an important source of energy for the northern country. 8
To complicate things even more, the Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Vélez decreed the Demo-cratic Security policy conceptualized under the tripartite discourse of counterterrorism-counternar-cotics-counterinsurgency through which he stigmatized the inhabitants of marginal areas as guerri-lla and paramilitary coguerri-llaborators. By this decree the State announced that it could provide security and social investment only in those regions that collaborate providing information and creating se-curity networks to help them defeat guerrillas (Ramírez 2010, 97), making the civic population ac-countable in confronting the threat to democracy from any armed group. This enabled an authorita-rian use of violence from the State against civilians, justified in the existence of only two possible sides, either in favor of the State, or in favor of the armed groups. However, what this facilitated was not the fight against armed groups but to dismiss grassroots demands and the expansion of de-mocratic participation, as well as to justify restrictions of civil liberties. 9
This very convoluted social and political configuration has had a great impact on citizens’ lives, es-pecially those who live in rural areas and marginalised communities, where the presence of these non-official actors has been higher than the presence of the State. This context has deeply affected citizens lives, configuring a way of living inside a perpetual violent threat, and forcing them to adapt and search for strategies in a demonstration of resilience in order to look for non-violent forms of living together and dealing with the conflict. As we have seen in this brief historical con-text, the coexistence and difficult interrelations between all the different armed actors —guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and official State forces— makes it very complicated (if possible at all) to determine the first causes of such a long and convoluted conflict. The purpose of this first chapter has not been to find the starting point of the armed conflict in Colombia, but to have a gene-ral perspective of its roots, to give an insight of the anatomy, such as Mapa Teatro explores in the
Zavala develops his study relying upon the investigations leaded by the journalists Ignacio Alvarado and
8
Dawn Paley, who demonstrate how anti-drugs US policies correspond to a clear expression of neoliberal and neocolonial capitalist structures. They argue that the final objective of these policies is not to reduce the drug that arrives to their country but to gain control over areas with high energetic, minerals and water resources. For further information see Zavala (2018).
Although in 1991 the current Constitution was signed, promoting a different vision and understanding of
9
democracy and democratic practice —based on consensus participation, transparency and decentralization of power, rather than on clientelism and hierarchical democracy, what had been promoted during many years by the central State, security and armed forces, dominant economic groups and traditional party leaders—, it has been very complicated to achieve that vision of democratic polyarchy (O$Donnell 1996, 34).
play Los incontados: un tríptico, that is part and parcel of Colombian identity configuration, inva-ding the childhood imaginary from the very beginning. As they finish the play saying ‘You have to be from here to understand. You have to be from here to feel a little pleasure with the pain’, recon-gnising that I have not experienced such a social context, I will keep trying to get closer to Mapa Teatro’s political aesthetics from a theoretical perspective.
Chapter 2. Violent pluralism: subnational actors and international forces. Decolonial gestures.
Latin America is one of the regions with higher levels of violence in the world. Colombia occupies one of the highest positions in this undesirable ranking. Although according to the Ministerio de Defensa Colombiano 2019 has been the year with lower rates of violent murders in the last 44 years (25,7 out of every 100,000 citizens), this number still locates the Andean country in such a terrible position. The conflicts between the state, armed forces, guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffic10
-kers have configured a tangled reality that has been used to label Colombian democracy with adjec-tives such as unsuccessful, imperfect, incomplete or even illiberal. Some scholars on democratiza-tion, like Larry Diamond (1999) or John Rawls (1993), focus on electoral patterns and formal struc-tures of democratic governance. They use terms such as the rule of law, sociopolitical inclusion, pu-blic fairness and transparency to define a democratic ideal and the consequent deviations from it. But this top-down perspective offers a limited insight into Colombia’s complex reality. They there-fore are undermined by their US and Eurocentric perspective. Furthermore, labeling regimes as de-mocratic does not mean that they are normatively positive, inclusive or even effective at guarante-eing rights. Against these perspectives, it is important to stress the fact that Latin America does not live in a perpetual need of bridging their separation from an implicitly Wester democratic ‘ideal’. Instead, there are unique forms of political practice, order and subjectivity that need to be studied on their own terms.
