4.21. Creative, Participatory, and Situated Methodologies in Memory Studies [ES/EN]

How do creative memory practices and performances activate alternative ways of knowing and being in resistance to and outside the modes of colonialism? What presences and forms of knowledge and political action do they spark? This paper elaborates a situated reflection grounded in my life experience and a core group of graphic pieces I created in the context of my work as a member of the H.I.J.O.S. Colombia. These pieces present viewpoints, reflections, questions, and engagements through which we collectively address memory labour. I argue that creating representative and collectively informed pieces and gestures mobilizes and displays memory labour as a practice of sobrevivencia creativa/creative survival (Mignolo, 2013; Richard, 2004, 2023; Taylor, 2003). This is a public, aesthetic, and political practice in the now-time, aimed at disputing, re-thinking, and re-creating diverse senses and possibilities of our worlds for the now-time, in the aftermath of political violence. By developing the now-time concept (Benjamin, 2008; Didi-Huberman, 2005; Hartman, 2008; Mate, 2006; Sharpe, 2016; Taylor, 2020), I propose a way to inhabit time and space in memory through creative and collaborative practices. This approach seeks to challenge and critically examine the conventional, linear, chronological, and progressive understanding of time in memory, especially within the context of systematic and mass violence, as expressed through slogans such as "Never again." This paper contributes to fostering an alternative understanding of temporality, systemic violence, and what we define as frames of possibilities.

How can we intervene in our inheritances? How can we re-tell histories of violence with an eye towards reparation rather than transference, towards solidarity rather than empathy, towards equitable democracy rather than liberalism? And how can the poet-historian's form of telling the past allow for more spacious conversations and griefs between distinct histories to emerge? At the threshold between solidarity and grief, in the face of material immensity and grammatical impossibility, the poem desires, aspires, to speak. Poetics provides a model of thought—one rooted in the possible and impossible, simultaneity and multiple-ness—that can be applied to our memory landscapes, both personal and national. Writing from the third generation, I weave through my Zede's stories of escaping Germany on Kristallnacht and my experience decades later amidst Berlin's memorial sites with a German passport in hand and mass violence in Gaza in the news. When the poet resigns possibility to the margin, it sits there still——a beckoning, a respiratory glance—even as it yields to her knowing that we are only-barely at its edge, and that we, as a political necessity, must dwell at this edge of each other. Towards the impossibly possible, I turn to a poetics of aspiration in the face of epigenetic inheritances. The poem bares the seams of its creation while attempting to craft a whole; the impossible aspirations of the historian, the poet, and the granddaughter lie visible on the page. In turn, memory transforms through poetics into a usable code for envisioning a multidirectional and capacious model of democracy and the multiple memory landscapes our democracies must hold at once.

The proposal aims to analyze the use of audiovisual resources in social research—from a gender perspective—not only as a methodological tool for investigation but also as a resource for the conservation of memory, as intangible cultural heritage. Through the recovery of oral histories from settlers who arrived in Patagonia Aysén at the beginning of the 20th century, I have sought to explore the ways of living on the borderlands and the daily life of the Chilean-Argentine central Patagonia, as well as the tensions associated with the fragmentation of the territory, which are periodically highlighted and exalted by the states. This border space has been built as a space of continuous mobility and migrant transit, which is materialized in the daily life of inhabiting Patagonia. Historically, this territory has given rise to the construction of subjectivities of border groups who, in their personal trajectories, possess multiple identifications and belongings, with continuous transit—across borders—being a condition of inhabiting that permanently re-signifies these affiliations. To this end, I have traveled the territory in search of oral histories, which I have captured and preserved through video recordings with a small video camera. The video footage of the interviews has allowed for a subsequent analysis through the transcription of the narratives, but it has also led me to academic reflections on the methodology and the ethical and operational implications of introducing a video recording of an interview into the daily life context of the interviewees. Thus, I would like to share reflections on the use of audiovisual methodologies concerning the production of images, ethical and methodological issues, their analytical use, and then their use for scientific dissemination, thereby connecting research with creation, leading to the creation of documentaries.

This paper presents the Ecological Model of Memory as a transversal theoretical and methodological framework designed to connect different scales, contexts, and knowledge systems in memory research. It asks how this model can contribute to more horizontal and situated comparative studies, while fostering mutual recognition among diverse epistemological and ontological perspectives. The model understands memory as a living, multi-layered system composed of four interrelated levels: the microsystem (community’s and daily practices), the mesosystem (academic and cultural institutions), the exosystem (local governance and policies), and the macrosystem (beliefs, values, and historical imaginaries). Through this relational structure, memory is approached not merely as a representation of the past, but as an active and transformative process embedded in social and ecological dynamics. Methodologically, the model integrates oral history, creative ethnography, and collaborative action–management as tools to co-produce knowledge with communities. This participatory approach allows researchers and local actors to engage in mutual learning, generating comparative insights across diverse case studies — such as post-industrial territories in the Global North and extractive regions in the Global South — without erasing their contextual specificities. Key findings suggest that the ecological model of memory fosters new forms of ethical and sustainable research, linking theory and practice through collaboration, care, and reciprocity. By valuing local cosmogonies and epistemic diversity, it provides a situated framework for understanding how memories are remembered, reimagined, and transformed across different worlds.

In this presentation, I reflect on two collaborative projects in which I have developed creative and participatory methodologies to approach memory scholarship in a socialised and co-creative way. The first project is a decolonial community filmmaking initiative developed in the aftermath of Hurricane María in contemporary Puerto Rico, and the second examines Argentina’s post-dictatorship imaginaries through an experimental documentary that promotes a feminist and non-victimising approach to political trauma. In doing so, this presentation engages with Ann Rigney’s vision that our ever-shifting relationship with the past can enable activist and communal pleasures to become carriers of memory (2018), thereby renewing memory studies for the future. Ultimately, I suggest that such creative approaches to memory studies can illuminate the potential of aesthetic platforms and cultural narratives to mobilise mnemonic practices by widening participation and transforming memory into action. These methodologies challenge the extractive hermeneutics prevalent in Euro-centred academic approaches to Memory Studies, instead foregrounding collective practices that privilege embodiment, performance, and critical engagement through co-creation from Latin America. They draw on the lived experience of working on research projects that explore memory and aesthetics across distinct landscapes that continue to grapple with affective forms of trauma, trace slow mnemonic processes, and confront proliferating forms of patriarchy and coloniality.