Singing truth to power: Transformative (gender) justice,musical spatialities and creative performance in periods of transition from violence

Introduction

Tierra, tierra bonita

Tierra donde yo nací

Tierra de mis ancestros

Hoy yo canto para ti ¹

With these verses, and accompanied by the sound of tambores, Enkelé, a Colombian women’s music collective, pay homage to the land where they were born, a land that has suffered from decades of war and environmental destruction. Building on this song and its story and drawing on our activist-academic collaboration with the group Enkelé, this article explores whether and how women’s collective artistic resistance in Colombia can foster deeper cultural and structural changes in war-to-peace transitions. Critical transitional justice scholars and practitioners have highlighted the importance of looking at narratives of contestation in the arts and culture as sites where restorative and transformative justice could be provided (Kurze and Lamont, 2019; Rush and Simić, 2014). However, their works have mainly examined the potential and impact of arts-based workshops and programmes designed and implemented by governments and international organizations to accompany transitional justice processes. Studies that deeply interrogate the everyday effects of war in the development of grassroots creative subversions, resistances and Indigenous artistic performances to cope with trauma are still embryonic, at least in the field of international relations.

On 24 November 2016, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC–EP) signed a historic peace agreement with the Colombian government. It was considered one of the most gender-inclusive, one that cherished women’s and LGBTIQ+ rights. However, the conservative claims that the peace agreement was ‘promoting gender ideology’ and ‘homosexual colonization’ were key in the victory of the ‘no’ vote in the plebiscite for the peace accord (Corredor, 2021). Amid the current recrudescence of violence, one of the main challenges ahead is the healing of social, emotional and embodied wounds caused by 60 years of armed conflict. The Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición [CEV]), established after the 2016 agreement, has been praised for its efforts to ensure gender mainstreaming in its composition and procedure and for the inclusion of historically silenced topics such as structural racism and climate violence. Nevertheless, critics claim that the negotiations surrounding its mandate ‘reproduced a hegemonic sexual and racial hierarchy and a delocalized perspective of TJ [transitional justice]’ (Santamaría et al., 2020: 57). They claim that the CEV focused mainly on episodes of extraordinary armed violence during the armed conflict, but less on what that violence had meant for the everyday lives of Colombian citizens that had to survive displacement, grapple with lack of access to food, clean water, schools and health services, and live in constant fear. González Villamizar (2023) shows how the CEV was limited in its assessment of the link between extractive capitalism and the armed conflict, reinforcing the tendency of transitional justice to separate the political and socio-economic realms. Equally, ‘the focus of differential approaches on individual identities, rather than on power structures’ that was adopted regionally for the operationalization of the CEV’s training and mandates ‘contributed to obscure their interlocking or hybridising in the experience of individuals in different social positions’ (González Villamizar, 2023: 10–11). With Colombia’s rates of gender-based violence, feminicides and killings of women activists being among some of the highest in the world, people often feel that neither peace nor justice is there just yet (Indepaz, 2023).

Recent critics have shown how the Colombian state-led historical memory processes have proposed rather ‘selective memories and “truths”’, ‘reproducing nationalistic, institutionalised, militaristic and colonial accounts of the history of the armed conflict’ (Rodríguez Castro, 2021b: 670). As a response, antimilitarist women’s and feminist organizations have provided alternative spaces to build intimacy and connection through collective living, community cooking and cultural performances. They have critiqued postwar development projects and extractivist policies that have reconducted the continuum of violence women face (Paarlberg-Kvam, 2021). In particular, Afro-Colombian women have been intensively, and for centuries, engaged against colonial violence and state oppression (Merriman, 2020). Recently, women, mothers and LGBTIQ+ activists have been on the frontlines of the national strike against precarity that started on 28 April 2021, forming the first line in contesting police and military violence (Hernández Bonilla, 2021). This is one of the most recent demonstrations in which women’s struggles in Colombia have brought intimacy and embodied politics to the streets, against war and violence (Anctil Avoine, 2021). In the same vein, through embodied performances of música de tradición oral (oral tradition music), Afro-Colombian dance and street art, women have challenged the war narrative in Colombia from an infrapolitical perspective (Lugones, 2010) that has been often overlooked by the literature on bureaucratic and institutional transitional justice mechanisms.