Something that cannot be denied is the unequal distribution of citizenship rights and the role that violence plays in implementing and challenging these inequities. They relegate large segments of the population —mainly poor, black and indigenous communities— who suffer from discrimination and violence through crimes and human rights violations by the different actors of the open conflict. In this sense, recognising the multiple violent actors who persistently operate in the region and how they affect political outcomes and lived social experience, becomes an essential task in order to un-derstand the particular politics in Colombia. Latin America today should be defined as viable states in various stages of democratic transition and consolidation that have coexisted and engaged with subnational armed actors (Arias and Goldstein 2010, 9).
Viceministerio para las políticas y asuntos internacionales. “Logros de la política de defensa y seguridad.
10
Julio 2020” Ministerio de Defensa. Dirección de Estudios Estratégicos, https://www.mindefensa.gov.co/ irj/go/km/docs/Mindefensa/Documentos/descargas/estudios_sectoriales/info_estadistica/Logros_-Sector_Defensa.pdf (last visited on 20th October 2020)
This particular political context and its consequences in different spheres of society is explored by Mapa Teatro in Anatomía de la violencia en Colombia, as I have explained in the introduction. In
Los incontados: un tríptico, they examine how this violent context bursts into a family’s living
room and into a little girl’s imaginary without knocking. Mapa Teatro’s focus on the bystanders in this theatrical montage reveals their political positioning. They pay attention to what Burgess and Malek have defined as the forgotten parties of the conflict. Those who have nothing to do with it 11
but who still are caught in the cross fire, bearing a huge suffering. For this reason I believe other conceptualizations on the Colombian situation that are able to analyze both the violent context and its repercussions in daily life from the bottom up are far more adequate to approach theoretically the content of Mapa Teatro’s performance. For this purpose, I will rely on the concept suggested by Arias and Goldstein ‘violent pluralism’ (2010) by which they try to recognise the plural nature of Latin America’s current governing regimes while, at the same time, try to avoid confining discus-sions of violence to the failure of those ‘imperfect’ regimes (Arias and Goldstein 2010, 3). Bridging a cross-disciplinary dialogue between political sciences and anthropology allows these scholars to combine the typified top-down perspective of the former discipline —interested in a macro-level analysis that reveals the working of states, institutions and transnational processes— with a bottom-up perspective of the latter —concerned with the everyday lived experience of ordinary people wit-hin the context of those larger elements.
By the notion of ‘violent pluralism’ Arias and Goldstein argue how indeed Latin American demo-cracies respond in form to the ways in which democracy works, and demonstrate how violence is not a failure of those democratic structures but an intrinsic part of them. It forms an integral part of democratic institutions because of the way, among other things, in which they have been implemen-ted and developed. Thus, they argue how violence becomes an essential component to their mainte-nance, but also an instrument for pursuing popular changes and resisting unfair forms of govern-ment, although based on democratic forms. Hence, violence constitutes a unique form of political practice, order and subjectivity. The objective then, is to understand political violence not as a failu-re but as an instrument. A critical tool that has been used, and is still being used, both for political rule and resistance in contemporary democracies in the South American continent, as the
Burgess, Guy and Cate Malek. "Bystanders." Beyond Intractability. Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess.
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Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: March 2005, http://www.beyon-dintractability.org/essay/bystanders
tical context demonstrates. This does not imply that all the implicated actors use violence in the same way, as they do not have equal access to power. However, all of them deploy violence as means for their own ends, that can be either legitimizing and consolidating power, maintaining the ‘status quo’, as well as confronting it. In Colombia, as it has been explained in the previous chap-ter, political democratic regimes coexist with organised violent non-state actors —guerrillas, para-militaries and large-scale drug trafficking— constituting multiple forms of state and substate order in different regions along the country. The political agendas of the latter ones, each of whom has responded in different ways to social, political and economic exclusion (Ramírez 2010, 104) pur-suits their official political participation, while they impose their social order by means of violence in those areas they control. This multiplicity of actors, both official and non-official, maintain diffe-rent and changing connections between them through time, by interacting, building or braking alliances, and engaging in direct conflicts. These variable and unstable relationships, and the way it configures daily social and political experiences, are what Arias and Goldstein call ‘violent plura-lism’. As a result of a variety of social, economic and political factors, power has diffused out of centralized political institutions. Instead it has distributed into the hands of various segments of so-ciety. This does not mean that the state is not functioning, or that their democratic institutions are a failure. On the contrary, what this pluralism implies is that new actors that deploy violence for their political and social purposes, have emerged in Colombian sociopolitical cartography acquiring a big relevancy.
