For more than 50 years, Colombia has been involved in an internal armed conflict, making it the world’s longest-running civil war in modern history. The conflict reflects a history of violence and pain, sustained by deep-rooted political, social, and economic issues. Its unique complexity lies in its nature as a low-intensity, long-duration conflict. The roots of this conflict can be traced back to a period of political instability known as “La Violencia” that took place from 1946 to 1958, during which time the country’s main political parties, the liberals and the conservatives, were engaged in a bloody civil war. This period of turmoil lasted until the two parties reached an exclusionary power-sharing agreement which limited the political participation of other groups. The 1940s saw a rise of organised peasants’ self-defence groups against latifundistas (land owners), which would later transform into socialist or communist militias after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1960s, as inequalities of land distribution and restricted political participation accelerated the use of violence and armed struggle. This eventually led to the emergence of left-wing guerrilla groups, most notably the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Financing their activities through the so-called ‘revolutionary taxation’, as well as kidnapping and drug smuggling later in the 1980s, these groups have engaged in a five-decade-long civil conflict with state forces and right-wing paramilitary groups that is still largely unresolved. In 2016, a peace deal was signed to bring an end to the conflict, addressing issues such as rural poverty and offering political representation to revolutionaries in exchange for disarmament. While the FARC signed on to the agreement, it left a power vacuum that has since been filled by the ELN, and other ‘criminal groups’ without a political agenda, jeopardising Colombia’s peace process. Research conducted in 2018 estimated that over 260.000 people have lost their lives, and 6 million have been forcibly displaced. Women represent almost half of the total number of victims, with 3.780.677 declared victims of forced displacement, 458.781 victims of femicide, 77.100 victims of forced disappearance, 40.231 victims of terrorist attacks, combat and harassment, and 17.350 victims of sexual violence (Salcedo Ávila and Paes-Machado 2019, 97).

Born in Medellin, the Colombian artist Miriam Londoño has gained international recognition for her paper calligraphy. Having lived abroad for 35 years, Londoño’s work was heavily influenced by her personal experiences as a migrant. She describes how the period after she moved to the Netherlands with her Dutch husband proved to be transformative, as she encountered ongoing difficulties with communication. She often felt discriminated against: “the moment I opened my mouth and they heard me speaking with an accent, I was treated differently.” In confronting this silence and the inability to verbally express herself, Miriam found comfort in writing intimate and emotional letters to her family members from a distance. This therapeutic process marked a turning point in her artistic career. Inspired by the crafts learned during her time living abroad in Argentina, Poland, and Thailand, Londoño began using paper as her primary medium and developed a groundbreaking technique that consists of creating ink made of paper pulp. She then uses the ink to transcribe written texts such as letters or testimonies, resulting in three-dimension sculptural drawings and writings.

Through her calligraphy art, Londoño has produced an impressive body of work which tells stories both personal and political in nature. Being far from home only drew her closer to the struggles faced in her native Colombia, which is why part of her work addresses the traumatic experiences of individuals and communities that lived through the atrocities of the Colombian armed conflict. Her focus has largely centred on capturing the perspective of Colombian women as to amplify their voices. By evoking painful and traumatic memories associated with historical fragments of violence, Miriam’s installations create a space where testimonies that are oftentimes silenced and neglected can find a powerful and resonant presence.

In the exhibited work “Times of Silence,” Londoño transcribes the words of women who have dared to speak up about their suffering as victims of abuse, rape, kidnapping, and forced displacement at the hands of the FARC and paramilitary groups. Each paper string represents a phrase from a testimony. Londoño listens to their voices and the words transmute through her body as she imagines their handwriting, allowing her to develop a deeper understanding of their struggles and trauma. Londoño specifies that she does not intend for the calligraphy to be legible. To her, the intentional illegibility and disarray of the text symbolise the imperfect nature of memory. She believes memory is not always clear, and it often fails to fully capture the range of experiences—which is why she feels her work helps portray this internal disorder. The gaps deliberately left between the letters further serve to represent the voids that exist in language and memory: between the said and the unsaid, silence and speech.