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Collectivizing justice: transmedia memory practices, participatory witnessing, and feminist space building in Nicaragua

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Collectivizing justice: transmedia memory practices, participatory witnessing, and feminist space building in Nicaragua

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Content COLLECTIVIZING JUSTICE:
TRANSMEDIA MEMORY PRACTICES, PARTICIPATORY WITNESSING,
AND FEMINIST SPACE BUILDING IN NICARAGUA
by
Emilia Yang
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS (MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE))
August 2022
Copyright 2022 Emilia Yang

ii
DEDICATION
“By stepping into unknown territory, I opened myself to the risk of failure. But the finite
nature of our existence, and the infinite nature of the unknown, moots success or failure in
any professional domain. What really matters are our relationships to the people who are
closest to us with whom we share our brief journey through this wilderness.”
— Jeff Watson
1

Rest in Power

I dedicate this dissertation to my beloved ancestors, those to whom I share family
lineage and those that I have selected and have selected me to be part of our joint paths of
life.
To my mamá Luvy, who taught me a way of feeling, creating and being connected
with life. Your light is my light. I continue living in your enormous absence and continuous
presence. I hope to make you proud with everything I have done and continue doing.
To my grandparents Leila and Vicente, to my uncle Vicente. Your memories have
summoned me to do the activist work I do and your teachings will always guide me.
Jeff Watson, who left too early too soon, my most loving and admired mentor. Your
critical thinking and charismatic energy will be with me permanently.
To all the victims of the State of Nicaragua.
I dedicate my life’s work and my pursuit of Justice to all of you, always.

1
Watson, Jeff. 2012. “Reality Ends Here: Environmental Game Design and Participatory Spectacle.”

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Anyone who could throw open the path and lead me back to the ancient wisdoms was a
teacher. Anyone with a greater capacity for love than I is a teacher.”
Toni Cade Bambara
2

My views are a collective effort. I am grateful for all the lives that have shaped my
thinking and my artistic sensibility. First, I want to thank my academic family, my
committee, that have had the most unique balance between bravery, praxis, academic rigor
and support that I needed to move in this quicksand that is a practice-based PhD. I am
grateful for your work and ideas, the examples you have set for me, especially Tara
McPherson’s invaluable feedback and support, Andreas Kratky’s critique, Henry Jenkins’
mentorship and Steve Anderson’s honesty. Thank you also to Pilar Riaño-Alcalá who
kindly accepted to be part of my dissertation evaluating committee, for your example of
engaged scholarship committed to Memory and Justice. It has been a privilege and honor to
be in conversation with all of you.
To faculty across USC who have offered me guidance in and outside the
classrooms: Manuel Castells, Suzanne Lacy, Kathy Smith, Lisa Mann, Taj Frazer and
Richard Lemarchand. I am thankful for your openness to engage with my curiosity and
interdisciplinary interests.
To the Interdisciplinary Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) faculty Holly Willis,
Elizabeth Ramsey, Michael Bodie, Kiki Benzon, Vicki Callahan, Ashley York and Pablo
Frasconi who have provided critical feedback and support to my projects and writings
throughout the years. I also want to recognize Holly’s leadership and generosity as the

2
Bambara, Toni Cade. 1980. “What It Is I Think I’m Doing.” In The Writer on Her Work, edited by Janet
Sternburg, 1st ed. New York: Norton.

iv
Chair of the Media Arts & Practice division for looking out for our collective well-being
throughout the years I spent as a PhD student. Thanks to Dave Lopez, Sonia Seetharaman
and Stacy Patterson for all the support that made my projects a reality. I also would like to
acknowledge that my fieldwork was possible by the support of a Research Enhancement
Grant by the University of Southern California.
To my Penn State Intellectual Community, thank you for giving me the critical
language to jumpstart this doctoral degree specially to Peter Kareithi, Yu Shi, Sam Winch,
Catherine Rios, Julia Morrow, Jeff Copus and Craig Welsh.
I am grateful for all the collectives I have been part of. bell hooks says that “one of
the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places
where we know we are not alone” (hooks 2014, 213). The following are places where I
have felt at home:
My magic, play and dreams squad team, my collaborators and great friends Tonia
Beglari, Lishan AZ, Ana Carolina Estarita and Andy Cao, I am grateful for all I have
learned through the years with you. Your brilliance made possible my work. My larger LA
community Lillian Galvez, Lily García, Farid Haji, Nicola Chavez, Alejandro Quant
Madriz, Carlos Roberto Gutierrez, Chinwe Okona, many thanks for making LA my home.
My iMAP friends and unicorns Laura Cechanowicz, Behnaz Farahi, Biayna
Bogosian, Catherine Griffiths, Karl Baumman, Brian Cantrell, Fidelia Lam, Sarah Ciston,
Noa Kaplan, Szilvia Rusev, Lisa Muller Trade, Juri Hwang, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Clea
Waite, Geoffrey Long, Kumi Iman, Triton Moebley, Benjamin Ross Nichols, Joshua
McVeigh-Schultz, Curtis Tamm, micha cárdenas, Samantha Gorman, Amanda Tasse,
Jeanne Jo, Sultan Sharrief, Michelle Salinas, Adam Liszkiewicz and Luke Fischbeck.

v
Thanks for sharing space, ideas, collaborations, projects, and specially warmth throughout
these years.
At USC, the Media Activism and Participatory Politics group was one of my
intellectual homes, I am thankful for Henry Jenkins’ generosity and guidance as well as
Gabriel Peters Lazaro and Sangita Shresthova’s energy and care in all the projects we
created. I am thankful to many colleagues from MAPP and cross border collaborators
including Rogelio Alejandro López, Pablo Martínez Zárate, Andrea Alarcon, Samantha
Close, Thomas J Billard, Brooklyne Gipson, Yomna Elsayed, Michelle Forelle, Paromita
Sengupta, Raffi Sarkissian and Sulafa Zidani.
In Nicaragua, to all the members of the Association Mothers of April, but specially I
want to mention Susana López, Tamara Morazán, Francisca Machado, Francys Valdivia,
Mayra Salinas, Eva Campos, Elizabeth Velasquez, Josefa Meza, Meyling Potosme,
Guillermina Zapata, Alba García, Carolina Carrión, Nelly López, Jerlin Chavarría, Socorro
Corrales, Alvaro Conrado, Alvaro Gómez, Carlos Pavón and all the Museum Ambassadors,
thanks for your trust and for sharing your stories, resistance, survival, resilience and
example. You have given me so much strength.
I want to honor and thank the Museum team María Elisa Ortega, Clara Velásquez,
Salvador Zelaya, Mapache, Gabriel, Nanai, and collaborators Cris B, Camaleoni, Enrique
Flores, Mich Sequeira, Roberto Guillén Salinas, Em Butler, Gabriela Selser, A. Sequeira,
the Hora Cero team and many others that supported this process. Special thanks to Emilia
Mason, who has been a tour de force in my life and the project. Thanks to all for keeping
me accountable and keeping the work transformative in each step of the way.
My great advisors Machi Angelica Fauné, Desiree Elizondo, Marlene Álvarez,
Marlin Sierra, Margarita Vannini, Sylvia Ruth Torres, Ileana Rodríguez, Juanita Bermúdez

vi
whose wisdom and support has been invaluable for the development of this project. My
mentors and friends from the Espira Espora, the space for Research and Artistic Reflection:
Patricia Belli and Milena García your critiques and work taught me who I can be. My
collaborators in the Futurist Portals Sofia Molecular, Priscilla Rosales, Eugenia Carrion,
and those who joined us Alejandra, Raquel, A. Sequeira, Clara Velásquez, Isolda, thanks
for showing me the Feminist and Queer Futures I want to live in.
My family, Leila, Juan Carlos, Ramón, Gastón, Hannia y Claudia thanks for your
support throughout all these years. My siblings Selene, Eduardo, Luisa, Ester, Diana,
Melina, thanks for your example, for being part of this rare, beautiful and cross-border
family to which I proudly and happily belong. My Nicaraguan friends and sisters: Alexa,
Ana, Luise, Mariana, Claudia, Jilma, Linda, Morela, Mayra, Urania, Lucila, Edna thank
you for your support, love, collective care y bandidencias together.
Luciana you are my everything. Thank you for welcoming me into your life as I am.
Thank you for cherishing our love and our intellectual journeys together.

vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
LIST OF FIGURES ix
ABSTRACT x
PREFACE xi
INTRODUCTION: NECROPOLITICS AND TERROR: TRAUMA, IMAGES, AND
MEMORY 1

The State and the Administration of Violence: Massacres in Contemporary Nicaragua 5
Historical structural violence and the necropolitics of state repression 9
Media Ecology, Official Narrative and Laws: State Media and Digital Abuse 13
Trauma and Media: Images of Horror and Communication Overflow 17
Nicaragua, Revolution, Re-appropiation and Memory: A brief history 22

CHAPTER ONE: COLLECTIVIZING MEMORY AGAINST IMPUNITY AND
TRANSMEDIA 41

Transmedia Memory Practices and methods 43
The labor of memory, from grieving to mourning 47
Team and research methodology 48
Narrative and mapping practices of the “routes of pain” 50
Testimonios 53
Modular Visibility and the politics of the archive 54
Museum and Digital Altar: Participatory Design 57
Connective Transmedia Memories 59
Conclusions 60

CHAPTER 2: PARTICIPATORY WITNESSING, AFFECTIVE MEMORY AND
EMOTIONAL COMMUNITIES 63

Memory transmission, protest and space 64
Affect, sensory memory, and emotional communities 67
Affective and sensorial memory 68
Bodies, affect and space 70
Collective mapping, soundscapes and stitches 74
Photographic Installation: an animated demand in time 88
Barricades, counter monuments and objects of memory 94
Participatory Witnessing 99
Closing of the exhibition, popular intensity and collective intimacy 104

viii
CHAPTER 3: VIRTUAL EXPERIENCES IN THE FACE OF REPRESSION 108
Museum as a portable object 110
Digital Layer and User Experience Design 112
Digital altars for rituals of collective grieving 118
Projection Mapping: From the Collective to the Individual 124
The political potential of memory objects and rituals in public and virtual spaces 126

CHAPTER 4: FEMINIST SPACE BUILDING: FUTURIST PORTALS 133
Poetry from the future: the black, radical, civic and feminist imagination 136
Women’s collectives dream weaving futures 139
Portaleras “Time travelling to heal” 146
Space building, feminist play and a critique of world-building 151
Spiral Methodology for the Feminist Future 154
Memory based feminist imagination for the future and healing 158

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON COLLECTIVE HORIZONS: MEMORY, JUSTICE AND
REPARATIONS 160

REFERENCES 167

ix
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Map of Maycol Cipriano González Hernández murdered on May 30th, 2018. AMA y
No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 51
Figure 2 Portrait demanding justice, family of Cruz Alberto Obregon Lopez, 23 years old killed
on May 30th, 2018. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive,
2019. 54
Figure 3 Mural of Jeisson Chavarría, before and after defacement. AMA y No Olvida, Museum
of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 66
Figure 4 Collective Maps by territory with illustrations. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory
Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 81
Figure 5 Photograph of embroidery workshops with members of AMA. AMA y No Olvida,
Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 84
Figure 6 Photographs of embroideries for memory results of workshop. AMA y No Olvida,
Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 85
Figure 7 Photograph of installation temporary exhibition Institute for History of Nicaragua and
Central America, Central American University, Managua, Nicaragua. AMA y No Olvida,
Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 89
Figure 8 Portrait demanding Justice. Family Dodanim Jared Castilblanco Blandón AMA y No
Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 90
Figure 9 Photographic installation temporary exhibition Institute for History of Nicaragua and
Central America, view from above. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against
Impunity Archive, 2019. 93
Figure 10 Photographs of barricades as altars. ABC Stereo News Facebook Page Estelí, 2018 96
Figure 11 Collective altar of Managua with memory objects by territory. AMA y No Olvida,
Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 97
Figure 12 Mixed Media Altar part of the temporary exhibition, third room. AMA y No Olvida,
Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019. 100
Figure 13 Participatory witnessing, audience of the Museum engaged in collective acts of
protest 105
Figure 14 Layout profile victims in the Interactive Art book AMA Constructing Memory, AMA
y No Olvida Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2021. 112
Figure 15 Image spread of Interactive Art Book section with target tracker to AR filters and QR
codes, AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity archive, 2021. 113
Figure 16 Poster insert part of the Interactive Art book for face filter, AMA y No Olvida,
Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2021. 114
Figure 17 Augmented Reality filter of Barricade with memory objects in front of the National
Engineering University, AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity
Archive, 2021. 121
Figure 18 Projection Mapping Demanding Justice Portraits and Handwritten name, Costa Rican
Legislative Assembly, AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive,
2021. 126
Figure 19 Portaleras circle of time travelling to heal past violences, Photograph by Camaleoni,
2019. 149
Figure 20 Portaleras flag signalling safe space for women, Photograph by Camaleoni, 2019. 151
Figure 21 Portaleras word game for feminist space building, Fanzine Portal Feminista a la
Futura, Photographs by Camaleoni, 2019. 153
Figure 22 Portaleras spiral methodology, Fanzine Portal Feminista a la Futura, Photographs by
Camaleoni, 2019 155

x
ABSTRACT

This dissertation presents and analyzes the development of AMA y NO Olvida,
Memory Museum Against Impunity, the first memory museum in Nicaragua and Feminist
Futurist Portals, a women’s circle of speculative feminist practices grounded in memories
of violence. It dissects methods and practices used by the families of victims of violence
and feminist activists who experienced state violence during popular demonstrations in
Nicaragua. In the midst of brutal repression, censorship and grief, we gathered to create
collective transmedia memories, a participatory museum, archive, exhibition and
interactive art book and future facing re-imaginings of our present. The dissertation argues
for the transformative potential of transmedia storytelling and participatory design as a
way of processing collective trauma and building politically engaged emotional
communities. Furthermore, it pays close attention to the ethical challenges and
implications of collectivizing memories of violence through digital technologies and
proposes strategies for designing platforms and digital experiences for preserving
community memories that reduce harms, build accountability and safety with community
organizations. Finally, I argue for a memory-based feminist imagination as a path of
transformation, that allows us to imagine how these bodies can survive the violence, heal
and construct alternatives to the future.
Keywords: Dictatorship, State Violence, Transmedia, Participatory Design, Archives,
Mapping, GIS, Affect, Activism, Visibility, Witnessing, Embodiment, Trauma, Digital
Media, 3D, Augmented Reality, Race, Gender, Feminism, Human Rights, Justice, Truth,
Memory, Futurism, Imagination.

xi
PREFACE

This dissertation is part of a tradition of women and gender dissident bodies
writing and fighting against state, gendered and racialized violence, outside and inside of
Nicaragua. I honor Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ+), women, feminists, femmes, writers, academics,
artists, activists and all others who have endured state and interpersonal violence and have
created strategies of resistance through love, compassion and solidarity. Thanks for the
generosity of your writings and sharing of your light and struggles. Especially young
feminists in Nicaragua. I am in awe of how much you have taught me. I want to think
along with you in community about what it means to survive and do something with all
this pain.
My interest in decolonial feminism has helped me to see this time as a time to
sustain life, to find harmony and balance, to care for others, and to care for myself, to
uphold our world. As Silvia Federici states “the best form of resistance to violence is not
to face it alone, it is to come together, create more collective forms of life and
reproduction, strengthen our ties and thus truly create a resistance network that ends all
this massacre” (Federici 2018). The web of life that all these bodies have made possible
cannot be destroyed beyond any extermination measures and the force and power that
communities have built will continue to flourish as long as our word, our hope and our
recognition is maintained. This work is a love letter to you, and to myself.

