Edit Document

Data is Null. This method or property cannot be called on Null values.

ID #

Type

Title

Created By

Created At

Author(s)

Keywords

Subject

Document

How did Comuna 13 of Medellín become a cultural center?

Commune 13 is presented to the world as an example of change and social transformation. Proof of this is that sports demonstrations are organized there, such as Red Bull Medellín down the hill, through which this community will receive 29 athletes from 10 different nationalities who will run for the first time in history the 1.6 km of the Red Bull MCA 2023 trail. 

There, where the route of this track takes place, which has 17 obstacles between banks, curves, drops and ramps, there is a lot of history to tell. 

Comuna 13 thus appears before cameras and mobile devices as a place that went from being a territory of maximum risk due to the violence of guerrillas, paramilitaries, gangs and drug trafficking organizations to a kind of sector that includes graffiti, tourism and art in general, what Commune 13 was before and how it has become what it is now.

But how did it come to project that image and what is the story it has to tell beyond tourism?

Disputes between armed groups and a rebirth marked by violence
From Commune 13, it is said, the drug trafficking boss Pablo Escobar's cartel was nourished by young people without opportunities to turn them into hitmen, kidnappers and extortionists, making that sector a cauldron of vulnerability and violence, leaving over time said territory and its inhabitants in the hands of whoever could exercise the power of violent and economic force.

"More or less 250,000 people currently live in the commune. The majority of the population is displaced by the conflict, and they live in the informal economy, from underemployment. Many of the population are mothers who are heads of households," highlights Manuel López Ramírez. , director of the School Memory Museum of Comuna 13 and Rector of the Eduardo Santos Educational Institution.

Manuel remembers that despite the difficult living conditions that already plagued the Commune, everything changed in 2002, when Commune 13 became a scene of urban war due to the Democratic Security policy, which was in force at that time.

"Once the era of democratic security entered the scene, after Operation Orion, it was said that this final operation would put an end to crime in the city, but in reality it sowed terror and victims. Medellín and the commune became in a theater of urban warfare experimentation where humiliations and abuses were experienced as a result of a war scenario that has as its antecedents the existence of insurgent guerrilla groups, but which were replaced by paramilitary groups with the support of the State to eliminate their enemies. and 'save the city', but neither one nor the other happened," says López, who in addition to leading the Museum and the educational institution is a lawyer, doctoral student and graduate in Philosophy and History.

What organizations such as the School Museum of Memory or the Casa Kolacho Cultural Center have collected is that the majority of victims were civilians, as a result of the bombings in the middle of the city, the attacks and overflights of helicopters and even the use of tanks. of war, which led to the domination of paramilitary groups. They exchanged one for another, but the crime continued, with the aggravating factor that anyone who raised a voice of protest or was accused - often without evidence - of belonging to insurgent groups could, in the worst case, be tortured, murdered or missing.

According to the Center of Historical Memory, around 1,500 troops participated in Operation Orion alone and were accompanied by hooded men and women -paramilitaries- who had carried out previous intelligence work and accompanied the Public Force in their raid work. and capture of alleged guerrilla collaborators.

Don Berna, head of the paramilitary forces at that time, declared that: "several of our men went there, many of them were hooded, several people were identified, some were discharged, others were captured and then disappeared."

The toll of victims, as reported by the newspaper El Tiempo in the civilian population, was extensive, with dozens of civilians injured, dozens of homicides committed by the Public Force, dozens of people murdered by the paramilitaries, people tortured, almost 100 forced disappearances and more than 400 arbitrary arrests, not counting the thousands of displaced people.

Commune 13 that remained and Commune 13 now

Since the urban war in Commune 13, 30 years have passed. Today a good part of it is painted with graffiti and seems to be a successful example of a paradigm where violence was moved to culture, accompanied by tourism around escalators traveled daily by locals and foreigners. 

But it was not so easy to get there nor is the image shown on social networks so complete.

"Since then, many leaders who made these accusations from art have fallen. For example, a movement arose called 'Revolution without deaths', inscribed in Hip Hop culture. Many of those boys fell, until in the year In 2009, Kolacho fell, one of the graduates of the school where the museum is located and who left a lot of pain among the community," López Ramírez remembers.

Hip Hop was a movement that promoted non-violent struggle among the youngest, through the four expressions of this culture: music, graffiti, break dancing and DJing. Although many of them were silenced by the violence (which according to the official discourse ended after the military operations) it was one of the seeds of the color and artistic atmosphere that is experienced in the tourist part of Comuna 13.

"What arose after Orion was terrifying. The leaders denied it. The project of escalators arrived, which in the end was not a priority, but for the city, for the administration, it was a priority to put in the stairs because that was what they were going to deal with. an urban aesthetic, like a story to create a narrative where people overcome conflicts by forgetting everything that has happened," says the director of the School Memory Museum.