Starting from a feminist academic-activist-artist collaboration with Enkelé, a women’s and feminist ² music collective based in the city of Bucaramanga, ³ Colombia, this article, first, examines the critical and creative possibilities of dance and music performance to recover a diversity of truths, memories and future possibilities for gender justice in post–peace agreement Colombia. Second, it traces the feminist political trajectory of Enkelé in its path towards proposing alternatives voices to the traditional understanding of the armed conflict during the current transitional period while offering alternative spaces in which to contest official narratives through rhetorically gifted musicians and dancers and their artistic tools. It does so by introducing three distinct musical spatialities – aesthetic, ethical and political space (Veal, 2020) – through which official narratives of violence and conflict are upstaged and contested. Ultimately, we call for greater critical conceptual attention to thinking intimate geopolitics through performance and examine the creative possibilities afforded by music and choreography to testify to an enduring culture of violence and to promote a truly radical way of understanding justice as that which improves the lives of ordinary people in the aftermath of violence.

Throughout the article, we use fragments of Enkelé’s song ‘Tierra’, ⁴ written by Enkelé’s founder and director Carolina Delgado, as the connecting narrative to explain our argument. This implies using Anzaldúa’s (1999) idea of terrorismo lingüístico (linguistic terrorism) to make our point about the centrality of localized and endogenous knowledge production in transitional settings. Foregrounding this marginalized knowledge that is often discarded in dominant security studies and peacebuilding literature, we propose musical performances as a device that can help us understand the affective, embodied politics of resistance in contexts of transition from violence. We, first, contextualize the contestatory power of Afro-Colombian music in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio region and situate the work of Enkelé. Second, we review the literature on critical approaches to transitional justice and the arts. Then, we present our theoretical framework and our methodology. In the empirical section, we unpack the political, ethical and aesthetic spaces that music can open for transitional justice, peace and security. Finally, we provide some concluding thoughts on the radical possibilities that arts can bring to understanding (gender) justice in the aftermath of violence and conflict.

The healing power of Afro-Colombian music in the Magdalena Medio

For centuries, música de tradición oral – Afro-Colombian musical practices – has been a tool for social integration and the construction of communities and spaces for collective resistance in the face of racism and discrimination (Bermúdez, 1994). Vergara-Figueroa and Botero Marino (2022: 198) show how alabaos – traditional songs in the Colombian Pacific region – ‘represent a counter-hegemonic narrative of violence’ that enabled Black communities to ‘sing their territory, inhabit it with their songs, and re-appropriate it symbolically’. The bailes, highly expressive, emotive and embodied, offer a stark contrast with the way in which canonical Roman Catholic musical practices are performed in urban centres in Colombia (Rojas, 2013). Moreover, the ‘Afro-descendant dance and song complex [has been] preserved by oral tradition, sung exclusively by older women and instrumented with traditional handmade drums’ (García Orozco, 2016: 16). Because of their function as tools for collective resistance and community-building, these music performances have been read as political and threatening to different Colombian governments (Rojas, 2013). Enkelé’s music relies on this double inheritance of Afro-descendant dances and songs and the resistance to the violence that has historically disproportionally affected Black and Indigenous populations (González Villamizar, 2023).

Although the Colombian armed conflict should be traced back to the Spanish colonization, the contemporary war begins with the murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 (Villamizar, 2017). Since then, the Colombian civil war has involved multiple actors – the state army, extreme-right paramilitaries, extreme-left guerrillas, drug dealers and multinational extractivist corporations, among others – and has been marked by high levels of violence, with more than nine million victims. ⁵ The story of Enkelé is tied to one of the regions most affected by armed violence and dispossession, the Magdalena Medio (CEV, 2021).

This mining and agriculture-dependent region is approximately 30,000 square kilometres in size and made up of predominantly rural municipalities from the departments of Caldas, Boyacá, Cundinamarca, Santander, Bolívar, Cesar and Antioquia (CEV, n.d.). Because of the development of coca plantations and illegal mining and the ensuing presence of armed groups, paramilitary presence intensified in the 1980s, coupled with state violence and confrontation with the guerrilla groups, where civilians were the main victims of forced displacement, massacres, torture, sexual violence, and the murder of political leaders and unionists (Sourdis and Pedraza Tabares, 2022: 131). The CEV has estimated that 6% of victims are from the Magdalena Medio. However, the Magdalena Medio has also been the territory of resistance and contestation, with numerous peacebuilding initiatives coordinated by multiple social actors, such as peasant and community leadership, the Catholic Church, businesses, academia and regional public institutions (CEV, n.d.).

