Victims, mourning and art: A reflection about the role of art in the peace process in Colombia

Abstract

This article will address the testing of the following hypothesis: dance in particular and arts in general, with factors of a different nature, mediate between victims of a conflict and the society in which it occurs creating the necessary conditions for the surviving victims develop the mourning. This is an absolute requirement for reconciliation in Colombia. There is not peace without mourning, there is not mourning without truth, and there is not truth without memory. In that process, art plays a capital role because it transmutes memory and the experience of the mourners into artistic expressions, it is to say, into languages which, even if they are based on victims’ crude reality, also take some distance from it, supported by their own symbolic and abstract elements, own of their nature. By saying that art plays a major role in the development of mourning, also it wants to say that, despite its importance, the grief is not made only through art.