5.16. Gendering Memory Across Genres, Place & Time [ES/EN]

Today, democratic systems face increasing pressures and challenges across the globe. From popular culture to state practices, we are witnessing a period in which democratic spaces are shrinking and authoritarian tendencies are on the rise. In this context, the role of art in fostering social transformation and democratic resilience is becoming ever more critical. The Embroidering Memory workshop series brings together diverse communities—particularly women, youth, and LGBTQ+ individuals—within Turkey’s shrinking civic space and under the pressures of an authoritarian regime. It enables participants to creatively explore both personal and collective memory. Old family photographs and archival materials are reinterpreted through embroidery, photography and oral history. By transforming their own lived memories into art, participants not only share their personal experiences but also generate a collective space of memory and solidarity. This workshop series demonstrates how art can serve as both a forum and a tool for democratic communities. Against the backdrop of oversimplified narratives produced by popular culture and restrictive political conditions, participants come together through creative practices to cultivate critical thinking, pluralism, and mutual understanding. Embroidering Memory stands as a concrete example of how art can nurture democratic resilience while also supporting collective well-being. Importantly, these insights are shaped not only by artistic intention but also by the experiences of more than 2,000 people who have joined over one hundred free workshops during the past three years. Their feedback has shown that such gatherings can create a sense of well-being, solidarity, and shared memory. This ongoing dialogue with participants continues to inform and inspire the workshops, strengthening the motivation to sustain and expand the practice.

The depiction of the Mexican Revolution, in Cartucho (1931), by Nellie Campobello has intrigued literary criticism for two reasons: its narrator’s perspective and the genre of the text she produces. Both questions derive their critical importance from the relation of literature to history, especially because of the uncertain processes of remembering proper to fictional characters. In this paper, I propose to read Cartucho not as a loose compound of vignettes, whose cohesion into a novel depends on the narrator, the time and the space of the events depicted, but rather as a collection of prose poems. On one hand, I will draw on the rhetoric of this genre—hybridity, modernity, lyricism with a space for the ironic, the grotesque, the deformed, etc.—to account for this incisive, opaque, and innovative memorialization of the Mexican Revolution. On the other, my intention is to show how Campobello uses and reworks every feature of the prose poem, and radically reorients this most iconic genre of urban, Western, bourgeois modernity. Anonymous, uneducated, witness of incomprehensible violence and gruesome incidents of armed conflict, roaming the dirt roads of a rural town, the little girl who narrates the Mexican Revolution, in the northern state of Chihuahua during the difficult years of 1916-1919, looks nothing like the Parisian flâneur. Yet both her inquisitive position from the perspective of childhood and her disarming phenomenological approach to the experience of war and modernity endow her with an acute perception of the underbelly of history, very similar to Baudelaire’s character. Campobello’s principal voice in Cartucho breaks away from History’s narrative logos; she positions lyric diction in the forefront of remembrance, thus radically renewing the aesthesis and ethos of poetry as a literary genre, as well as the way the past can to be accounted for and therefore understood.

María Mercedes Carranza’s singular lifework provides the perfect space to reflect on the relations among art, politics, and memory in times of democratic consolidation in Colombia. The objective of this paper is to inquire into how Carranza’s political action and artistic creation allow her to articulate an active form of memory capable of contributing to the country’s democratic resilience. As a delegate to the 1991 Constituent Assembly, she played a key role in the discussion and enshrinement of fundamental rights in the constitution that still governs Colombia. In parallel, her poetic work represents an exercise in memory against Colombia’s systemic violence. The paper carries out a textual analysis of materials from two sources: El canto de las moscas (versión de los acontecimientos (1997-1998), composed of 24 short poems, each one linked to a Colombian locality where a massacre took place, and unpublished texts found in the Banco de Archivos Digitales de Artes en Colombia. Said analysis is theoretically grounded in Walter Benjamin’s concepts of Erlebnis and Erfahrung, as well as in Slavoj Žižek’s conception of event. As a delegate to the Constitutional Assembly, Carranza represented the possibility of a reconstructed democracy based on public discourse and institutional recognition. As a poet, she created a language through which acts of violence, far from fading away in the immediacy of information (Erlebnis), are transformed into events that make collective and historical experience, or Erfahrung, visible. Likewise, Carranza’s austere language transforms the testimony of horror into historical consciousness and extends, in the literary sphere, the Constituent Assembly’s commitment to a democracy grounded in the word, memory as a social practice, and the recognition of victims. In this manner, Carranza’s lifework articulates the two fundamental dimensions of political action and poetic creation.

This article examines how the memories of Argentine women who participated in the Malvinas War (1982)—in roles such as nursing, surgical instrumentation, radiotelegraphy, and radio operation—circulate, are appropriated, and received, with a focus on the social media platform X, selected for its capacity to facilitate discursive exchange among users, fostering the construction of argumentative threads and the development of conversations. The interest arises from the recent process of making these voices visible, which had been historically absent from the official narrative for more than three decades. April 2, 2025, the Day of the Veteran and Fallen in the Malvinas War, acts as a “memory activation” moment, where disputes emerge regarding the past and the role of women in the conflict. The study addresses the question: how are these memories interpreted, contested, or re-signified in the digital space? A total of 558 tweets were collected using commemorative hashtags (#Malvinas, #memories, #women), through a non-probabilistic sample suitable for qualitative analysis without aiming at generalization. The methodology combined operational concepts from socio-semiotics, enunciation theory, and content analysis, allowing the examination of thematic, rhetorical, and enunciative dimensions of the messages, as well as the interactions generated. The analysis reveals tensions between laudatory and critical appropriations, where the recognition of male combatants continues to prevail over that of women. Digital interventions also highlight demands for symbolic and institutional recognition, both from women participants and from others who, without having been involved in the war, engage from a gender and memory perspective.

According to Czapliński (2024), as the peasant turn expanded—when, alongside literary works and theatrical plays, there also appeared reportages, films, and anthropological, sociological, and historical monographs—the peasant majority, began to fragment. To the peasant themes were added those of workers, women, and sexual minorities, and this interwoven representation gave rise to the broadest cultural current in the history of Polish emancipation, which Czapliński proposes to call the “egalitarian turn.” The aim of my paper is to analyze Garapich’s book as an example of both the peasant and egalitarian turns present in Polish social memory. Garapich set out for a small village in Podolia in order to demythologize his family history, trace concealed family secrets, discover unknown relatives, and reconnect Polish and Ukrainian, noble and peasant destinies. His goal was to uncover how far the family narrative of idyllic rural life—supposedly governed by the laws of nature and social hierarchy—was from the truth. In resisting the multigenerational inheritance of trauma and silence, Garapich not only demythologizes and reconstructs the complicated relationships of his great-grandfather with his wife, concubines, and numerous legitimate and illegitimate children, but also exposes the actual social hierarchy: one marked by divisions, subjugation, and systemic domination. The author shows that serfdom did not end with its formal abolition but left enduring traces in culture, social relations, and collective mentality. He uncovers the mechanisms of economic exploitation, symbolic violence, and exclusion, as well as the ways in which the memory of interwar social relations was, on the one hand, repressed within his own family, yet on the other, persistently transmitted in the families of the village’s former serfs.