The Role of Art as a Strategy for Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Bogotá, Colombia : A narrative investigation of Colombian artists and victims

Abstract: Due to processes of change, there has been an increase in reconciliation initiatives around Colombia directed at promoting spaces for human interaction and social reconstruction to be encourage. This repertoire of strategies nurture collective memory, individual trauma healing and communities’ transformation, and become a place for peacebuilding to take place. The following research pretends to determine how art initiatives create and promote a space for reconciliation and peacebuilding processes for people that have participated in them. This thesis is based on the experience of 10 individuals that consider themselves artists and victims, which were interviewed concerning their experience with art performances and exhibitions in music, muralism, cinema, sewing, narration and theatre as instruments of self-reconcilement with traumatic experiences, catharsis processes and peacebuilding strategies for themselves due to their personal experience with the Colombian conflict inside Bogotá, Colombia. This investigation makes use of a qualitative analysis for a narrative investigation based on semi-structured interviews of different individuals who have led and worked in Art performances including theatre plays, narration, mural painting, songwriting, movie production and sewing focused on reconciliation and the construction of peace and memory. At the same time, this research makes use of the exercise and theoretical framework of “the meeting place” by John Paul Lederach as a general guideline on how to approach concepts related to reconciliation and peacemaking. This approach in relation to elements such as truth, mercy, justice and peace provides guiding principles to understand how and to which extent art initiatives act as a strategy in the promotion of personal and collective peace for the interviewees. Furthermore, “the meeting place” as a theoretical approach is necessary for the comprehension of the role art initiatives can have in the creation of a space in which participants can genuinely generate significant change towards the dissolution of tensions, truth-telling, catharsis processes, pain handling and the fortification of human relations. This thesis however does not indicate how the art initiatives promoted by the participants affected its viewers. This thesis concludes by supporting the argument that art provided a space for reconciliation and for meaningful processes of peacebuilding to rise in the case of all interviewees as they personally used art as a coping mechanism which provided a space for reconciliation for themselves.