1
INTRODUCTION: NECROPOLITICS AND TERROR: TRAUMA, IMAGES, AND
MEMORY
“Our elders taught us that the celebration of memory is a celebration of tomorrow… that
memory always points to the future and that paradox is that memory is what prevents that in the
future the nightmares are not repeated, and that there are new joys present in the inventory of the
collective memory.”
— Subcomandante Marcos
3

This is a story about pain, rage and trauma that affect people that live under extreme
conditions of state organized violence. It is also about strategies of caring, learning, and creating
memory; the work that activists’ groups engage in order to survive. The dissertation project
encompasses two projects created in tandem as intuitive responses to violence, and as the need to
create networks of solidarity and support became evident. The first and most ambitious project,
focuses on processes of memorialization of Nicaraguan victims of human rights violations
through the creation of AMA y No Olvida, (trans. Love and Do Not Forget), Memory Museum
Against Impunity. I created this project in collaboration with the families of victims of state
violence, organized in the Association Mothers of April (AMA), to dispute the official narrative
that criminalizes citizens who participated in civic protests and the climate of impunity fostered
by the Nicaraguan government. The second project is Feminist Portals of the Future, which is a
project I developed with a group of women, artists, healers, educators, and researchers in
Nicaragua. For this, we asked ourselves how to materialize our personal, collective and structural
desires by building safe spaces with a feminist ethic.
In this dissertation I navigate inland in the technological, affective, and socio-political
implications of engaging with temporality by doing memory and futurist creative work after an

3
Subcomandante Marcos. 2001. “Carta Del Subcomandante Marcos a La Digna Argentina.” 2001.
https://palabra.ezln.org.mx/comunicados/2001/2001_03_24.htm.

2
uprising in 21
st
century Latin and Central America. The written part of this dissertation is an
attempt to give theoretical and empirical contributions by describing and analyzing the
transmedial practices of memorialization engaged by the families of victims, as well as the
possibility of weaving futures by different groups of women in Nicaragua. Some of the guiding
questions are: How do media, trauma and memory intersect in the political life of a country?
How do authoritarian governments use and abuse information to maintain impunity for their
acts? How do activists use media, memory and imagination to start grieving, share their stories
of pain, but also their hopes for the future? What are methods to share and collectivize power?
What are the ethical challenges and implications of using digital media to represent the victims,
their families and their memories? How can we build social systems based on artistic and
feminist praxis? What could be a feminist education and justice?
While culturally specific, these projects allow us to critically examine the construction,
impact, and effects of designing mediated projects that represent state violence and the
implications of including diverse, gendered and racialized voices in media ideation, creation, and
distribution beyond the Nicaraguan context. One of my contributions is that by connecting
transmedia creation and audience engagement with memory activist practices I am able to name
both the process, outcome and engagement we designed to tell the story of each victim into a
collective experience. Through praxis, I argue that in order to create digital projects that
collectivize memory, as a path to justice, we need to centre the victims’ needs, and grant
community control and ownership. I propose “modular visibility” as a design principle based on
refusal, to portray the victims and their families in ways that do not cause further harm, and
instead dignify and elevate the communities we work with, especially in contexts where life is
devalued and communities are dehumanized. In the creation of virtual experiences, I aim to

3
address viewers’ privilege by considering issues of embodiment, access and place and by
designing experiences that foreground the context of the victims’ lives, and the activism and
organizing of their families. I argue that participatory witnessing is made possible by expanding
the project exhibition into a performative and political space, in which society at large can
participate in and witness the victims’ struggle for justice through sharing intimate experiences
of embodied pain and grief, as well as demands for justice and reparations. Consequently,
creating an emotional community with solidarity, and a moral and political commitment that
recognizes and centers the victims as active survivors, activists and protagonists.
Thinking about the possibilities of the future, I describe the intentions and practices I
engaged with a group of feminists, and an analysis of three main methodologies: time travelling
to heal, ritualistic feminist play for space-building and a spiral methodology for the feminist
future. I argue for a memory-based imagination that allows us to imagine how these bodies can
survive the violence, heal and construct alternatives to the future, hopefully with poetry.
I hope this dissertation makes interdisciplinary contribution as I move through
discussions and examples that pertain to Media and Design Studies, Activist Research,
Communications, Performance Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Central American Studies
and Human Rights. My thinking is grounded in the productive tension between accounting and
typifying the violence, documenting the practices of memory, resistance and public mourning
against authoritarianism performed by the families of victims of state violence, and also creating
spaces for the victims to organize, mourn collectively, speak and be represented in a way that
feels comfortable for us. It also emerges from the necessity to dig deeper and find the appropriate
strategies to disrupt and create in the midst of all this violence. This is done through
epistemological creativity and critical interdisciplinarity coming from the Global South, but also

4
through engagement with critical theory and praxis emerging from black, decolonial, trans and
communitarian feminists and scholars and activists from the borderlands (Valencia 2020).
In Nicaragua, AMA organized through the creation of the museum and the representation
of the memories of our loved ones and emerged as a key political actor in the struggle for justice
in Nicaragua. We have exhausted the national and international legal channels, while taking the
process in our own hands, making a shift in previous process of justice and memory of the
Americas. This process has demonstrated that the search for Justice is a long and dynamic
process that confronts other forms of impunity, gendered, racialized violence and corruption. The
demand for the right to memory, enacted with this project, has also allowed us to honor the lives
of the victims with dignity, and find meaning in their struggles into the future. This has been a
healing path to name and collectivize processes of injustice and mourning. We have re-signified
this violence collectively. One of the reflections we bring forth is that as victims and survivors
do not want to be the sole owners and keepers of memory, rather we want it to grow as a seed
with a potential rhizomatic growth (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). A recognition that not only
happened to me, my family and other families, but it happened to us as a Nicaraguan society,
which made the process of collectivizing and reproducing solidarity and empathy possible.
This process has highlighted the power of affects to move and mobilize, and the role of
care in accompanying pain. In this collective process we have been acuerpadas
4
(trans.
embraced) and have embraced others and we have been able share collective joy without losing
indignation. The project has allowed us to identify and demonstrate how the violence was not

4
Lorena Cabnal has named acuerpamiento to the personal and collective action of bodies of women outraged at the
injustices that other bodies experience. To name the act of summoning others to provide political energy to resist
and act against the multiple patriarchal, colonialist, racist and capitalist oppressions. Acuerpamiento generates
affective and spiritual energies and breaks down borders and imposed time. It provides us with closeness, collective
indignation, but also revitalization and new strength, to recover joy without losing outrage (Cabnal 2022).

