This panel examines a vital shift in memory studies toward research methodologies that are not merely about communities but are forged with and from within them. We propose Collaborative Action Research (CAR) framed by the Andean concept of sentipensar—a praxis that unifies feeling, thinking, and doing—as a crucial epistemological and political stance. Moving beyond extractive ethnography, these presentations explore how collaborative artistic practice becomes a mode of sentipensar, generating embodied, affective, and transformative forms of memory.
The panel brings together four distinct projects across diverse geographies (Colombia, Peru, the Basque Country) to investigate how CAR and sentipensar operate as foundational for resistance. Adela Goldbard analyzes participatory cinema with Quechua communities, where reenactment becomes an ethnography of desire. Mariela Yeregui explores electro-textile workshops in Bilbao, where weaving and technology materialize memory as a collective, interdisciplinary practice. Camilo Martínez dissects a project with the Arhuaco people, where artistic tools replaced written ethnography to ensure cultural survival. Finally, Leonardo Bejarano investigates community theatre in Colombia as a confrontational practice to incorporate the missing into the social consciousness.
Collectively, we ask: How does collaborative art-as-research or research-creation produce not just data, but new forms of political subjectivity and communal resistance? This panel argues that sentipensar is not simply a theme but a vital methodology for creating memory that is lived, felt, and actively resistant.
Adela Goldbard, Rhode Island School of Design, Ethnography of Desire: Participatory Cinema, Embodiment, and Confrontation as Memory-making
In this multimodal/multimedia presentation, I will discuss my research-creation and participatory cinema project, "K’allpanakuy Orcconchiskunapi (Rage in the Andes)", which I directed and produced in 2023-24. Developed in collaboration with Quechua communities from Chumbivilcas in the Peruvian Andes, the project focuses on Indigenous and peasant resistance struggles. In this project, reenactment becomes a creative tool to embody communal memory, conforming a creative approach to performance that seeks to become an ethnography of desire. This work not only revisits the region's social struggles but also connects them to present-day narratives of loss and oppression within Quechua communities (Rufer, 2018). In the presentation I will analyze how the project's participants reformulated their performative traditions to transmit counter-hegemonic narratives, transforming them into artifacts for the construction of anti-colonial memory and collective tools for reflection (Taylor, 2003). Three chapters of the film will be shown to discuss the participatory methodologies followed, the outcomes of the performances where embodiment produced a complex and profound ethnography of internal conflicts that were not initially outlined by the research. I will also mention how Peru’s current violent and unstable political situation influenced the project’s development and outcomes.
Mariela Yeregui, Rhode Island School of Design, Interwoven Practices: Indisciplinary Electro-Textile Interventions and Memory in Subaltern Urban Contexts
The Interwoven project was conducted in subaltern neighborhoods of Bilbao between October 2024 and December 2025, initiated and led by women in vulnerable situations. It comprised a series of workshops integrating weaving, embroidery, drawing, text, and low-tech technologies within an accessible and open-source framework. These indisciplinary practices enabled participants to engage freely and actively with materials, gestures, and narratives, generating situated experiences in which creation and sentipensar functioned as tools for knowledge production, for the activation of political and cultural memory, and for social resistance. Technology was incorporated as a flexible and collaborative resource, capable of materializing traces and marks and producing embodied practices intimately connected to the local territory.
Throughout the workshops, participants left visible inscriptions in the neighborhood’s architecture and on the objects they created, transforming everyday experiences into signs of belonging and resistance. Collective texts, woven and embroidered works, and small screen-based devices acted as material records of symbolic resistance, rendering typically invisible narratives perceptible. The interplay of textual, visual, sensory, and technological languages, combined with collective engagement, allowed these ephemeral traces to evolve into lasting markers of shared memory.
Interwoven demonstrates how in disciplinary artistic practices, underpinned by accessible and collaborative technologies, function as tools for situated research-creation. The traces and marks produced through the active participation of women serve as material testimonies of collective histories, reinforcing community bonds and mobilizing urban memory. Grounded in community-based, territorially rooted practices, the project expands participants’ agency and generates new narratives through the articulation of their cultures, knowledge, and aspirations.
