Memory, Art, and Violence: Listening to Difficult Stories

Conflict and dictatorship are challenging topics to discuss and engage new audiences. However, scholars have tasked themselves with finding creative ways to revisit narratives of these difficult pasts to foster public awareness and prevent socio-political violence from happening in the future. Art has been a long-standing medium through which our society registers our lives, from pre-historic cave paintings to contemporary cartoons, films and exhibitions.

Oral history is ubiquitous in recounting stories of survivors’ experiences of traumatic pasts involving state violence, civil conflicts and abuse of power around the world. Still, merging oral history with different forms of art practices remains an underutilized approach to retelling the recent violent pasts in Latin America. A new wave of scholars are working to promote more engaging and immersive ways of showing the broader public complex narratives of people who experienced or survived dictatorships and armed conflicts.

About the panel

This panel brings together three doctoral researchers who examine the interconnections between listening, memory, and art in Brazil and Colombia. Through three case studies, researchers discuss how oral history methodology and art practices offer alternative ways to engage audiences with complex narratives about past socio-political violence.

Manuela Ochoa has developed Can You Hear the Trees Talking?, an arts-based methodology for conducting dialogical interviews and actively listening to survivors, collaborating with Comunidad, a displaced human rights defender and musician.

Through the question “How can memory be filmed?”, Luana Sampaio explores a series of Brazilian documentaries that depict the Civil-Military Dictatorship in Brazil, which lasted from 1964 to 1985. The films focus on listening and filming the testimonies of survivors and their peers. By examining this creative work, she uncovers how cinema can offer a new understanding of memory by engaging an artistic expression with the past, present, and future.

Patricia Branco Cornish researches the experiences of women artists during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985), merging oral history and visual art within a decolonial framework. She uses the artworks as memory prompts so women artists can retell their past from daily struggles to groundbreaking creative practices despite censorship and normative gender roles. Patricia seeks to understand the pervasive and subtle ways dictatorship erases women’s stories, and manipulates how we understand past state violence in the present.

About the panelists

Manuela Ochoa is an artist and PhD candidate in Humanities at Concordia. In Colombia, she was part of the team at the Museum of Memory, where she explored the relationship between art and memory in violent contexts. Her research centers on how to listen— effectively and with care — to survivors of violence while collaborating on creative works based on their life stories.

Luana Sampaio is a documentary filmmaker and a PhD student in Communication Studies at the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil. Her research and creative practice focus on exploring the relationship between memory and history in documentaries that use cinematic narrative tools to tell stories about the past. Luana has co-directed over five documentaries, including short films, feature films, and series, and is dedicated to discovering new ways to listen to and capture memories through cinema. She holds a Master’s degree in Communication Studies from the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Arts from Deakin University.

Patricia Branco Cornish is a PhD candidate in the Communications Department at Concordia. Her research focuses on women artists living under the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-85) and their contributions to the country’s avant-garde art scene of the 1960s–70s. In Brazil, Patricia worked as an art curator and gallery owner. She earned her MA in Art History from the University of São Paulo, where she investigated how women artists carved out space for themselves in the local avant-garde movement despite censorship and conservative gender norms.