5
equally distributed among the bodies and identities. It was and has always been the most
marginalized and precarious bodies that are in the front-lines receiving violence. In this context,
the project seeks to puncture the patriarchal and racial hierarchies and narratives that uphold
them. The multiple expressions of grief and mourning create a puncture in the narrative of
sacrifice, martyrdom and militarism that has been inscribed by the country’s revolutionary
history and layered historical processes of violence. In a more hopeful tone, AMA has articulated
and dreamed of a future horizon with justice without impunity, a society where people’s dignity
is respected, there is freedom of expression and the cycle of impunity and violence ends.
Members of AMA reiterate that without the active participation of the victims there cannot be a
true process of solving the serious social, political and human rights crisis in Nicaragua.
This introductory section first delineates an accounting and typifying of the state violence
in its physical and symbolic forms. Then, it describes the racial and gendered character of the
necropolitics of state violence, as well as the possibilities of activists to enter the political public
sphere in the repressive communicative ecology created by the government both in traditional
media and online. I discuss one of the main issues that the project responds to which is the viral
representation of violence in online spaces, and the trauma it inflicted to the families of the
victims. Then, I give a brief history of the longer memories of violence that emerged with this
work. At the end, I present a roadmap to the dissertation chapters and some of the next steps of
this project that are articulated fully in the conclusion.
The State and the Administration of Violence: Massacres in Contemporary Nicaragua

“Sucede que, desde el invierno de abril del 2018
Quiero escribir, y el llanto no me deja.
No son versos,
son lágrimas que encuentro y luego cargo

6
como un féretro
con cientos de cadáveres dentro.”
— Andres Moreira
5

“It happens that, since the winter of April 2018
I want to write, but the crying won't let me.
Is not verses,
I find tears and carry them
like a coffin
with hundreds of corpses inside.”
— Andres Moreira

In April 2018, what began as protests led by elder pensioners and university students
turned into an on-going socio-political and human rights crisis characterized by the biggest
massacres ever seen in Nicaragua in “times of peace” (C. F. Chamorro 2018). The protests were
sparked by multiple reasons: an austerity reform to the social security system recommended by
the IMF that required higher payments by employers and employees, and cuts in benefits for
elderly retirees by 5%. The protests were also preceded by small protests denouncing an
unattended forest fire in the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve, the country’s largest, located in
Rama-Kriol Indigenous territory (Mayer 2018). Commentators and scholars have included other
reasons, such as the concession of the interoceanic canal, extractivist and anti-labor policies,
anti-women policies, and popular discontent that had been simmering in Nicaragua since
Ortega's return to power in 2006 (Morris 2018).
The government, led by ex-guerilla and ex-revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega and his Vice
President and First Lady Rosario Murillo, responded to the protest by “shooting to kill.”
Government shooters targeted the head and thorax of protestors as reported by Amnesty
International in its May report (Amnesty 2018). People were indignant and massive
demonstrations filled the streets of all the major cities in the country. One of the signs that

5
Moreira, Andres. 2020. La Suma de Los Daños. My translation.

7
protesters held summarized the indignation of the people “we let you do everything, but you
shouldn’t have touched our chavalos (trans. kids).” Those first deaths of young people, as well as
the lack of recognition from the government of this ever happening explain the spark of the
rebellion (Equipo Envío 2019). These are my notes during the first days of the protests:
The first people assassinated. Richard. Darwin. Then many others more. We couldn't
believe it. We didn't think they would get this far. Zinc sheets covering the boys lying dead
on the streets. Getting together with friends to imagine how to confront death with art.
Candles in the streets. Their names on the sidewalks. Crosses that we hammered with the
help of Leyla's child. I was afraid. Poniendo el cuerpo (trans. putting the body). Rage
against the government and the state. Previous traumas. Cacerolazo. The roadblocks. The
pharmacy kit that we carried in the car. The patrols that smell of death. The fear.
Emergency exit plans. Every day a new crisis. Strikes. Abuse. The cruelty. The poetry.

The uprising or insurrection, which is how many people called it, “emerges there, where
the affected bodies, capable of naming their affection, recognize themselves in a crowd that
interrupts the machinery of the proprietary powers”(Reguillo 2017, 887 kindle). In May, public
university students occupied the public universities, and as the government attacked their
occupations, young people across the country rose up in solidarity and blocked streets with
barricades of pavement stones to obstruct the passage of government forces. Undaunted, the
government launched a military operation, self-declared as “Operation Clean-up”, against
unarmed civilians during the months of May, June, and July to violently remove the barricades
from the streets, killing hundreds of people. The paramilitary army was formed by state
employees, historical Sandinista ex-combatants, pro-government supporters and police force.
Their collusion was made public by photographs and news reports of the operatives on official
media channels (Digital 2018)(Chávez 2018) and through the testimonies of the victims.
The largest march in Nicaraguan history was the one organized by the Mothers of April, a
group of mothers and families of victims of violence, held on Nicaraguan Mother’s Day on May
30th. With about half million people on the streets, nobody could have imagined that “the

8
Mother of all Marches” would be attacked ruthlessly by police and paramilitary forces leaving
nineteen people dead and many wounded (Luna, 2020). In the light of this heavy repression
according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) more than 150,000
people have had to flee to exile to save their lives (UNCHR 2022), many of them families of the
victims. Until November 15th 2020, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights (IACHR), 355 people were killed, including 27 adolescents and infants, 15 women and
more than 2,000 have been injured.
Human rights violations were documented by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent
Experts (GIEI) selected by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) as well
as the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights of the United Nations (OHCHR) and
national organizations. The government’s disproportionate violence to participants in the wave of
protests unleashed from April 2018 onwards was qualified by international human rights bodies
such as the IACHR as “crimes against humanity” (GIEI 2019, 224). They include extrajudicial
killings; enforced disappearances; torture; obstructions to access to medical care; widespread
arbitrary or illegal detentions; prevalent mistreatment and instances of sexual violence in
detention centers; violations of freedoms of peaceful assembly and expression, including the
criminalization of social leaders, human rights defenders, journalists and protesters considered
critical of the Government. It is important to mention that the international human rights
organizations’ missions were expelled and human rights violations continue to happen in an
undeclared state of exception. Today, Ortega governs relying on brutal displays of sovereign
power, the dissemination of terror, and the de-facto suspension of constitutional guarantees
(Chamorro Elizondo 2020).

9
Historical structural violence and the necropolitics of state repression
Several authors have commented that there were already precedents to the type of state
terrorism that was exercised during 2018 with a racial and class character, such as the military
occupation of the Caribbean Coast (Goett 2016) and the state force against protests in different
mining areas (Sánchez González 2016). At the same time the feminist movement, the peasant
movement and the anti-extractivist movement have been victims of state repression in all their
mobilizations since Ortega’s return to power in 2006 (Neumann 2018) (Tittor 2018). In the urban
area, I refer as a precedent to the state terrorism, to the case of #OcupaInss where young
protesters, in which I was involved, stood in solidarity with the National Unit of the Elderly
(UNAM), which took over the facilities of the National Institute of Social Security (INSS)
between June 16 and 21, 2013. For this reason, we were assaulted, robbed, threatened with rape
and stripped naked by government shock groups in complacency of the National Police.
Thereafter, the government erased any evidence and did not conduct any investigation, even
though the claims were awarded to the pensioners and the group of youth continue demanding
justice
6
(L. Chamorro and Yang 2018). In addition to political violence, historical-structural
violence around neoliberalism, extractivism, colonialism, racism, sexism, transphobia and
lesbophobia persist.
The afterlives of colonialism have multiple ways that structure Nicaraguan reality.
Contemporary state violence in Nicaragua is just one expression of a great repertoire of violence,
racism, discrimination, exclusion and dispossession deployed over several centuries on poor,
black and indigenous communities and their territories. Racism in Nicaragua is present in a
myriad of ways, specially present by practices of settler colonialism on the Caribbean Coast of

6
A participatory archive of documentation of these events that I created in 2013 to maintain the demand for justice
of these events is available at OcupaInss.org

10
Nicaragua, the racist ideology that has reaffirmed the colonial “Spanish” to remain the superior
race and language (Cunningham Kain 2006) and continued to enforce the belief that the country
is an all mestizo (mixed race) people (Hooker 2005) erasing the multiethnic and multicultural
diversity of the country. Scholars have argued there are ethno-linguistic hierarchies (based on
skin color, language or accents, among others) (Figueroa Romero and Gonzalez 2021), a
“pigmentocratic” structuring of the socio-political order, based on colorism
7
, a verticalized social
structure in which whites and mestizos are positioned at the top, while indigenous peoples and
Afro-descendants remain at the bottom (Zeledon 2021). This discrimination permeates in all
aspects of life.
There are various manifestations of antiblackness and anti-indigenous racism in
Nicaragua, that range from invisibility, to sociopolitical and economic exclusion, to what I argue
is the decreased value of the lives and bodies of those in the bottom position of the social
structure. Violence, control, dispossession and denial was deployed against mestizos with darker
skin and indigenous communities during the 2018 uprising, in an intersection between class and
race when state violence extended to urban centers. Necropolitics is a term used by Achilles
Mbembe, that characterizes the state's sovereign power to control, regulate and legitimize
mortality in states of exception, without any responsibility or justice (Mbembe 2019) As
presented by the testimonies of the victims starting in April 2018, the Nicaraguan state governed
through massacre, by the disposal of the victims’ bodies, and by dehumanizing them through
official state discourse. The research of the museum made evident how most of the victims
represented in the Museum were from marginal neighborhoods who lived in precarious