Hip Hop was a movement that promoted non-violent struggle among the youngest, through the four expressions of this culture: music, graffiti, break dancing and DJing. Although many of them were silenced by the violence (which according to the official discourse ended after the military operations) it was one of the seeds of the color and artistic atmosphere that is experienced in the tourist part of Comuna 13.

"What arose after Orion was terrifying. The leaders denied it. The project of escalators arrived, which in the end was not a priority, but for the city, for the administration, it was a priority to put in the stairs because that was what they were going to deal with. an urban aesthetic, like a story to create a narrative where people overcome conflicts by forgetting everything that has happened," says the director of the School Memory Museum.

For López Ramírez, however, the commercial and tourist explosion that is experienced there is not a form of real progress for the commune, "but a perversion of the people's needs. We wanted to counteract with the museum the commercial, aesthetic exploitation of the leaders, tourism as a way to demonstrate that the war and the violence suffered was necessary for them to have this progress today. As a small cleanup of official history in the face of violent events where the state had an enormous responsibility.

The scenario today is quite diverse. Currently, López stated, very few organizations that did memory work escaped the exploitation of tourism. "It is not a crime, because people have no way of subsistence. People have no jobs, no options, and they have to go do what they do. That is why many cultural organizations of resistance against oblivion have finally had to dedicate themselves to doing exploitation of tourism," concluded the director of the School Memory Museum.

Despite all this, the daytime festive atmosphere that the cultural and tourist sector of the Commune has has given rise to initiatives such as Casa Kolacho, a Hip Hop cultural center led by the Hip Hop collective C15 and Camaleón productions, who throughout Their history has contributed to the process of formation and strengthening of the Hip Hop movement in Medellín, being recognized as one of the promoters of Hip Hop festivals such as "Revolution without dead" until 2010, and now with the "Festival Manifesto, Cultura Viva Comunitaria" , in addition to leading the "Territory of Artists" project, a permanent proposal to make the neighborhoods and communes of Medellín a space for creation, for encounter and dignified life.

In the victims and art lies the genesis of this tourist and cultural outing that today is just one of the faces of Comuna 13, and that with initiatives such as the "Graffitour" is a historical, aesthetic and political tour prepared by artists of the Hip Hop movement, with which they make known the stories that move and inspire hope and the search for better living conditions for the community, and that also tell the stories of inequalities and historical violence that are still present in the area .

Like the Graffitour, there are many other proposals that go beyond the tourist and commercial exploitation of its history, but that can only be known once people ask themselves beyond the escalators what is the reason for the international phenomenon that is today. Commune 13.

Comuna 13 of Medellín opens to tourists

The neighborhood of the Colombian city wants to attract visitors by offering its historical memory as an attraction when it is still in the process of reconstruction and involved in tensions

Mass tourism usually alters the characteristics of the territory: if it is a natural environment, putting pressure on its natural assets; if it is an urban environment, altering the dynamics of the city. However, not all impacts are of the same magnitude or of the same nature. Hence, it is convenient to explore the characteristics of the process of opening to tourism in Comuna 13 of Medellín (Colombia), in terms of consumption of historical memory and urban transformation. What happens when the tourist product offered is historical memory, still in the process of reconstruction, in an urban territory marked by armed conflict? What impact does the use of memory itself as a commodity have on territory and memory?

[The city] is made of the relationships between its spaces and the events of the past that define them, of those networks of stories and stories that give meaning and significance to the built environment and the biographies of life that are created therein.

In the official narrative, reflected in the Strategic Tourism Plan 2018-2024, it is declared that one of the main attractions of Medellín is its social transformation and that this has allowed the development of various tourism products, such as tours of the communes. In this way, the urban interventions carried out in the communes through social urban planning projects, whose purpose was to improve the quality of life of their inhabitants, have become a platform that facilitates and promotes their conversion. Historically excluded from the development of the city, they are now tourist consumption products that are articulated in the promotion strategy of Medellín as a destination.

This is how people, their life biographies, their processes and the traces of the armed conflict become a commercial asset of the city. Through demonstrations of urban art and tours of places of memory that are recreated by the stories of those who were protagonists or witnesses of the violent events that shook the commune during decades of conflict.

Historically excluded from the development of the city, [the communes] are now products of tourist consumption that are articulated in the promotion strategy of Medellín as a destination

Pablo Montoya, in his work The Shadow of Orión, captures with literary skill the sociopolitical and territorial fractures that constitute Commune 13, using the waste dump as a metaphor, but also highlighting it as a fact that reflects a territory historically crossed by violence, ignorance of their existence and the impossibility of counting their dead and missing; and that, consequently, he has not managed to close his wounds, reconstruct his memory, or shape a new destiny.

