What happens when the “official” and “popular” stories about your neighborhood do not match what you archive in your family album?
In Colombia, people who are forced to flee their homes due to violence are called desplazados. When desplazados self-settle in another region of the same country, they are called “internally displaced.” Medellín is now home to Colombia’s second largest population of internally displaced people.
Displaced women’s stories are more than their displacement. Over the past six decades desplazados have built 15 sprawling neighborhoods in Medellín. Until the past decade they have done so on their own, with little to no official state support. Since 2004, through three mayorships, desplazados have collaborated with the City of Medellín in government urban interventions and socio-political inclusion of stunning scope.
We craft documentary videos from our first-person interviews with desplazados and the stories they narrate from their family albums. Our documentaries put their stories into conversation with research in archives, human rights and government publications, media coverage, and academic literature.
Excerpted from Mobility Movilidad director Tamera Marko’s “Disrupting Doble Desplazamiento in Conflict Zones” (Reflections 2012).