7
“Colorism” according to the National Conference of Community and Justice is: A practice of discrimination by
which those with lighter skin are treated more favorably than those with darker skin. https://www.nccj.org/colorism-
0

11
conditions, as well as from indigenous communities, such as Monimbó in the department
(province) of Masaya and Subtiava in department of León.
Most of the victims were also young. Internationally, we live in a normalized horror in
which young people with precarious lives are routinely killed by police and paramilitaries, in
many places such as Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, and many countries in the
Middle East (Reguillo 2017) in the global frame of neoliberal capitalism. The term juvenicide
“names, illuminates, elucidates systematic death based on the value of the young body, a value
that oils the machinery of necropolitics…not only as an explicit intention, but the daily operation
of a system based on the administration of death” (Reguillo 2015, 59). According to José María
Valenzuela juvenicide “refers to the extreme condition in which sectors or specific groups of the
young population are murdered” (Valenzuela 2015, 15). Its constitutive elements include
precariousness, poverty, inequality, stigmatization and stereotyping of youth behavior, corruption
and impunity of the State. Fatima Villalta, a Nicaraguan young writer has stated that death is a
state policy in Nicaragua and it is exercised not only by murder but from exclusion and
dispossession, by which for her “stripping us of the future is also sending us to the
slaughterhouse” (Villalta 2021)
Gender also plays a role in contemporary forms of violence faced by Nicaraguan women
activists, coming from the state as well as their male counterparts in activists’ organizational
spaces. The current regime has inherited a militarized and male dominated exercise of power
from the Sandinista Revolution and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party,
(Lacombe 2010) (Rodríguez 1996) (Blandón 2016). Others trace this structural violence as
rooted in a hegemonic masculinity model with historical roots, based on Catholicism, colonial
patriarchy, Hispanicism and militarism (Antillón 2016) (Gómez 2015). During the uprisings’

12
organizational process, women have been denied a voice and place in the political sphere, similar
to what happened during the Sandinista Revolution (Díaz Reyes 2021).
Current state violence specifically targets women rights defenders, with actions including
kidnapping, torture, sexual violence, raids, smear campaigns, harassment and surveillance of
women defenders and their families (GIEI 2019). In 2020, a Tribunal of Conscience created in
Costa Rica accused the government of Daniel Ortega of the crimes of torture, through sexual
abuse and rape of people arrested after participating in protests in 2018 (Welle 2020). For current
women political prisoners their feminized gender identity exposes them to other forms of
mistreatment. Trans women political prisoners have been imprisoned in male jails and receive
harassment, denied of their gender identity and received additional violence (Amnesty
International 2020). Political prisoners have been reported to have spontaneous abortions in
prison. Feminists have denounced that police officers “intend to make women prisoners feel
guilty for being away from their children”, and “sexual violence is a latent threat” (100%
Noticias 2022)
In the case of the families of victims of state violence, it is important to highlight the
psychological and physical effects of state terror on the communities of those killed. The families
of the victims have been subjected to various forms of intimidation (imprisonment, surveillance
and harassment) aimed to silence our demands for justice and our efforts to build spaces of
remembrance. Three members of AMA are currently imprisoned for demanding justice. In
addition, many family members have been temporarily detained in their own homes and police
stations for trying to hold commemorative events (Vásquez 2021)
Young feminists brought the issue of care and self-care to the forefront as part of our
current resistance, recognizing needs for well-being, tranquility and security (D’León Nuñez,

13
Martínez Palacios, and Zeledón García 2020). This was also present in the streets, where women
re-signified the slogan “Patria Libre o Morir” (Free fatherland or death), into “Matria libre para
vivir” (Free Motherland to Live) presenting an ethic of life that critiques the heroic martyrdom of
the revolutionary past and the militarism (Agudelo Builes and Cruz 2018), extractivism, and
heteropatriarchy of the contemporary state (Bran Aragón and Goett 2020). The possibility of
activists and critics of the regime entering public discourse is very limited, as presented in the
next section.
Media Ecology, Official Narrative and Laws: State Media and Digital Abuse
International Human Rights organizations have received reports of attacks on media and
journalists who are critical of the Ortega-Murillo government. At the start of the crisis, on April
21st 2018, the Nicaraguan reporter Ángel Gahona
8
was shot and killed in the South Caribbean
Autonomous Region of Nicaragua (RAACS), while covering the protests. His family is now part
of AMA. Another nine journalists were wounded on the same day. Police officers and
paramilitary groups have attacked, burned and raided the offices of multiple news outlets such as
100% Noticias News Channel, Radio Darío, La Prensa, El Confidencial, Esta Noche and Esta
Semana. These news channels, printed newspapers and programs have been removed from
circulation and from TV signals. Various independent journalists and political commentators
have been arrested and accused of “incitement to commit acts of terrorism” (Amnesty
2018)(OACNUDH 2018).
The Ortega-Murillo project has bought or claimed more than fifteen news outlets, many
of them managed by the children of the Ortega family (Enriquez 2022). All of them are

8
Angel Gahona profile in the Museum https://www.museodelamemorianicaragua.org/perfiles/angel-eduardo-
gahona-lopez/

14
considered “official media,” that only present positive information about the government with
approval of the government's spokeswoman and first lady Rosario Murillo. Part of the
government’s communication strategy is to deny media reports of malfeasance by the
government, and to suppress coverage of political or social issues that are uncomfortable for the
current government. The government’s attitude has been defined as a “politics of amnesia”
(Martinez 2014). I contend that there's an illegitimate historical revisionism, since the
government is writing news as the truth that suits its interests, a strategy that also takes place
online.
Since April 2018 Ortega-Murillo and their sympathizers have constructed a narrative
about a “failed Coup d’état” organized from the United States through funds from international
cooperation agencies perpetuated from the different state institutions and official media. William
Robinson, a sociologist who studies the history of US interventions in Latin America explains
that there is little evidence to corroborate this claim, since “Washington's main concern is not to
get rid of Ortega, but to preserve the interests of transnational capital” (Robinson, 2021).
According to him the United States fears an unstable and unpredictable vacuum of power that
could threaten capitalist interests in the country and U.S. policy objectives towards the region,
but has not been invested in destabilizing the country (with difference to other countries such as
Venezuela or Cuba). The vast majority of USAID funding has “gone to the government itself—to
health and educational programs, export-import support, food aid and commodities support,
counter-narcotics operations, technical assistance for government development programs, and so
on” (Robinson 2021). I add that the state of Nicaragua has been cooperative of U.S. anti-
immigration policies and the so called “war on drugs”.

