Text by Pilar Riano from Research Publications

The Skin of Memory was developed based on the concepts of memory, place, and violence, three fields of relationships and ideas that were highlighted by Pilar Riano’s fieldwork. The general concern of her research is with the cultural dimensions of violence in Colombian cities. Riano explored the memories of Medellin city dwellers searching for clues that would reveal the complex and plural ways in which they are making sense of the violence affecting their lives and the ways they are refashioning their lives in the specific social context of Medellin. This work is best defined as an anthropology of remembering, an ethnographic observation of how people remember and actualize memories in the every day life.

Violence has made deep fissures in the social and sensorial fabric of these communities. Thus Riano’s fieldwork highlighted the few collective opportunities to grieve and mourn in a community like B. Antioquia. Anger, pain and other emotions have not been dealt with as a community, and the art project was designed as a process that facilitate the opening of spaces and opportunities for individual and collective mourning, for sharing and communications and for envisioning the future through the process of art and memory.
The concept of place as a metaphor of/for identity and dwelling (habitat) was developed in the project through the installation as a museum of memory. The installation-museum was conceived as a place of/for memory, as a place of living memory and for re-signifying past memories, forgettings and silences. The bus as a familiar moving object that crosses territorial borders provided the physical context for the installation, becoming the home where the memories of barrio Antioquia’s residents inhabited. The museum then was seen as a place of community commemoration that re-created the past, from the present.”