According to Enkelé, the song ‘Tierra’ is the story of these years of armed conflict, peacebuilding and reconciliation processes. It narrates how the paramilitaries would use the river to dispose of dead bodies, and how women often walked along the riverbanks, hoping to find their loved ones. But it also shows that the riverbanks are a symbol of resistance, as women organized collectively to help one another survive and mobilize for change. ‘Tierra’, therefore, offers an alternative space in which to contest official narratives about the armed conflict, also appealing to the oral traditions of the region. It tells the stories of Enkelé’s corporeal memories. Our focus group in March 2022 uncovered multiple and intersectional war affectations for the group members that still have consequences in their daily lives and, therefore, mark the political terrain of their music. Several musicians from Enkelé have grown up on the riverbanks of the Magdalena Medio, have experienced forced displacement themselves, or have been threatened by armed actors or the state because of their political position and activism. Most importantly, most Enkelé members are heirs to the teachings of their Indigenous and Afro-Colombian women ancestors and recognize themselves as bearers of their stories of resistance to colonial and patriarchal violence. As such, Enkelé uses the música de tradición oral of the Magdalena Medio and the Colombian Caribbean to contest the violent macho culture that enabled and is embedded in Colombia’s armed conflict (García Orozco, 2016: 17). For Enkelé, ‘Tierra’ was born out of thinking, being and feeling the Magdalena Medio.

Towards a bottom-up approach to (gendered) transitional justice

Traditionally understood, transitional justice measures are a set of judicial and non-judicial instruments and mechanisms, such as trials, truth commissions, lustration or memorials. The aims of transitional justice are often linked to the normative objectives of democratization, nation-building, primacy of the rule of law and a free market economy (Rees and Chinkin, 2015: 1012), and a privileging of civil and political rights over an engagement with socio-economic and cultural rights (Hamber, 2016). Crucially, judicial and legal transitional justice mechanisms have failed to deliver justice for various gendered conflict-related harms and experiences (Ní Aoláin, 2019). Indeed, much of the engagement with gender in transitional justice unfolds within the context of holding perpetrators accountable for wartime sexual violence in criminal courts and tribunals, forgetting other types of gendered violence (Schulz and Kreft, 2022). Moreover, the existing caseload of successful convictions remains limited at best (Martin de Almagro and Schulz, 2022).

As an alternative, restorative justice measures that often take form in truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs), such as the CEV in Colombia, seek to provide recognition of harm and suffering to victims and offer redress. However, these measures have been criticized by feminist scholars because of their focus on ‘extraordinary’ violence during a specific historical moment – from the declaration of war to the signature of a peace accord – leaving structural power relations unchallenged while also ignoring intersectional dimensions of oppression and identities in postwar settings (Fobear and Baines, 2020). These scholars have argued that violence must be understood as a continuum between phases of peace and conflict (Cockburn, 2004) and as a manifestation of structural inequality and gendered power relations (Braithwaite and D’Costa, 2018). They claim that traditional transitional justice processes cannot live up to the complexities and non-linear lived experiences of violence, conflict and peace (Hamber, 2009). Women experience direct violence, such as forced displacement and sexual and gender-based violence during war. But, in the aftermath of war, gender norms and traditional women’s roles impair women’s access to justice. For example, Colombia adopted a transformative approach to reparations and land restitution in its 2011 Victims’ Law. ⁶ Because almost all the land titles are in men’s names, the law provides for allocating joint land titles to men and women to ensure better social and economic security in the event of divorce or the husband’s death. In practice, however, transforming attitudes towards women and agricultural work is difficult to achieve, and the projects that have accompanied land restitution in Colombia have focused on men’s agricultural work and devalued women’s work as just family work to ‘help make ends meet’ (Weber, 2021), reinforcing rather than ending gender inequalities.

In addition, a ubiquitous understanding within most transitional justice processes of women as passive, vulnerable victims dismisses and forgets the active roles and agency exercised by women in (post-)conflict and transitional settings (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2015), thereby reinforcing essentialist gender stereotypes of female victimhood and reconducting the dichotomy victim/perpetrator of violence (Anctil Avoine, 2022a). All this is striking because a significant body of (socio)legal literature shows how insufficiently addressing or reflecting lived experiences can deepen the injustices that were supposed to be eliminated (Fletcher and Weinstein, 2017).

Feminist scholars have therefore sought to broaden legal understandings of transitional justice. For them, justice is not a thing delivered by particular institutional mechanisms at international, national or local levels in the form of truth commissions, criminal courts or reparation programs, because these make invisible everything that does not correspond to the logic of the dominant epistemic territory (Vazquez, 2011). They have claimed that justice is also a sociocultural project and that we need to understand the different ‘strategies employed by war-affected populations to deal with the legacies of mass violence’ (Baines, 2010: 415) and to ‘work with and pay attention to the flows and ripples of ordinary life’ (Zalewski, 2013: 1). This is more than simply acknowledge the ‘local’ or to ‘traditional’ mechanisms – as opposed to the ‘international’ or the ‘modern’ – and how they feed one another. Rather, it is about understanding how war victims themselves work towards social reconstruction in the everyday and towards contesting and stretching the boundaries of what is possible in terms of justice beyond existing mechanisms and beyond the judicial realm (Herremaans and Destrooper, 2021).