15
The Nicaraguan legislative also created a set of laws that criminalize organizing
endeavors, legalize impunity and officialize the paramilitary army
9
, making it difficult to clarify
the truth regarding the serious human rights violations that occurred in the context of the protests
against the regime. An example of this has been the creation of the Truth, Justice and Peace
Commission (CVJP), which does not fulfill the necessary conditions that guarantee its
independence, violating the procedures established in international regulations for investigation
commissions. The reports created by this Commission, constitute a clear example of its purpose:
to modify the narrative, circumstances, acts occurred, identity and profile of the victims. In order
to support their accusation that the victims are terrorists and criminals, and that the victims are
the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity.
In October 2021, Facebook’s company Meta, made public that they removed a troll farm
run by the government of Nicaragua that was started in 2018 after the protests. They stated it was
“the most cross-government troll operations disrupted to date” with around 1000 accounts
suspended. This campaign was cross-platform as well as cross-government including multiple
Nicaraguan government branches using multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
YouTube). According to Facebook, the network was removed because it was part of a

9
Law 976 Law of the Financial Analysis Unit, approved on July 16, 2018.
Law 977 Law against money laundering, the financing of terrorism and the financing of the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction approved on July 16, 2018.
Amnesty Law, approved on June 8, 2019.
Law on Comprehensive Care for Victims, approved on May 29, 2019.
Law of the Association Council of Defenders of the Homeland Commander Camilo Ortega Saavedra CODEPAT,
registered, approved and published on April 24, 2019.
Declaration and proposal of the executive power to reform the laws to incorporate into criminal legislation the
classification of "hate crimes" and incorporate the life sentence into the legal system.
Special Cybercrime Law, legalized through the Decree norm called National Cybersecurity Strategy 2020-2025,
approved as Law through the National Assembly of Nicaragua on October 27 of 2020
Foreign Agents Regulation Law, approved on October 22, 2020.
On these created laws, the political position from the Mothers of April Association (AMA) as relatives of murdered
people and as Nicaraguan citizens, we have rejected and filed an Appeal for Unconstitutionality before the Supreme
Court of Justice. (Valdivia 2019)

16
coordinated effort to manipulate public discourse using fake accounts that intended to flood the
internet environment with “pro-government and anti-opposition content.” This content included:
fake news, promoting violence against protestors, accusing them of violations and crimes,
dehumanizing and denigrating them, and in some cases even impersonating them (Alonso and
Nimmo 2021, 4).
First Lady and Vice President Rosario Murillo accused demonstrators of being vermin,
comparing them to pests, plagues, ants, vampires, and other creatures, dehumanizing political
opponents and justifying violence committed against them. At the same, in Ortega-Murillo's
online and public discourse they have made clear that the capital flow of goods is more important
than the lives of the victims, since they promoted the military operations as liberations in the
name of “peace, tranquility and the circulation of goods” (Digital 2018) (Chávez 2018). Sayak
Valencia discusses the visuality of necro-political violence in Mexico through the term Gore
Capitalism, to address the material extraction through violence as a form of labor and
furthermore how massacres executed by the narco-state are transformed into a commodity for
morbidity, and are used as “a form of governance that makes emotion profitable through the
transmission of massacres in real time to certain populations” (Valencia 2020, 3). I relate her
analysis to the situation faced by the families of AMA, in relation to the Nicaraguan state
massacres and its prioritizing the circulation of commodities over lives; and the “live regime,”
that trivializes and justifies the violence towards racialized populations (Valencia 2019) to
account for the viralization of images of violence against the victims’ bodies that circulated
online.

17
Trauma and Media: Images of Horror and Communication Overflow

“Let images hunts us”.
— Susan Sontag

Uprisings in these hypermediated times implies that cultural practices are made in three
layers in the social context: the digital layer, the media layer, and the physical layer, as pointed
out by Javier Toret (Toret et al. 2013, 19). Due to the widespread use of technological devices
such as cell phones during the protests, there are innumerable records of the events and of the
people injured or killed in Nicaragua during 2018. The images and videos were shared on social
networks, in message groups and stored on the victims’ family members’ personal phones (GIEI
2019). Families of the victims kept them as part of the legal evidence about the killings for their
legal complaints. Among the testimonies of the museum, there are instances of families and
mothers who received the news of the murder of their children through videos or photographs on
Social Media sites, some uploaded by witnesses and others even uploaded by the paramilitaries
who killed them, as a message stating that anyone on the streets would have the same outcome,
and for the possibility of receiving retribution by the government.
The most traumatic videos of the killing of victims that were shared and circulated
became “viral.” The museum testimonies present multiple cases of this visual trauma. According
to the GIEI, the contact with the image of pain persists even long after the burial, and is intensely
present in the daily life of the family and the community through its online circulation. In this
way, developing mourning processes becomes more difficult, because beyond facing the pain of
loss, they had to face death in a very direct and crude manner, with the participation or omission
of responsible public institutions and agents (GIEI 2019). In the following, I will briefly present
the narratives of three victims based on the video testimonies that are in the museum, with some

18
commentary from my part. They are Alvaro Conrado, a 15-year-old high school student shot in
Managua, Franco Valdivia shot in the city of Estelí during the first days of the protests and
Marcelo Mayorga, killed during the so-called operation “Clean Up” in Masaya.
Alvaro Conrado

Álvaro Manuel Conrado Dávila was 15 years old and he was a high school student at
Colegio Loyola. He was a junior and was noted for his academic performance, his
solidarity with his peers and his participation in sports and cultural activities. He wore
glasses, liked anime and comics like many young people like him. He was a member of
the school athletics team and had won three medals in 200- and 400-meter races. He had
a lot of resistance, but since he was the smallest of the team, he competed with older
youths who always beat him. Maybe because of this he thought he could run faster than
the bullets that hunted him.

At 10:30 a.m. on April 20, 2018, the boy Álvaro Manuel Conrado Dávila arrived in the
vicinity of the National University of Engineering, to distribute bags of water to the
students who participated in the protests against the alleged reforms of the Social
Security System. In our interview for the museum his mother told me “he had some
money, from his birthday, that had just passed, that’s what he used to buy water bottles”.
In the center of the city, throughout the perimeter of Metrocentro, the Cathedral of
Managua, the UCA and UNI there was a police presence and anti-riot forces. Police on
motorcycles passed by while actively shooting to the university students every 15 and 30
minutes. Between 11:15 and 11:30 in the morning, Alvarito was hit by a firearm
projectile in the neck, which penetrated from top to bottom, in the direction of the
internal organs. There are two hypotheses yet to be determined by an investigation. One
that the sniper was on top of the National Stadium and the other that they were police
officers moving on a motorcycle on the avenue, standing on the motorcycle and shooting.

He was wearing a red sweatshirt; he didn’t know that because of what he was wearing he
could be an easier target. A video on Facebook live depicted his words “it hurts to
breathe” while blood was pouring out of his mouth. This video caused great commotion
and his last words have been reclaimed as part of the chants and other cultural memory
practices. Helped by the university students, he was transferred in a van to the Cruz Azul
hospital, located five minutes from the university, but the doors were closed there. People
said that there were “direct orders from the Ministry of Health to not help the wounded”
(multiple testimonies confirm this). Afterwards, they decided to take him to the Baptist
hospital, where the doctors fought for three and a half hours to save his life. The surgeon
in charge told the family that Alvarito bled to death and could have survived if he had
received medical care at the first hospital.

19
Franco Valdivia

His stage name was "Renfan" and although his true passion was rap, Franco Valdivia
Machado was a multifaceted young man: from Monday to Friday he worked in a
carpentry workshop, at night studied Law and on weekends he was a baseball and softball
umpire. He composed "rap with conscience", with lyrics that covered topics such as
migration, violence, weapons and self-knowledge. He called his songs “The School of
Thought”, a title he would use for his debut album. He was 24 years old, married and the
father of a four-year-old girl, who today learns his songs.

Franco was very indignant about the social security reforms because he considered that
“this affected all of us”. Then, when the government's response was to hit and attack the
elderly in León and the students at UNA, “he was outraged”, said his sister Francys. On
April 20th, he joined the march that was going to leave the Francisco Espinoza National
Institute, but changed his route due to the presence of police, paramilitaries and shock
forces blocking the streets. When the attackers started firing, Franco made a frontal video
in which he showed a projectile in his hands and related how they were being violently
repressed. In the midst of the chaos, he dedicated himself to helping the wounded and
among them he saw César Castillo and Orlando Pérez who were his friends and later
became two more victims.

