Relying on six months of ethnographic research, Ricardo Velasco Trujillo discusses the mobilization process started by a group of women that led to a symbolic act of intervention of the memorial monolith at the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá, Colombia, on September 21, 2018. The initiative—consisting of the covering of the monolith with fabrics representing a plurality of voices of victims of the armed conflict—constitutes the first stage of a series of symbolic claim for justice. The monolith was erected as a visible structure that signifies the growing responsibility of state institutions toward the victims and the type of actions taken to restore their dignity in the context of the transitional justice process initiated in 2005. The collective intervention, led by an Afro-descendant human rights leader, does more than merely interrupt current official initiatives of commemoration and reconciliation. It proposes new inclusive forms of inhabiting memorial sites as arenas for civic engagement, memory activism, and post-conflict community building.

Trujillo discusses the complex meanings of intervening a public monument of historical and national significance in the context of the politics of memory in transitional Colombia, and focuses on the institutional transformations brought about by the act of the covering and the spaces for civic participation it enabled by opening the initiative to the citizenry and claiming a permanent space for autonomous memory praxis within the CMPR.

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