Nevertheless, the focus when studying violence under this assumption is not located only on the state and groups that confront its ‘stability’, nor an understanding of them as two isolated parts of an open conflict. Violent pluralism observes violence as a critical tool. This means that, apart from being an instrument for maintaining the ‘status quo’, it has also become a mechanism for popular changes and resistance. A way of responding and confronting a myriad of problems that neoliberal democracies have generated (Valencia 2010). Hence, attending to these different uses and layers, violence in a Latin American context is necessarily plural and dialectical, it stems from multiple resources, transforms what it touches, and configures citizens’ daily life and the working of gover-nance in various ways (Arias and Goldstein 2010, 6). So, under this perspective, violence emerges as a key element of Colombian democracy and society, as the basis on which the former one was founded. It also constitutes a critical component towards that foundation either allowing or confron-ting its maintenance. Violence and democracy in Latin America should then be understood in tan-dem, rather than two distinct points on an evolutionary trajectory or as contradictory elements
(Arias and Goldstein 2010, 25). This understanding and analysis of violence suggests that no simple path will lead to lower levels of violence in much of the South American countries, as it is implica-ted in the institutional structure of the regimes, and is part and parcel of the engagement between the state, non-state and civil-society actors. Hence, this last ones, specially marginalised and impo-verished communities are deeply embedded into this sociopolitical violent plurality, what configu-res their daily experiences, and subjectivities, affecting them in a myriad of ways.
Furthermore, violence and its pluralism does not steam only from inside Colombia’s own borders, but also, and equally important, from the relations generated between the Andean country and the international system. International postcolonial forces constitute another actor in the violent tangle. Taking into consideration the history of subjugation of the region by global forces of imperialism and colonialism throughout three centuries, and two more centuries of postcolonial domination, this reality has had a great impact on the configuration of Colombian structure and identity, generating colonial subjects and subjectivities. Although colonies ended in Colombia in the first half of the 19th century, as Diana Taylor states: the end of a colony did not signal the end of colonialism (Tay-lor 1991, 1). Latin America remained being the peripheral ‘other’ of the European narrative of glo-bal history, what Mignolo names as the colonization of space and time and the universalization of Western history (Mignolo 2014). He defines the colonization of time as the invention of the ‘Anti-quity’ and the ‘Middle Ages’ and placement of the ‘European Renaissance’ in the center of a linear history. Hence, by imposing the history of Europe and its narrative as the universal global history, that of the regions and peoples colonized by European regimes were left at its margins. This move allowed Western civilization to demonize Islamism, to exclude the entire African continent from that linear history and to ignore the contributions of Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations to hu-man history, among other consequences. Moreover, the South American continent remained eco-nomically and culturally impoverished, a situation that formed a damaged bedrock for the construc-tion of new political and social orders. The labeling of the postcolonial era, a concept that has been criticised by scholars such as Ella Shohat (1992) or Anne McClintock (1992) for being excessively ambivalent, refers as Mignolo defines, to the modern colonization of time and space (Mignolo 2011). Referring to this era as postcolonial does not imply that colonial forces and relations are over, but emphasises the distinction between old and new colonial practices and brings to light the historical rupture conducted by anti-colonial and anti-imperialist fights during the 20th century (Mezzadra 2008, 17).
The domination and exploitation of the colonized civilizations generated not only physical violent relations between colonizers and colonized but also epistemic ones, for those actions require justifi-cation and legitimization to be deeply accomplished. This responds to what Galtung calls ‘cultural violence’. By this concept Galtung refers to those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence —exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science— that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence (Galtung 1990, 291). According to Taylor, during colonialism, theatre became a potent tool for the manipulation of a po-pulation already accustomed to spectacle. Indigenous societies such as the Nahua, the Aztec, the Inca and the Mayan among others, understood spectacle not in terms of mimesis but as a vital link between the social and cosmic orders. For these societies, spectacles had nothing to do with a repre-sentation or a legitimization of power, on the contrary, they were power in themselves. Spanish co-lonizers used theatre as a platform in which colonized communities witnessed and even participated in their own defeat, what highly contributed to the legitimization and justification of the new order.