One productive way of understanding social reconstruction in the everyday is to study cultural and artistic expressions of (in)justice, as we seek to understand marginalized knowledge and practices of memory and healing and how women in Colombia are making their political demands visible. Artists and scholars have explored the creative possibilities of the arts for critiquing justice and giving space to silenced voices and ordinary people in contexts of transition (Rush and Simić, 2014). Already in 2015, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence recognized the potential for arts and culture to help provide justice (De Greiff, 2015). Thus, music plays an important role in strengthening communal ties in urban and suburban ethnic-based communities (Aparicio and Blaser, 2008), in creating spaces for intercultural dialogue (Pettan, 2010), and in raising awareness of social and political issues that have been silenced through performative protest (Garlough, 2008). Nevertheless, there is barely any research that satisfactorily understands the relationship between transitional justice and art or that attempts to go further than demonstrating what the arts as therapy can bring to legal transitional justice approaches (Bahun, 2016). In the next sections, we contribute to covering this gap and contend that musical performances can express new visions of justice that are not constrained by the limits of what is possible and feasible in formal transitional justice mechanisms and can offer corporeal connectivity (Clark, 2019) able to bring together communities fractured by war.

Intimate geopolitics and the embodied experiences of musical spatialities

Feminist international relations scholars and geographers have drawn increasing attention to embodiment in war and (post)war settings (Narozhna, 2022; Zaragocin and Caretta, 2020). They have highlighted the ‘intersecting geographies of corporality and violence’ (Little, 2020: 1123) to demonstrate how different bodies experience violent conflict differently, depending on mutually reinforcing forms of positionality, such as gender, race and class, and the centrality of the body as a space through which to better comprehend the intertwinement of the intimate with the geopolitical. War is experienced through the body (Sylvester, 2013), a repository of memories and stories (Parr, 2008).

Starting from the acknowledgement of the centrality of this embodied presence, we draw upon the Latin American decolonial feminist notion of cuerpo-territorio (Gómez Grijalva, 2012; Rodríguez Castro, 2021a) – or the ontological relationship between territory and embodiment, between what is felt and what is known, and between knowledge and the territory in which this knowledge is lived and takes form. This relates to the idea of senti-pensar (Escobar, 2013) or the refusal to divide knowing and feeling, mind and body, and rather to highlight the link between bodies and their lived experience and knowledge. If experiences of conflict are fundamentally embodied, then transitional justice, which takes social reconstruction as its core, needs to open spaces for embodied narratives to understand not only ‘what is done to bodies and how they suffer’ during violent conflicts but also ‘what they do’ and ‘how they interconnect’ (Clark, 2019: 283).

The arts, including musical performances, are well suited to bringing in the corporeality of (in)justice and finding spaces for societal transformation. Through musical and choreographic performances, artists’ embodied presence, clothing and looks play an active role in contesting hegemonic narratives about justice and peace (Åhäll, 2016; Pruitt and Jeffrey, 2020), and this at political, ethical and aesthetical sites (Veal, 2020). Studying musical performances in times of transition from conflict to peace gives new perspectives into the potentialities and tools for radical contestation, hope and justice (Mills, 2021; Pruitt and Jeffrey, 2020).

In what follows, we use a decolonial feminist lens to analyse the embodied location (Coenga-Oliveira and Anctil Avoine, 2019) of Enkelé and its narrative of gender justice that contests the colonial roots of violence in Colombia. We argue that, through performance, the body is a ‘territory with a story, a memory and knowledges’ (Gómez Grijalva, 2012: 6) rooted in musical practices, aesthetics and a political link with the ancestors. In this endeavour, we want to displace our attention from transitional justice institutions and truth commissions towards embodied and ‘infrapolitical’ struggles (Lugones, 2010).

Art-based methods and feminist methodology

Enkelé Voces y Tambores ⁷ is a feminist activist and musical group of seven women that disseminates the cultural heritage of bailes cantados and mestizaje of the African diaspora in Latin America, especially acting in the war-affected region of the Magdalena Medio to narrate alternative stories of the violence to achieve reparation. The bailes cantados are dances performed together with oral tradition songs. They originated in the syncretic process of the Indigenous, African and Hispanic cultures during ‘the colonial social formation’ and developed during the nation-building period (Fals Borda, 1981: 55).