Minutes after transmitting his video, at approximately nine o'clock at night, Franco
Valdivia Machado was assassinated in front of the Estelí Mayor's Office. A shot to the
head caused his instant death. One of the videos that circulated on social media shows his
lifeless body being mistreated and dragged by the paramilitaries for an entire block, who
abandoned him at the San Juan de Dios Hospital at 10:30 at night. The next day,
everyone in Nicaragua saw another video in which people who work for the town hall
washed the blood from the crime scene, concealing evidence essential to the investigation
of the case.

Marcelo Mayorga
Masaya, is named the city of folklore with strong indigenous roots, and had been the
location of ongoing rebellion for a month. On June 19th a strong shooting began. There
were barricades throughout the city and the residents were defending themselves from the
siege of the Police, which had initiated the “Operation Cleanup” to regain control of the
city. Marcelo Mayorga participated in the anti-government protests and that morning they
called him to participate in the defense of the city. Before leaving he said to his oldest
son: “I'll leave you breakfast”. He told the minor that he loved him and assured that he
was coming back,” according to the telling of Auxiliadora Cardoze, his wife. She
remembers that at 11:25 A.M. she spoke to him and asked him to return to the house, but
he replied that he could not, because the Police and the shock forces had surrounded the
place. She begged him to take refuge in a house. In the middle of the shooting, he called
his youngest son and spoke to him. The residents of Masaya were connected by social
networks and there they reported on the events that were taking place in the city.
Auxiliadora learned that her husband had been injured because someone uploaded the
photo of a man lying on the street with his shooter at his side and she recognized him.

20
“When I saw it was him, I screamed and passed out”. Then I looked for a way out to go
and recover the body. “A neighbor accompanied me and with a diaper tied on a stick as a
white flag we went out into the street” she said.

Crossing barricades, pipes and cobblestones, she managed to reach the place where the
photo had been taken, but the barricade was gone. They had removed it and only rubble
remained. She went to the police officers on the scene to ask about the entrenched boys.
The policeman replied that "those dogs" were not there and that she should not have let
him out. It was then that she saw Marcelo's body on the side of the street, where he had
been dragged to clear the way for the bulldozers that removed the barricades.

She approached, picked up his backpack, his cap, the tiradora, (a rubber slingshot) and
screamed with all her strength for help, but no one answered him. On a video taken from
a nearby house her cry for help could be heard mixed with the noise of rifle shots and the
explosion of mortars. No one could support her. The Police did not allow the firefighters
to pass. Auxiliadora affirms that when she went to collect the body, the police and
paramilitaries pointed their weapons at her. She managed to take the body home in a
carretón (trans. trash cart). The next day, on June 20, the funeral procession made its way
to the cemetery, dodging rubble and barricades. Marcelo was carried on the shoulders of
his friends, dismissed by the chicheros (trans. band) with music from the processions of
San Jerónimo.

The difference between terror and horror lies in a displacement of the gaze: if from
power, terror; if from the victim, horror (Rodríguez 2019). I also add, if it is from a witness,
horror and trauma. These three videos were widely shared on social media. Most videos were
shaky and blurry, but you could feel the chaos, danger and insecurity in which they were filmed.
In the cases of Marcelo and Franco the camera was hidden, afar, blurred, unframed. The audio of
the videos are the most visceral aspects of it. Hearing people struggling to help somebody who is
dying. Saying “move, get out of the way, help!” What we call trauma takes place when the very
power that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors; when
the community in which we consider ourselves members, turns against us (Edkins and Jenny
2003). In the cases of the families of those killed and the witnesses the shock is the first
response. Jenny Edkins cites Slavoj Žižek about the essence of trauma, things that are “too
horrible to be remembered, to be integrated into our symbolic universe” (Žižek 2002, 1 as cited

21
by Edkins 2003). Then after the shock is over, we can feel the traumatization and repetition of
the event.
Black scholars have discussed the ways the images of Black Death and disregard for
black life online has turned into a spectacle and a commodity in the United States that also
increases forms of surveillance (Noble 2014). Even though the images of black death are meant
to be used as evidence in the interest of justice and history, they serve other purposes. One
unintended purpose is the profiteering of social media platforms with the virality and hyper-
circulation of these images and the second which is the mental and emotional effects on the
communities impacted. As Safiya Noble argues “we need a better understanding of the cultural
importance of trafficking in the spectacle of Black death and dying on the Internet by looking at
how often and to what profit Black death as a viral phenomenon is exponentially potent and
traumatizing” (Noble 2018, 151). In that sense, these images are reinforcing data colonialism as
theorized by Nick Couldry and Mejias, combining the “predatory extractive practices of
historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing” (Couldry and
Mejias 2019), but instead of “social life” being extracted for profit, I would argue that is social
death.
Even though these images are intended to work as evidence to bring justice, it is re-
traumatizing and re-victimizing for the families and the communities in which these victims
belonged to see these videos over and over again. Cyber-doula Olivia Ross talks about Data
Trauma to refer to “manifestations of harm that emerged in the digital realm as a reflection and
amplification of the trauma we face in the physical world” (Githeere n.d.).
I see the circulation of these images in Nicaragua first and foremost as a denunciation,
made not necessarily by the victims but by the witnesses that were at the site and wanted people

22
to know what was happening. These same images were presented to the Human Rights
organizations as forensic evidence and support of the initial documentation of their cases. Butler
states about photos of torture in Guantanamo, “the photograph, shown and circulated, becomes
the public condition under which we feel outrage and construct political views to incorporate and
articulate that outrage” (Butler 2009, 78). But later in perspective, I see how they lose their
ability to “shock us” as Susan Sontag would have conceived it, and then they become just a trace
of the feeling of indignation for what we have lived. Both Butlers’ and Sontags’ positions at a
removed distance are different than the ones of the families, that as stated above, cause further
harm. Tiziana Terranova talks about the affect images pack: she argues, that there are two ways
of thinking about images in relation to their circulation online, “what is important of an image, in
fact, is not simply what it indexes – that is, to what social and cultural processes and
significations it refers. What seems to matter is the kind of affect that it packs, the movements
that it receives, inhibits and/or transmits” (Terranova 2004, 142). The intensity of the images
and their reverberations, the urgency to denounce the violence in which the government killed
young people have affected the victims, as they are forced to watch the images of death multiple
times and then conflate the denunciation with this representation. Throughout the process of the
museum, we present alternatives to the re-representation of these forensic evidences that are less
harmful for the family of the victims and potential ways to engaging with memory work. In the
following, I will discuss concepts of memory and how it has been mobilized in Nicaragua.
Nicaragua, Revolution, Re-appropriation and Memory: A brief history
Memory is a relational concept. It connects time, objects and people. Elizabeth Jelin
argues that the exercise of the abilities for remembering and forgetting is unique to each
individual, and that they are central to the process of identity formation. She states that “it is this

23
singularity of memories and the possibility of activating the past in the present, that defines
personal identity and the continuity of the self over time” (Jelin 2003, 18:10). Pilar Riaño Alcalá
conceptualizes memory, as a cultural practice, and as “a bridge between the individual and the
collective that facilitates processes of identity construction” (Riaño-Alcalá 2011, 1:11).
These collective memories allow the past to be articulated in the present, they are traces
that shape social histories and are reawakened in collective celebrations. As Andreas Huyssen
states “the past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory,”
(Huyssen 1995, 3) since there is a fissure between experience, remembrance and representation.
The problem is that in any given moment and place, it is impossible to find one memory, or a
single vision and interpretation of the past shared throughout society, which Appadurai calls the
“debatability of the past,” as cited by Trouillot (Trouillot 2015). Although we can talk about
“master narratives” of nations, a central symbolic operation in state formation, in which
politicians advance an almost mythical version of history that includes the patriotic symbols and
national heroes to anchor national identity such as the Nicaraguan Revolution; Jelin reminds us
that memories of national events are still the object of disputes, conflicts and struggle.
The Nicaraguan Revolution was a product of a popular insurrection, and was intended as
a social transformation project that lasted from 1979 to 1990. The Revolution came to an end
because of several issues that have been amply debated elsewhere
10
, among them we could list
the economic scarcity as a result of the military and economic intervention of the United States,
the war between the State of Nicaragua, the Counterrevolution, and the compulsory military
service necessary to wage that war among others. After the end of the revolution and the civil
war, people thought there was a possibility of achieving a democratic state, as a bilateral position

10
(Equipo Envío 1990); (Martí i Puig and Wright 2010); (Vilas 1991); (Houtart 1994).