Nowadays, postcolonial domination, not less fierce than that of the past, continues being facilitated by the manipulation of spectacle. Latin American countries are swamped by Western images (what relegates Latin America to the periphery defined by the non-Western) by means of mass media, mo-vies, television shows and advertisements. All of them reproduce and display ceaselessly images that configure world views that do not match with native Latin American identity, experiences or aspirations. However, this globalized postcolonialism based on the power of images, create and convey desires, provoking continuous increasing demands, which activates more desires. Robert Heilbronner calls this the triumph of globalized capitalism (Heilbroner 1989). According to Taylor, this form of cultural dominance has deeply effected the artistic work produced in Latin America in two main ways. First by creating foreign models that have defined and controlled Latin American culture since the 16th century. These models ended up becoming the referents to validate judge-ments that legitimate or exclude other cultural manifestations. Hence objective criticism had been overcome and delineated by colonial and postcolonial hegemony. This fact has had deep conse-quences that affect not only artistic productions but also cultural subjectivities, constitutes another branch of daily violent pluralism, generating what Sayak Valencia defines as ‘sujetos endriagos’. 12
This term is used to define those subjects that emerge in the rift between the extreme consuming demands of global capitalism and the growing decrease of economic resources. Hence these
Valencia, Sayak. “Capitalismo gore: narcomáquina y performance de género” emishpherica., Vol. 8.2
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tos endriagos’ make use of violence as a tool for self-empowerment and quick capital acquisition. 13
The second way in which cultural postcolonialism has affected Latin American artistic works, is by adapting its production to the consumer market, mainly formed by foreign spectators that demand for exotic otherness (Taylor 1991, 13). Netflix series such as the worldwide known Narcos is a per-fect example of both efper-fects of cultural postcolonialism. In this series, spectators face a closed ima-gery that presents an archetypical and mythological image of Latin American drug traffickers and the worldview associated with them. This type of fictions have created along the years a collective and global imagery, filling the gaps of an unknown criminal world and imbuing those characters in a double morality by which they are censored and admired at the same time, as exotic criminals.
However, according to Taylor, in the late 1950s and 1960s, several kinds of theatrical activity in La-tin America underwent a widespread process of revision. Many committed theatre practitioners star-ted to react strongly against all the centuries of colonization and began to see and use theatre as an instrument of liberation. The intense theatre productions of major playwrights, university and group theatres, workshops and national and international festivals dedicated specifically to Latin Ameri-can theatre facilitated a space for the construction of an emerging structure to support this change. From that time, much Latin American theatre has turned its focus of investigation towards itself, in order to examine both its role in cultural domination, and to reshape itself into a powerful instru-ment for a decolonizing process.
Diana Taylor has named this theatre as the ‘Theatre of Crisis’, one that bursted with vitality in the mid 1960s in several Latin American countries where they introduced deep systemic questions in relation to their own societies. Among their intentions, they started to mirror the effects of sociopo-litical crisis by analysing the objective, systemic rifts of their own societies and communities in
Capitalism and its economical demands, an exacerbated neoliberalism, globalization and a gender cons
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-truction based on binary codes generates what Valencia calls ‘endriago’ subjectivities, following Mary Loui-se Pratt’s idea that the contemporary world is governed by the return of the monsters (Pratt 2002, 14). This term ‘endriago’ is taken from the Spanish medieval novel Amadís de Gaula (1508), written during the first period of colonization, and describes a monstrous cross between a hydra, a man and a dragon and is charac-terised by its very brutal condition. Its fierceness is such that the place that it inhabits is defined as a hell on earth, an uninhabited landscape comparable with contemporary cross-border territories, such as Tijuana in México or Tetuán in Morocco, places defined by its cruelty, brutality and colonialist reality. Hence, Valencia proposes the term ‘endriago’ in order to talk and define the capitalistic subjectivities influenced by new forms economic postcolonialism that govern a gore capitalistic context, and relates it with the term ‘macho’. This term is highly immersed and implicated in the construction of gender identities in México, that for some time was related to the peasants and working classes, but now is connected with the construction of a violent form of masculinity. The combination of both terms describes a form of cultural violence that oppresses and alienates a part of the community, normally young poor males, and provokes very cruel and extreme forms of violence.