If we understand that the city is not the succession of its streets, the skyline of its buildings, the bus networks that energize movement, nor the houses that protect its inhabitants; but rather it is made of the relationships between its spaces and the events of the past that define them, of those networks of stories and stories that give meaning and meaning to the built environment and the biographies of life that are created in it, memory would have to be your most valuable asset. In fact, it is the foundation from which the future is built. Memory understood as a bastion of the symbolic dimension of the city that fills the space with meaning, drives the processes of appropriation of the territory and collective construction around a common past.

Its popularization [of the commune] as a tourist destination, without a comprehensive territorial and economic development strategy that transforms Comuna 13 from its foundations, and without a tourism management system that minimizes its impacts on the territory, has its risks.

Commune 13 is a place where the territory speaks, but at the same time is silenced; in which high rates of poverty and equal levels of hope still exist; in which its residents found in urban art a means of expression and construction of historical memory, which has now also given way to art as an object of tourist promotion and generator of economic income. This diverse and complex territory has been coated with tourist magnetism, although its invisible borders and territorial control by armed groups have not completely disappeared.

In fact, the tourist tour guides comment—without raising their voices too much—that they must pay for vaccines, a form of extortion, to be able to carry out tourist activity in Commune 13. This suggests a transformation of the transactions that arise between the settlers and armed gangs, which change the form, pay for the exhibition of the territory as a space of historical memory, but not the substance: violence and extortion as a mechanism of territorial control.

Meanwhile, its popularization as a tourist destination, without a comprehensive territorial and economic development strategy that transforms Comuna 13 from its foundations, and without a tourism management system that minimizes its impacts on the territory, has its risks. Not only to trivialize its history and finish corrupting its memories constructed of diffuse and incomplete fragments, but to cover up with the façade of tourist success the complexity of the challenges it still faces, going so far as to aggravate the social and economic exclusion of the that many of its inhabitants are exposed.

Validation of the place as possible cultural heritage Comuna 13 San Javier, Medellín

Without a doubt, the city of Medellín, in Colombia, is currently a symbol of the vindication of the context of violence experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, and in the last 30 years it has become a tourist destination of great relevance for the economy. of the department and of the same country: it is the third most visited city by foreign and national tourism, according to figures from the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism (MinCIT, 2018). This progress and this image of innovation converge in the development programs and the various urban-architectural interventions that government entities, together with public and private companies, have committed to in the previous 20 years, which has triggered a evident empowerment on the part of the State, with the development of road projects, parks, libraries and state buildings that, without a doubt, benefit the majority of the population, without social distinction. It should be noted that these interventions have generated a great impact on the city and the community in general; However, when delving into these changes, the active participation of the different communities that intervene as contributing and triggering entities must be highlighted, and thus enable the changes of these state interventions and build empowerment strategies for the benefit and well-being of the community.

This is the case of the renowned Commune 13 San Javier, located in the central-western area of ??the city, and formed as an edge settlement of subnormal characterization that houses a historical invasion of peasant migrants victims of the armed conflict from various bordering areas of the Antioch's Department. From the forties of the 20th century to the first decade of the 21st century, the area was drastically transformed in terms of the number of inhabitants in the sector, to currently form a commune of 21 sectorized neighborhoods of strata 1-3, depending on time. consolidation. Thus, investigating its historical makeup, the population of the commune increased significantly in the 1940s and 1950s, as a prelude to the worsening of the violence of the armed conflict that would formally develop in the 1960s, and that in both Following decades it increased, as a result of forced displacements due to the internal war that, without respite, occurred in the rural areas of the country. The dynamics of these two decades (1980 and 1990) were the scene where the process of development and strengthening of criminal gangs took root in the sector, when militia groups were formed to support drug trafficking, paramilitarism and guerrillas. This reality of violence worsened due to actions of the State together with paramilitary groups that, with the aim of dominating and controlling the area, took possession of it, and left the indelible mark of forced disappearances and false positives in interventions such as Operation Mariscal and the Operation Orión, in 2002. Although it must be recognized that these situations of violence have currently decreased significantly, there is still the trail of local criminal conflict, which its inhabitants, in a work of awareness, coexistence and participation, try to overcome. combat fighting with social projects that empower and strengthen the community.

