La Piel de la Memoria (The Skin of Memory)
La Piel de la Memoria (The Skin of Memory)
Suzanne Lacy and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá
1999
Medellin, Columbia
Social practice
Lacy, Suzanne and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, “Skins of Memory: Art Civic Pedagogy and Social Reconstruction." In Collective Situations: Reading in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995-2010, edited by Bill Kelley Jr. and Grant H. Kester, 203-219. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Duke University Press.
La Piel de la Memoria (The Skin of Memory) is a public arts initiative that took place in a barrio (neighbourhood) called Antioquia, in south-west Medellin, an area with a distinct history marked by exclusion, social tensions and multiple forms of drug related, territorial, political and everyday violence. The project responded to concerns around societal reconciliation of collective violence and how to elicit critical thinking regarding violence as destructive to social life without disregarding the complexities of that experience. The end product of the project is a portable museum of local heritage and knowledge, and a final celebration.