combination with the subjective experiences of their citizens. They also pursued a dissection of the inherent violence in their societies, taking into consideration both a national and an international perspective. The authors that Taylor encompasses in her definition of a ‘Theatre of Crisis’ tend to approach specific issues that are fundamental to an understanding of Latin America’s cultural ima-ges, addressing central topics such as colonialism, institutionalized violence, revolution, identity and self definition, and socioeconomic centrality versus marginality (Taylor 1991, 9). Its main refe-rent in Colombia was Enrique Buenaventura (1925 - 2003) whose main purpose was the sociopoli-tical demystification of hegemonic Colombian history (Taylor 1991, 186). What this means is that he attempted to make audible voices that have traditionally been kept out of the official and hege-monic history: voices of the victims and perpetrators, participants and collaborators, always with a non-didactic approach, exposing the different voices and ideologies without imposing them. Ho14
-wever, as Taylor suggests, all these questions and debates that were being generated during this de-cade were not yet evolving beyond the crisis that was being experienced towards a reconstruction. I believe that Mapa Teatro, who started their artistic activity 15 years later, has emerged from this so-ciopolitical line of thought, and constitute a referent in the theatre that has taken over from this ‘Theatre of Crisis’ towards a theatre that focuses on the reconstruction of Colombian identity, by means of what Walter Mignolo defines as ‘decolonial gestures’ (Mignolo 2014).
According to this Argentinian scholar, the ‘de’ in decolonial emphasizes the confrontation with ‘co-lonial’ at the very moment that it appears. If before I have written about the colonization of time as the universalization of Western history; the colonization of space, already from its beginnings, prompted a historical complexity that can only be properly addressed by delinking it from the Euro-centered assumptions of the colonial matrix of power. This is the structure that has been builded up by specific actors (imperial subjects, colonizers and colonized), categories of thought and institu-tions since the 16th century, and constitutes another actor in the tangle of violent pluralism that de-fines Latin American sociopolitical context, another form of institutionalized violence that cons-tructs oppressed subjectivities. Hence, ‘decolonial gestures’, as Mignolo defines them, would be any gesture that engages, either directly or indirectly, with the actions of disobedience of the dicta-tes of the colonial matrix and the contribution to the re-emergence, resurgence and re-existence of subjectivities, values, ways of being, languages, thoughts and stories that have been degraded over
Taylor focuses on Enrique Buenaventura’s play called Los papeles del infierno (año) (Documents from
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hell). For further information see Taylor, Diana “Destroying the Evidence: Enrique Buenaventura”, Theatre
of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991). Lexington, Ky: The University Press of Kentucky,
centuries in order to be dominated. This is the task that colonial subjects are tackling all over the world, to delink and decolonize their subjectivities, their histories (I should even say themselves), as a starting point which from they can engage in a world-making that is not regulated anymore by any form of colonialism.
This violent pluralism, formed by official and non-official substate and international actors, defines the content and the sociopolitical situation that Mapa Teatro explores and displays in Los
inconta-dos: un tríptico. Guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickers, coca plants, all of them combined
de-ploy on stage a very particular form of violence. A violent pluralism that irrupts into a living room, filling every corner of it with its presence, permeating the most private and intimate sphere of Co-lombian society. Mapa Teatro, by establishing the focus of their research and artistic work on the unknown bystanders of the conflict, establish their political positioning. They do not try to give clo-sed answers to the problem of violence in Colombia, but to dissect its anatomy. They just show its different parts, its pluralism and the way it configures Colombian society while at the same time reflect on different possibilities. They perform in a strikingly powerful way a ‘decolonial gesture’ approaching specific issues of Colombian reality, relying on stories, experiences and perspectives that have been left out from both Colombian official history, and even more, from European self-centered one.
Chapter 3. Images, media and violence
In the introduction, I have defined Mapa Teatro as creators of images. Through the combination of theatrical forms, live music, pre-recorded sounds and new media they create a very particular form of dramaturgy that Daniel Villegas Vélez has defined as a dramaturgy of pastiche. According to the Spanish dictionary María Moliner (1998), pastiche refers to a heterogeneous combination of things. In Mapa Teatro’s case, these heterogeneous ‘things’ are various artistic disciplines and the deploy-ment of different media. Both of these constitute the very formal aspect of their work and their combination leads to the creation of a multiplicity of poetic images that reflect on the violence that Colombia suffers. In the following chapter I will focus on the relationship between media and ima-ges in relation to theatre and how this medium offers a space to reveal that relationship, unveiling the invisible violence of media, performing a political act.
