Ruben D. Yepes

This project studies how art and film produced during the last fifteen years of Colombia’s fifty-year-long internal war have contributed to the memorialization of the war and have helped Colombians overcome its negative legacies. It follows the recent tendency in visual culture to reject representational approaches to war and instead argues that the works in question mediate the war rather than represent it. In other words, they bridge the distance between their urban audiences and the predominantly rural conflict. Further, this mediation prompts an affective engagement with its history, events, and victims, thereby countering the apathy towards and removal from the war that has predominated in Colombian urban sectors.