This project gives special emphasis to the contemporary literary and artistic practices in Colombia and Lebanon that reflect the historical threshold provoked by the respective conflicts and caesura in art and literature. Aesthetic strategies profoundly question the notions of testimony and historical witnessing: the narrative tropes of victim and perpetrator articulate a lieu of enunciation for addressing oblivion and the relationship between the subjects, their memories and human time. Accordingly, the project also seeks to examine related memorial and architectural sites, and those visual or material archives that, read against the grain, potentially configure other forums and alternate spaces of cultural, material and mnemonic negotiations of political conflicts. It thus brings into the foreground the ‘courtroom’, both as physical site and legal forum, with its media technological environments to discuss the conceptual and material entanglements between contemporary literature, art and their investigative aesthetics, and the law with its trials, truth and/or historical commissions.

Writers and artists alike have questioned the writing of the history, the state of historical amnesia, and the lasting political violence in the two regions, not so much in their articulations as representations, but rather as experiences and historical consciousness. This project aims to unfold the civil imaginations behind these literary and artistic strategies, aesthetic and archival practices to discuss the articulated spaces of ethos and alternate writings of history that might allow a possible reconciliation.