Today, the consumption of images has increased since the irruption of the Internet and mass media to an unprecedented degree. In a globalized and networked world, transnational cultural communi-cation is incomprehensible without taking into account the widespread diffusion of images. Pictu-res, visual simulations, videos, stereotypes, copies, reproductions, imitations, fictions and so on, play a vital role in the continuous process of world creation. Images continuously address cultural, social, political and religious issues all over the world. However, as Kati Röttger and Alexander Jackob argue following Otto Weckmeister, there is still little understanding of the relationship bet-ween electronic media and images within that process of world formation (Röttger and Jackob 2007, 3). According to W.J.T. Mitchell, the invention of new technological media (internet, news-papers, magazines, television) generally changes the modes of representation and communication under which human vision is articulated. Changes that are also altering the very structure of human experience (Mitchell 1994, 3). Nowadays, with the excessive use of social media, we can assure that this alteration has become an established —not to say an overwhelming— reality. Images per-vade our daily life to such an extent that they have become central to human experience (Belting 2011, 125).
Advertising, mass media and social media all evoke an uncontrollable stream of images that satura-te our perception even without noticing it. For this reason, it is said that images, although creasatura-ted by humans, are completely ‘out of our control’. Furthermore, public discourse is established primarily by mass media, and out of all types of images, those of violence tend to be omnipresent. Indecent,
shocking and heartrending images trap perceiver bodies between the paradox of images of violence and the violence of images. However, as Jackob and Röttger state, these last ones are not violent in themselves, but due to their media. What this means is that the violence of images relies on the way in which they are used and transmitted. However, this violent capacity is hidden under a continuous stream of images, specially violent ones. By hiding their potential for violence, media present them-selves as power, following Arendt’s notions. What this implies is that media can be used for acqui15
-ring power through propaganda and creating majoritarian discourses, but without revealing their hidden mechanism that relies on a violent form of distribution of images. For these reasons a criti-que of visual culture is mandatory in order to comprehend the criti-questions of agency, violence and power in relation to how images and media work.
According to Otto Karl Werckmeister, one of the biggest problems of civil societies in the 21st cen-tury comes from the impact of the new media. They play a vital role in the distribution and trans-mission of images which are produced and processed out of the public’s control. For this reason, 16
media constitute unassailable means for power and potential instruments of violence. In the case of
Los incontados: un tríptico, media undertake the transmission of political propaganda and the
cons-truction and diffusion of an official history from which some citizens are left out. Hence, by crea-ting images that do not show an explicit violence, but that are violent in the way in which they are transmitted, Mapa Teatro points out different media that take part in the violent conflict, and reveals how they play an essential role in the legitimization of violence in Colombia. The radio, screens and bodies, all of them serve as media through which a hidden violence enters inside the private and intimate spheres of society. The role of the radio, for instance, acquires an essential relevancy, spe-cially at the beginning of the play. It is located at the very center of the living room and its sound
Hannah Arendt in her text On Violence (1970) establishes a relationship and distinction between the con
15
-cepts of violence and power. One of the most obvious distinctions that she suggests is that the latter one al-ways stands in need of numbers, whereas the former one, up to a point, can manage without them because it relies on implements (Arendt 1970, 42). What this implies is that power does not necessarily need the use of force and violence to be accomplished, but the support or acceptance in different ways of a majority of a group, while violence normally is used by the few to obtain power over many. As Arendt states, the extreme form of power is All against One, while the extreme form of violence is One against All, for what instru-ments are needed (Arendt 1970, 42).
Otto Karl Werckmeister defines two images spheres, the operational and the informational. The first one is
16
defined as the virtual space created by the new computer based media, in which images are produced, pro-cessed, saved and transferred as datasets (Röttger and Jackob 2007, 3). An sphere that contains the technical possibility of creating and controlling images for the public, but that is inaccessible for them. The informa-tional sphere resides inside the previous one, and pretends to be public granting visual access to selected and frequently repeating images, however, it reveals only a small portion of what the operational sphere records and produces (Röttger and Jackob 2007, 3).