Camilo Esteban Martínez, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (ICANH), Beyond Western Ethnography: Artistic Tools and Ethnographic Ownership in a Methodology of Resistance
"La Memoria como forma cultural de Resistencia" is a participatory-action research project born from the Arhuaco peoples during the intense Colombian armed conflict. Facing paramilitary control and the targeted assassination of their leaders and elders–key guardians of ancestral knowledge–this project, built and implemented from a participatory approach, engaged Arhuaco youth in a community-led ethnographic exercise. Its core methodological innovation replaced conventional written ethnography usually conducted by western anthropologists, with cultural and artistic tools (rituals, myths, drawings, and symbolic mapping) as the primary means for data collection, processing, and communication. This shift was crucial in a context where western literacy poses a barrier, enabling a more authentic, culturally grounded articulation of knowledge and ensuring its intergenerational transmission to survive as culture.
The memories recovered were democratically analysed and validated in traditional assemblies, where elders authorized the knowledge and youth presented their artistic interpretations, creating a dynamic, intergenerational dialogue. This participatory methodology became a powerful engine of democratic resilience: it fortified cultural memory against annihilation, actively involved youth in the communitarian service and strengthened the community's internal governance. Several of these youths were later elected as authorities, demonstrating the methodology's success in fostering participatory leadership.
This case study argues that such artistic and participatory methodologies are not merely alternative research tools but are vital practices of memory-as-resistance. They offer a critical model for how culturally-responsive methodologies can forge resistance, empowering communities to defend their culture and physical survival against the forces of violence and risk of extinction.
Leonardo Bejarano, Universidad del Cauca, Confronting Absence: Theatre as a Political Practice for Memory and the Missing in Colombia
In Colombia, the phenomenon of forced disappearance—with over 132,877 cases registered by the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons (2025)—remains a marginal presence in the nation’s collective memory and imagination. Unlike in countries such as Chile or Argentina, the search for the missing has not been widely embraced as a shared social cause. This presentation examines how theatrical practice can disrupt this collective indifference and serve as a vehicle for sensorial and ethical confrontation. It analyzes the work of Tunía Teatro, a community-based theatre group from Cauca, and its diptych of plays, Desaparecidos and Sapos. The first piece employs introyección (introjection), exploring the internal world of those who search for their loved ones; the second turns to proyección (projection), addressing the external social and political context. Rejecting linear narrative, the works create immersive situations that demand the audience’s full attention and discernment, transforming spectators into witnesses. This paper argues that Tunía Teatro’s methodology offers a form of performative memory-making that bridges the diachronic and synchronic nature of disappearance—it is both past and ongoing present. By staging absence as a confrontational and sensorial experience, the project asks: Can theatre foster the collective sensitivity necessary to incorporate the missing not only into memory but into Colombia’s living social consciousness?
Sentirpensar as a Sites of Dialogue in the Andean Diaspora
Individual paperMigration and (Post)Colonialism00:00 Midnight - 00:00 Midnight (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/30 03:00:00 UTC
This paper explores how sentirpensar, an ontological articulation that integrates feeling and thinking, can serve as a framework for rethinking archival practices within Indigenous and Indigenous-descendant Latinx diasporas. It argues that dominant Western notions of the archive, rooted in universalist thinking, often fail to account for localized systems of memory and knowledge. Viewing recordkeeping through an ontological lens reveals relationships that include both human and non-human beings, as well as processes of becoming through memory. This study examines the recordkeeping practices of dancers from the highland Bolivian diaspora in the United States, focusing on the ontologies, or stories, expressed through records created in conjunction with dance. It asks: (1) What can archival initiatives seeking to preserve Andean dance traditions gain from adopting an ontological approach to recordkeeping? (2) How might a pluriversal understanding of memory open space for asserting the agency of Andean and other resisting Latinx Indigenous diasporas in the United States? This research suggests that diaspora’s constant flux and its resistance to colonial impositions can generate new forms of consciousness. Through narrative inquiry & reflexive methodologies, this study will examine how relationships within dance records can be revealed through storytelling and archival description exercises. For diasporas, dance expands stylistic and rhythmic possibilities, creating room for remixing and for challenging traditions that have reinforced gender marginalization. Engaging with region-specific, ontological dimensions of knowledge production can help information professionals, memory workers, and archivists better support practices that reflect localized value systems, relationships, and spatial-temporal boundaries represented in records.By rethinking archival structures, often shaped by ideals of “efficiency” and a settler colonial logic that insists: “I have the right to know, to access, and to possess". This research aims to offer, in a moment defined by uncertainty, an act of renewal.