Our engagement with Enkelé dates to its formation in 2018, when two of the authors were working with Fundación Lüvo ⁸ in Colombia on projects related to decolonial feminism. One of them joined Enkelé, and we rapidly engaged in collective actions to reflect on the structural violence women and non-binary people face in the post–peace agreement setting. Our more sustained conversation with Enkelé began virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic when we started the research project presented here. We set up a WhatsApp group where we had conversations about gender, violence and transitional justice as Colombia commemorated the fifth anniversary of the FARC-EP peace deal. In the face of continuous and increasing violence, we collectively reflected on how bailes cantados can contest normative stances on transitional justice in Colombia. Therefore, our methodology is hybrid, based on feminist ethnography and netnography, which consists of the ethnographic study of online communities and their social interaction (Hahn, 2020; Kozinets, 2010). Both virtually and in person, we have conducted focus groups to discuss specific sets of questions we agreed with Enkelé before the beginning of the research. We sent the first questions through the WhatsApp group in November of 2021, which were responded to by the seven women of Enkelé. WhatsApp has been increasingly used by feminist scholars because it gives an account of ‘anecdotes, gossip, misinformed histories’ that open different ways of building knowledge and research archives (Tandon, 2018: 17). It allows a ‘temporal and spatial flexibility’ (Stewart and Williams, 2005, cited in Colom, 2021: 454) that made conversations possible during the uncertain months of the pandemic. It offers a space where women can reflect, come back to our questions later and respond without fixed temporalities. In turn, this enables us to reflect on transitional justice and women’s agency on the basis of the ‘everyday’ practices and lived experience of Enkelé members as creative spaces for thinking about alternative narratives in postwar society (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2015).

In March 2022, we conducted two focus groups ⁹ in Bucaramanga with follow-up questions and discussions based on previous WhatsApp conversations and the reflections stemming from the writing and performing of ‘Tierra’. Each focus group was about two hours in length, with a flexible set of questions regarding five main categories: (1) gender justice, (2) memory, (3) musical spatialities, (4) embodiment and (5) resistance. During the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023, we organized four online meetings with Enkelé to continue our conversation about the research and follow their growing activism through performances. Therefore, our ethical stances followed friendship principles for research in war and postwar settings (Anctil Avoine, 2022b) as we adopted a long-term feminist activist commitment where the research encounter went beyond the focus groups and interview settings. We believe that it was precisely these participatory methods that enabled us to produce a theorization of the power of embodied art-based performances as potential sites of transformative justice.

Performing embodied justice: Politics, ethics and aesthetics

Taking on Clark’s (2019) invitation to take seriously embodied agency and connectivity in transitional justice and inspired by Veal’s (2020) three musical spatialities, we examine the work that Enkelé does through its song ‘Tierra’ and the extent to which aesthetics, ethics and politics materialize as distinct spatial frames through which to mirror and rhetorically probe societal injustices. First, we explore how, through its music, Enkelé offers an opening of political spaces. Second, we delve into the ethical space by showing the ontological relationship to the territory in Enkelé’s members’ individual and collective histories. Third, we show that Enkelé’s musical performance enables the construction of an aesthetic space in which bodies, contestations and emotions might collide.

Reclaiming the bodies and the land: The ethics of ‘Tierra’

Mi tierra agoniza gritando

Mi tierra quiere vivir

En entrañas de ríos y mares

Montañas, valles y daños

Mi tierra cuanto me duele

Ver cómo te maltratan

Mi tierra desborda sangre

De aquellos que ayer murieron ¹⁴

Transitional justice processes are also contested ethical spaces in which queries about who represents and speaks for whom and which questions are asked have a tremendous impact on the ‘truth’ that is exposed. Artistic performances as political spaces are not exempt from the ethical dilemmas of performing and representing others. However, although the musical performance of groups such as Enkelé has the risk of presenting another uniformed truth that could deny the multiple realities present on the ground, it does provide the political space in which to contest the failures of official transitional justice mechanisms that had set up as goals to find the truth. As Rodríguez Castro (2021b: 678) argues, ‘collective memory for many social leaders ¹⁵ was attached to their territorial, ancestral and embodied experiences of place with an understanding of the plurality memory, truth and peace’. The idea of the group is not to homogenize victims but to find common vulnerabilities. Many members of Enkelé are social leaders in their communities, and many have experienced the armed conflict as direct victims. Camila, who sings ‘Tierra’, talked about this ethical responsibility to craft a space in which these stories of suffering might be translated into a musical performance that is never fixed, but rather constructed with the public in every performance:

I think ‘Tierra’ always ends with the phrase ‘tierra donde yo nací’ [the land where I was born] to recognize that ‘I was born there’. I accept it, but I don’t want things to continue being that way. It hurts me a lot to sing ‘Tierra’. I like to interpret it a lot, and I always sing it very differently. But it is painful.

