Creator’s Statement

Colombia has been at war for more than seventy years. This conflict has lasted so long that it has become much more than just a series of violent events: for those of us who have lived through it, it has become a force that has deeply reshaped the social fabric, memory, our bodies, and the very experience of time. In this context, the signing of the Peace Agreement between the government and the FARC guerrilla in 2016 emerged as the only hope of breaking free from the eternal return of war to which Colombians felt condemned. The event was expected to mark a turning point in Colombia’s history. Yet, can a single ceremony erase decades of violent history? This video essay stems from the suspicion that war, especially one of such scale and duration, relentlessly refracts into its least visible dimensions.

This reflection is part of my doctoral dissertation, in which I conduct ethnographic research with former women combatants of the FARC guerrilla. The entire process of conceiving, designing, and producing this video essay allowed me to explore the ways in which the armed conflict persists, even after a ceasefire, etched into the bodies of those who lived it most intimately.

Although the fundamental aim of war is to produce wounded bodies and corpses (Scarry 1987, Uribe Alarcón 2018), the act of harming and its aftermath have been systematically excluded from official narratives, which tend to describe the conflict as a matter of policy-making, geopolitical calculations, and strategic planning. In this sense, the legitimacy of war is framed within a rational world of technical expertise (Dodd 2014, McSorley 2013, Staudigl 2014). In response to this omission, this video essay offers an invitation to understand the armed conflict as embodied politics, experienced through the sensitive bodies of its witnesses and participants. It is within the register of the body that the most profound and most elusive traces of conflict are inscribed, those that escape language (Das 2008).

My research and this video essay seek to re-center the place of the body in war, not only as the target of violence (Kirby 2020) but also as the archive where its most elusive experiences are stored, those dimensions that resist articulation not because they lack meaning, but because they transcend the limits of language (Dodd 2014). Thus, the body becomes a medium to express what exceeds words, not to encode pain as insignificant, but to reveal how the conventional notion of testimony often excludes other forms of narration, communication, and remembrance (Das 2008).

This project also helped me to reframe the role of the imagistic, the use of images to grasp dimensions of human experience that resist articulation (Grøn and Mattingly 2022), as a tool to access the embodied memory of conflict and to manifest its opacity through repetition, layering, and fragmentation.

Finally, in response to the saturation of audiovisual data in the contemporary world, this work turns to a close, repeated examination of a constellation of gestures that emerge within an official, highly ritualized political event. These are institutional gestures, embedded in the choreography of the peace ceremony, through which the end of the war is publicly staged and legitimized. By slowing down, repeating, and fragmenting these gestures, the video essay seeks to reveal the tensions between the scripted language of reconciliation and the bodily traces of violence that persist beyond political proclamation. Rather than focusing on spectacular scenes of suffering, it interrogates how war remains inscribed in the bodies even at the very moment in which it is declared over.

References

Das, Veena. 2008. “Trauma y testimonio.” In Sujetos del dolor, agentes de dignidad, edited by Veena Das, pp. 145–169. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Instituto Pensar, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Dodd, James. 2014. “On the Concept of Violence: Intelligibility and Risk.” In Phenomenologies of Violence, edited by Michael Staudigl, pp. 33–63. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004259782_003.

Grøn, Lone, and Cheryl Mattingly, eds. 2022. Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Precarious World. Fordham University Press.

Kirby, Paul. 2020. “The Body Weaponized: War, Sexual Violence and the Uncanny.” Security Dialogue, 51, no. 2–3, 211–230. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010619895663.

McSorley, Kevin, ed. 2013. War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience. Routledge.

Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press.

Staudigl, Michael. 2014. “Introduction: Topics, Problems, and Potentials of a Phenomenological Analysis of Violence.” In Phenomenologies of Violence, edited by Michael Staudigl, pp. 1–32. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004259782_002.

Uribe Alarcón, María Victoria. 2018. Antropología de la inhumanidad: Un ensayo interpretativo del terror en Colombia. Universidad de los Andes.

Biography

Carol Pinzón-Masmela is a Colombian researcher and Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work moves at the intersection of phenomenology, political anthropology, human rights, and feminist thought, exploring how experiences of violence, reconciliation, and peace are lived and sensed through the body. Her doctoral research focuses on the lived experiences of former FARC combatants in Colombia, examining how gestures, sounds, and collective practices open possibilities for repair and coexistence beyond speech. More broadly, Carol has worked on human rights research projects across Colombia and Latin America, engaging with themes of transitional justice, memory, gender-based violence, and peacebuilding. She is particularly interested in building bridges between academic research, political action, and artistic practice, often through video essays, soundscapes, and short stories that listen to what resists narration.

Review by Felicity Aulino, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Carol Pinzón-Masmela’s “El gesto” searches for the experience of war in seemingly unlikely places. We here attend to the gripping of a pen, the sweep of a signature, the beat of hands clapping, the pressing of palms in firm embrace. We join in the search for the experience of war in the historic signing of a peace agreement between Colombia and the FARC. September 26, 2016, to end a half-century of fighting.

We are invited in physically and psychically, as that day’s mundane gestures are overlaid with their mimics from years past. Tape rewinding, we experience what so many must have too as they bore witness to this grand event: flashes of vintage newsreels before our eyes, signings of old, warped memories, hand for hand, posture for posture.

“But it was not there.”

Or was it? Timochenko, FARC commander Rodrigo Londoño, speaks at a podium, declaring the war is over. As if to punctuate his sentence, suddenly a whooshing sound of a jet overhead. In a clip broken down on repeat, we feel the suck of his breath. The reach of his eyes. The calculation, the deduction. And then it is clear.

Might we read some commentary behind his eyes, as a military jet displays its might in jubilation above? Maybe so, though that too would be another kind of politics. So we settle into the reverberations, this involuntary action, its thousands of waves.

Is this then experience of war? The gesture—the involuntary act that belies the habituation of war. War etched in the body, but so deep as only to emerge in reactivity. Reflex born of nightmare. The gestural scar. La cicatriz del gesto.

Thank you, Carol Pinzón-Masmela. May we stay alive to the gestures, big and small, and may in so doing they be healed.

Review by Tracy Cox-Stanton, Savannah College of Art and Design

“El gesto” does a wonderful job of enacting what the video essay is so well suited to do: use image and sound to interrogate meanings that lie beyond written language. The written statement that accompanies the video essay well articulates much of what I would hope to share in my assessment of the video essay, aptly identifying the work’s aim to uncover the way war leaves its imprint on/in the human body. The statement solidly grounds its audiovisual investigation in works that convey the gravity of this query, offering further opportunity for the reader-viewer to explore traditional scholarly approaches to the subject. The video essay makes the imprinting of war apparent both within the individual body and within what we might consider the literal body-politic—the received gestures of statehood and institutionalized violence that effectually legitimize war. The “search” metaphor (articulated with the titles “I searched for the experience of war…”) is brilliantly literalized with the multiple frames that dissect the overall image and remind us that meaning is polysemous and apt to be found in even the tiniest fragment of the whole if we care to look. The video uses sound in effective and creative ways to support its investigation—it distorts music to defamiliarize the official discourse, and it uses a first-person voice over, reminding us that the author’s own body is implicated as well.

License

CC BY 4.0

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.