Contextualizing these historical events with the pictorial manifestations of the graffiti artists of the commune, it is clear that the panorama described was the inspiration for random visual interventions to be carried out, which had the same basic intention of the values ??of graffiti action around the world. : mark in a tangible, but ephemeral way, a sector through visual communication, but not with a specific aesthetic-urban purpose. And although the historical burden may be the inspiring foundation for the creation of these graffiti, in the particular case of Commune 13 it is imperative to recognize that the trigger for the current demonstration was in 2011, with the inauguration of the stairs project electric lights, which opened the way to the stage for the graffiti artists to capture their interventions in the adjacent houses at 384 m length. Artists like 'Jomag', 'Chota' and 'Yess' probably started with a mural that historically expressed what had been experienced in the commune and its context of violence, or at least that's what the tour guide says in an interview. Andrés Mesa, from the Comuna 13 Graffiti Tour:

The first graffiti is a fact that no one should know, because in principle stairs were not thought of as tourism, when the construction was done, boys came to graffiti but not as such in the sense of tourism, if we are going to talk about that topic I would dare to say that it could be Jomag, Chota and Yess among the three of them because they were the ones who painted the first wall, which was the one below and which is no longer there today. (Personal interview with Andrés Mesa, September 19, 2020)

Along with the escalators, another of the urban projects that served as a canvas for graffiti artists in the area to continue deploying their artistic interventions was the construction of the Media Ladera Viaduct, which sought to solve the connectivity and mobility problems of the Independencia I neighborhoods. and Independencia II, which extends the gallery already reflected in the route of the escalators.

In this panorama, and with the contextualization of the meaning of the graffiti action in the place, the tour of Commune 13 was carried out with the primary objective of verifying the following indicators of cultural heritage, ruled at the world conferences on cultural policies held in Mexico by UNESCO (1982):

The cultural heritage of a people includes the works of its artists, architects, musicians, writers and scholars, as well as the anonymous creations arising from the popular soul.

Every people has the right and duty to defend and preserve their cultural heritage, since societies recognize themselves through the values ??in which they find a source of creative inspiration.

In this order of ideas, it should be noted that the route taken in the tour is, in itself, a historical foundation of the origin of the commune, and becomes an additional tool for understanding how some of the neighborhoods were established. iconic in the sector.

It should be noted that the majority of the neighborhoods of Comuna 13 emerged as clandestine urban processes, and that its urban planning was subject to late legitimization by the State, because it was much later than neighborhood consolidation, as is customary in illegal settlements that overflow the city limits. Making the previous point clear, we can proceed to the description of the tour, which had as its starting point the San Javier metro station, to later travel through the neighborhoods of Villa Laura, Independencia I and Independencia II, and the renowned neighborhood 20 de Julio, founded in the 1970s, as an extension of the San Javier neighborhood. As a parenthesis of the guided tour, it was considered vitally important to visit the cemetery of Comuna 13, since there is another important sample of graffiti made by the community, and in which some of the victims of violence are commemorated. which the commune was subjected to from its origins. These murals have been developed and consigned thanks to the Art for Reconciliation workshop program, which has been a local strategy that promotes cultural activities and encourages conscious, sustainable and permanent social change in the community. On route again with the designated itinerary, an inventory of the graffiti of Commune 13 was begun, where not only were the pictograms described in the two contextualization exercises (Bubble Letters, Tags, Characters and Murals) found, but a wide display of styles and development of techniques, which are the component that incorporates the peculiar aesthetics of the intervened neighborhoods and adds a more artistic structure to the exhibition. And although the most purist graffiti artists could consider it a nonsense with respect to their philosophy, it is from the desire and territorial need to empower themselves as a collective over their commune that the graffiti artists of Comuna 13 reconsider individual expression in order to generate alternatives. that, as detonators, make it possible to develop new forms of empowerment so that their neighborhoods overcome their own violent history, surpassing the counterculture values ??of the practice and becoming the milestone of rescue for its inhabitants.

Currently, the production of street art as an artistic alternative for cultural innovation in urban contexts, whether local or global, provokes and generates tensions between its creators (graffiti artists and street art artists) with other actors who are part of the city scene, such as public administration. From these dynamics, a space of tensions and closeness is simultaneously built. 

This is how this staging is reaffirmed so that the community, in a creative way, joins the initiative, supporting the route with other types of ventures and giving even more values ??of interest to the route. Enterprises such as Casa Kolacho Cultural Center, which promotes and manages most of the graffiti in the commune, Café con aroma de Barrio and homemade ice creams such as Cremas de Doña Consuelo, among others, are currently developing as microenterprises of great importance for the economy. emerging locale, and are, in addition, the pillar of the promotion of cultural tourism adopted in the Comuna 13 open sky gallery.

The findings show that Casa Kolacho can be considered to use a transmedia communication strategy, which together with citizen participation achieves social mobilization, in addition the cultural and creative production of the collective involves the inhabitants of the neighborhood and represents their work beyond their art. , has an impact on the identity of the city.

Notes

Draft

Status

Country

City

Placename

Cancel