Carolina, the group’s musical director and maracas percussionist, told us: ‘That is how I feel Enkelé: through music, we reveal that there is suffering in this land . . . and each one of us has experienced it in our paths.’ However, the efforts to reveal suffering navigate in a very fine but contentious space over who and what is represented, whose ‘truths’ are told and whose are discarded. It is through the stage that ‘truths’ are uncovered both for Enkelé’s members and towards the audience. The stage therefore functions as a physical and symbolic ethical space through which Enkelé can invite us to grieve for other bodies and landscapes and expose silenced truths. The stage is an ethical space where Enkelé members take a stance – through explaining their songs and positioning themselves in the political landscape – with regard to the armed conflict and collective memory. ¹⁶

The song ‘Tierra’ never speaks directly about the war (Figure 1). It has been thought by its composer, Carolina, as a homage to the land and the marginalized bodies that had remained invisible to justice. The song aims ‘to articulate, to (re)name, to chart uncartographied maps; it is, moreover, to forge a space from and where women of colour can self-invent themselves in a nation that keeps them on the socio-political, economic, racial/ethnic, and literary margins’ (Joysmith, 1993: 4) – or at the musical frontiers, at the margins (García Orozco, 2016). It is subversive because it proposes very rhythmic and happy music to explain tragic, hard and dark events about death and destruction. And it is political, as it exposes the Magdalena River as grievable:

We lost everything in the Magdalena River. For us, the Magdalena River is so symbolic and has so much meaning, so much significance. . .. It has also allowed us to spin the tragic history that we have. (Yira, Workshop 2)

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Figure 1.

Enkelé during the filming of the videoclip ‘Tierra’. © Watson Rojas.

In our conversations with Enkelé, the connection between marginalized peoples, their land and justice was central. ‘Tierra’ illustrates the artistic and political decisions that have shaped whose stories and truths are told and, consequently, who they are speaking for, rather than with (Alcoff, 1991). Crucially, they have put their own dancing bodies open to the gaze, hearing and violence as a shield to protect those bodies that have suffered:

No. It is for this exact reason that I cannot allow this to happen because one ends up dead. The social leaders, the women leaders, they end up dead for telling the truth, for speaking the truth. So, I cannot ignore the importance of this; it is transcendental because it has ended many lives. ‘Tierra’ says that and much more. (Yira, Workshop 1)

With this song, Enkelé channels the voice of people who fight for their river and land, for the right to live. Mildreth’s narration painfully recalls that the temporalities of transitional justice should be contested:

We are against fracking; we are against what the governor is doing. . . . I know that one day, any one of us can disappear. He or she is the third, fourth and fifth leader. . . . We have already lost the count [of murdered leaders]. And we were asking ourselves that question; there were 15 people in that meeting with me, and we were asking ourselves, which one of us is the next one?

This is what the song ‘Tierra’ reclaims: an ethical space in which to discuss the embodied land relationship ‘from a perspective that considers their ancestral and affective body-land connections’ (Rodríguez Castro, 2021a: 355). Crucially, Enkelé draws upon the connection of Afro-Colombian women to nature and opposes the ontological separation between the territory and the body. ‘Tierra’ portrays the ‘territory as a multifaceted, conflictual and relational space’, where the protection of life relies on an ‘embodied connection to the Earth’ and on ‘ancestral knowledge’ (Rodríguez Castro, 2021a: 349).

The search for justice also concerns the land as a victim of extractivism of the non-Indigenous communities during the war, demanding justice for the fact that ‘mi tierra agoniza gritando’ [my land screams in agony]. As Carolina expresses it, land exploitation is interconnected with gender violence:

In the Sierra Nevada, the first time I sang. . . . I don’t sing usually, but there, I sing. There we do what the mamo [spiritual community leader] says. When ‘Tierra’ was sung, the mamo said that Enkelé sings to nature, to the earth. And the Indigenous people there, they have not been exempted from the armed conflict. They had the conflict in their territory for a long time, and when we sang that song, he said: My father listens to you all [the women of Enkelé]. . . . When we arrived there, Mildreth and I, all the Indigenous musicians looked at us and did not like us. When they saw us on stage, they fell in love with who we are, and then they all wanted to sing with us. One says: ‘Wow!’ How come those people from the roots recognize us as women, give us importance, give us a song and feel proud of us and how other people who think they ‘possess’ the tradition try to make us invisible.

In this case, the message of the song of ‘Tierra’ is strengthened by what it means to be on the side of a Colombian culture of native peoples that have been made invisible and almost exterminated. In sum, the ethical space offered by ‘Tierra’ is reclaiming the body-territory in defence of life.

Aesthetics, embodiment and ‘staging’ feminism

Enkelé carefully presents this body-territory to the public to open an aesthetic space able to subvert the colonial narrative and the patriarchal order in post-conflict Colombia. The staging of the bailes cantados is still dominated by an androcentric sphere – the musical space and industry are controlled by male artists and producers – and by a colonial matrix of power – where the aesthetic reconducts violence and oppression, especially for women. This andro-hetero-colonial matrix is well represented in the traditional outfits used in the bailes cantados, and with heteronormative bodies in the bullerengue: ¹⁷ the man wears pants and a hat and is usually dressed all in white, while the woman wears a large and colourful dress, a necked blouse, large earrings, and flowers in her hair (Danza en Red Colombia, 2013). In other instances, women dress in white with the three colours of the Colombian flag – red, blue and yellow – restaging the ‘Colombian nation’ in the woman’s body as the bearer of culture and the place of memory-building.

The heteronormative and colonial representation of women in post-conflict Colombia has also been reproduced in the imagination of victimhood in the state mechanisms for transitional justice, ‘which have a postal code (rural), a skin tone (dark), and a gender (female)’ (Krystalli, 2021: 131). By proposing rhythmic and joyful music and dancing to explain tragic, hard and dark events about death and destruction, Enkelé openly subverts this aesthetic of the Colombian woman as a victim. The group carefully crafts a counter-hegemonic visual presentation on stage in two ways: by occupying the public space as a women-only group and by transforming traditional/colonial clothing.

First, Enkelé occupies the musical and political ‘public’ space that is still not easily accessible to female bodies in the Colombian context (Figure 2). They are not supposed to be a women-only group: they should be accompanied by men to perform in traditional music. As they collectively pointed out during the workshop, ‘we are always travelling together, the seven of us, but they still think that we are alone, because there are no men with us; so even our families think it is dangerous’. Enkelé have performed and persisted with their embodied presence where they were not welcome to do so: in different cities around the country, from the most peripheral zones to the most central places, such as Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez’s inauguration ceremony in Bogotá in 2022 (RTVC Noticias, 2022). They have occupied musical scenes, but also political and pedagogical ones, with online discussions about the place of women in traditional oral music ¹⁸ and folklore, ¹⁹ and in the diffusion of the final report of the CEV in their communities through conversations about gender and racial justice (Focus group, June 2023).

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Figure 2.

Enkelé during a concert at Javeriana University (Bogota). © John Sepúlveda.

Second, armed with their punk, chunky, dark leather boots and reinvented costumes, they embody subversive femininity. Completely made by Enkelé’s members, the outfits are based on an aesthetic that recognizes the heritage of the African diaspora, but with designs, vector prints and geometric shapes that differ from the traditional ones. They use skirts, pants, long overcoats and leggings, contrasting with the traditional and typical Colombian representation and stepping out of the colonial aesthetics of the Spanish and mestizo costumes. Furthermore, they use diverse accessories to claim their Afro-Colombian identity, the most important one being the turban that appeals directly to their African identity and ancestors.

Aesthetically, they refuse to stick to heteronormative colonial outfits that permeate the visual culture of the bailes cantados. They propose a rebellious aesthetic of punk boots, which represent their support for the working and popular classes, as a symbol of struggle and resistance (Restrepo Restrepo, 2005). As Yira says: ‘I think, yes, I perform, I am the enkeleana drag queen when I put on the outfit.’ Similarly, in several workshops Enkelé members stated how the outfits are breaking aesthetical paradigms. They make it possible for the members to imagine themselves as being otherwise, outside of the schemes of colonial, patriarchal power structures:

And I think that touching the issues of feminized bodies, of LGBTIQ+ trans women, in the oral tradition has affected a lot of people because it means moving and shaking the foundations on which the music of oral tradition has been created. And in many places of the country, oral tradition music has also served to maintain violence. It has served to make fun of feminized bodies, to plunge feminized bodies, women . . . gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual people . . . even more into oppression. (Yira, Workshop 2)

Enkelé opposes publicly and directly the gender and racial order, challenging normative femininity and portraying themselves as positive role models for younger generations: from a past and present of the objectification of women and their presentation as passive victims to a future of positive female agency. Through the aesthetics of performance, their bodies become a political force of the ‘subaltern’ subjects that struggle and build their own stories (Cardoso, 2014; Coenga-Oliveira and Anctil Avoine, 2019). Damar embraces this subversion, acknowledging how Enkelé is breaking gender and music paradigms:

I come from a very macho tradition; from a town (Arboletes, Antioquia) where the tradition is that a tambolero is a tambolero [not a tambolera] – a man. The tradition says the singer and dancer flirts with the tambolero because he is a tambolero, and it has always been sexualized as if there should be a connection between the man and the woman. So, I was so used to that, and I felt that I could not get out of there. When I came to Enkelé, it broke all the paradigms, and I began to connect with Angélica [one of the tamboleras]. I have talked to Angélica and I have told her: I feel that I connect with you in a very special way and that it does not have to be sexual or flirting or falling in love. It goes beyond that; it is like a feminine power, and I have found that too spectacular.

Conclusion

One of the greatest things that Enkelé has given me has been to resist. (Camila)

I think that Enkelé has been security for me. A moment of tranquillity, of feeling free, safe. . . . I have felt that, thanks to Enkelé, I am protected. (Carolina)

Taking embodied performances as a central site of inquiry, this article has teased through the critical and creative convergence between music and gender justice in the combat against oppressive structures in post-peace agreement Colombia. Using artistic expressions to denounce injustice and provide respite to those harmed is not uncommon. Art-based workshops have been used and adapted in (post-)conflict settings to enable victims to recover from traumatic experiences. However, little is known about how people use art as embodied performance to heal, contest and open new ways through which to find collective justice and healing. The article has argued that more attention should be paid to such processes, for they occur not solely in Colombia but globally. In turn, this can enrich our comprehension of the prospects of political interventions and the possibilities of peaceful and inclusive transition. Artistic performances are not only a response to past injustices and suffering but an active form of forward-looking agency that seeks to transform the patriarchal and racist elements upon which Colombian society is embedded.

The article makes three contributions to the study of (gender) transitional justice and the arts in contexts of transition. First, understanding transitional justice as a sociocultural project (Baines, 2010) implies giving as much importance to apprehending how ordinary people and communities who lived through trauma transform the world they live in today as to how many prosecutions or convictions of war criminals are out there. Crucially, participating in Enkelé has been a powerful way of creating healing for its members and for those who listen to their music, but it has created present and future insecurities. Enkelé is targeted by conservative and misogynist collectives who feel threatened by the group’s presence on stage and by the lyrics that denounce the continuum of (sexual and gender-based) violence that is embedded in, but does not stop with the end of, violent conflict. This is particularly important in the context of official silences about appropriate justice responses to structural gender injustices and land damage. It is not about a particular perpetrator or victim but about collective responses to distressing memories and unmet hopes of justice and peace. In this sense, musical performances are a sociocultural project that opens political spaces in which to transform post-conflict societies.

Second, while musical performances are often studied solely as an on-stage moment, the production, circulation and consumption of these performances are also meaningful forms of contestation worthy of analysis. This means encouraging scholars to analyse how a group is formed, what their members intend to write about, who the audience is, whom they believe they represent, and how their values and beliefs inform the process of creation. We focused on Enkelé’s single ‘Tierra’ to show how Indigenous lands, knowledges and practices are being marginalized, ‘made absent’, during official transitional justice processes. Furthermore, while reparations programmes on land, truth commissions and trials may or may not benefit Colombia’s Indigenous communities, most Indigenous people and their land, to which ‘Tierra’ refers, are politically and socially excluded from discussions about justice in Colombia, and they have barely any influence on governmental policies. The arts and music are, however, available as means of expression and healing.

Third, we showed that Enkelé’s musical performance enables the construction of an aesthetic space in which bodies, contestations and emotions collide. The presence of women on stage and their modern-traditional outfits denounce the racial and colonial past of traditional oral music and the broader Colombian society. Therefore, a systematic analysis of art performance as an aesthetic site helps illuminate the various ways in which art brings silenced and marginalized voices, knowledge and bodies to the fore. This has important implications for conventional transitional justice literature, which has focused more on how violent conflict is shaped by the persistence of antagonistic narratives and discourses than on the embodied impact of political violence (Brett et al., 2022). A focus on aesthetics, bodies and emotions brings two theoretical and methodological moves. First, a change in the object of analysis. The continuum of violence in postwar contexts, which includes mundane instances of hunger, domestic violence, unemployment and grief, has corporeal and emotional consequences on ordinary people long after violent conflict, which should be part of reconciliation and memorialization processes. Second, a proposal for studying arts as a method to better understand (transitional) justice as a sociocultural project that puts the lives of ordinary people at the centre. Considering the ‘denialist politics’ of past Colombian governments (Rodríguez Castro, 2021b: 673) and the numerous challenges that the new team is currently facing, thinking transitional justice through music and dance performance as a shared embodied experience has important implications for gender justice and security in post-peace agreement spaces. Enkelé is an example of ‘place-based collective memory’ (Rodríguez Castro, 2021b: 673), and future research in similar cases can foster counter-narratives to state-led actions in truth and reconciliation processes as well as spaces for alternative/non-judicial mechanisms for gender justice.