24
between Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas who claimed equal responsibility for achieving that
goal: the former, by defeating Somoza, the latter, by winning the 1990 elections (Soto Joya
2009). Because of a constant polarization between Sandinistas and Anti-Sandinistas in the last
forty years, different narratives have competed positions as hegemonic memories and counter
memories, and these operations have brought forth critiques to uses of the past by Nicaraguan
scholars.
Leonel Delgado mentions how the rise of testimony in Latin America that led the way to
a series of texts on the Sandinista process. They narrated aspects of the guerrilla struggles and
imprisonment in Somocista prisons. Once the Sandinista government took power in 1979, they
“lost in part their character of marginal discourse, which has been alleged as characteristic of the
testimony (Beverley, 1987), to embody the official discourse of the new regime, without
necessarily the narrative closure implying an overcoming of the dichotomy” (Delgado Aburto
2016, 448).
The Revolution with its official narrative buried memories of different communities that
suffered harm and discrimination through its process. An important element to highlight about
the Revolution in relation to human rights violations and their memories is the sacrifice and
revolutionary conviction that was demanded of all people, including militant women, mothers of
“heroes and martyrs” and members of the Patriotic Military Service. Lorraine Bayard De Volo
narrates how the discourse of the Sandinista Revolution, inspired by the liberation theology of
the popular Church, promoted the shedding of the body of the innocent (the best sons and
daughters of the country) as a method to atone for sin. She states that “the sacrifice was amazing:
displacement, torture, rape, murder, but it came to be seen in the eyes of many mothers as
something necessary” (Bayard de Volo 2001, 58). Luciana Chamorro talks about how

25
“revolutionary sacrifice and conviction appear as a mandate, most of the time demanded of youth
by a revolutionary elite that distanced itself more and more from its practice” (Chamorro
Elizondo 2020, 109).
In her book, Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America,
Ileana Rodríguez argues that the vanguard parties “neglected, degraded, and marginalized
women, disparaging and omitting everything that was synonymous with women, exercising
power against women and all of those who have a sub-position in the project” (Rodríguez 1996,
58). We could add as people in sub-position all those who have feminized bodies, dissident
genders, racialized and any other who does not fit the masculine guerrilla ideal enabled for
combat and war. Rodríguez affirms that: “the models of gender performance were to subjugate,
obey, erase oneself so that the man could be an authoritarian insurgent, an autocratic militant”
(Rodríguez 1996, 86). Through novels of young people who were victims of the war and part of
the armed conflict, Rodríguez narrates the search for the disappeared children by their mothers,
which at the same time creates a type of “counter-insurgent” politicization: “In Pantasma, mother
is a plurality overwhelmed with impotence, hearing stories of suffering and mistreatment: how
they were left in the mountains; how they treated homosexuals; how they practiced cruelty on
them.” (Rodríguez 1996, 117)
Multiple authors discuss the conflicts of collective memory in terms of political events or
situations of state violence. Commemoration takes special relevance when linked with trauma,
when “profound social catastrophes and collective suffering are involved” (Jelin 2003, 18:29).
These memories usually emerge with a double intent: that of asserting the truth or veracity of
events, and that of demanding justice. In these cases, there is a struggle between competing
actors who claim recognition and legitimacy of their stories, memories, voices and demands. The

26
disputes of collective memories often take place in specific moments in time, where the context
allows them, in moments of constructing democratizing projects, hopefully to orient the course
of the future.
The pursuit of recognition and legitimacy takes place when actors and activists use the
past by bringing their understandings and interpretations about it into the public sphere of debate.
Generally, their intention is to establish/convince/ transmit their narrative, so that others will
accept it (Jelin, 2003). Common examples of both collective identification and recognition are
the stories of survivors and victims of the Holocaust and the victims of bloody genocidal
dictatorships in Latin America and Africa, which in many cases are counter-narratives to the
specific national story. In various cases, as in the Nicaraguan one, nation building stories obscure
the actions of victors (in their benefit), as well as those who have lost the battle of history and
therefore have been silenced in time. In those cases, what memory workers are trying to achieve
is to be part of the canonical national narratives, and enter the cycle of reform, revisionism and
construction of these narratives. This project aligns with the conceptualization of memories from
a human rights approach, which attends to the ways in which people build meaning and relate the
past to the present in the act of remembering serious human rights violations and the actions of
victims and civil society in the defense and promotion of human rights in such contexts.
As one of the few exercises of recuperation of buried narratives, Irene Agudelo narrates
about the memories of the Contras or counterrevolutionaries, what she calls the ContraMemorias
(trans. Countermemories). Her work demonstrates how the Sandinista discourse constructed the
members of the Counter-revolution as an enemy, and how their composition was heterogenous,
as it included guards from the previous Somoza Guard, but also many of them peasants who
were reluctant to the changes brought forth by the Revolution, and whose the Revolution was

27
supposed to represent (Agudelo Builes 2017). Other memories that have been mostly buried is
the ones of LGBTQ+ Sandinista revolutionaries, who were imprisoned and tortured in the
security House number 50, and threatened since “the new man was neither a faggot nor a fag
fucker [el hombre nuevo no era cochón ni cochonero]” (Kampwirth 2014) as cited by Karen
Kampwirth in her study about the LGBTQ+ movement in Nicaragua in the 1980s during the
Sandinista Revolution. A group of artists of Operación Queer
11
, have mentioned these episodes
in relation to the visibility of these groups during the Revolution and in the present.
After the loss of the elections in 1990s, during a new wave of conservative politics and
neoliberalization “the word memory implied continuing to defend the Sandinista Revolution and
the ideas that shaped that project” (Soto Joya 2009, 2). Fernanda Soto Joya shows the nuances
and contradictions of those engaged in the project of remembering this political project, as she
did in her study of peasants’ memories, “the Revolution is idealized and mistakes and pains are
forgotten. Here, the Revolution is always under constant attack and the Sandinista's eternal
obligation is to defend it, thus showing his political loyalty”. She argues that the collective
memory of the Revolution that prevails today is “a complacent memory, as Vezzetti (2002)
would say, that inhibits internal questions and highlights the imperative of defense” (Soto Joya
2009, 3). Margarita Vannini also traces the how places of memory have been built and destroyed
in these historical periods contesting the legitimacy of the discourse about what happened and
foreclosing the possibilities of dialogue (Vannini 2012).
Macarena Gómez-Barris reminds us that even though the past can be mobilized to
reproduce the hegemony of the State, there are also alternative memories that question this
construction and offer other spaces to think about the nation, the group, and political projects

11
Operación Queer Website https://www.operacionqueer.com/

28
(Gómez-Barris 2009, 5). Agudelo and Martínez talk about how the use of “revuelta” or “revolt”
to name the April’s Uprisings has many angles, relevant to this discussion: it speaks to the
refractive ways in which young people in 2018 “defied state power without the intention of
taking it, retaking or snatching symbols, words, slogans and places of power from the state,
political parties and the status quo, re-signifying and occupying them” (Agudelo Builes and Cruz
2018, 27). Also they see it as repetition, a return to a common place, or as memories transmitted
by parents and grandparents and lived from pain, that is, as post-memories, (Hirsch 2008) as
Marianne Hirsch would say, of a new return to the revolution of the 80s and the insurrection
against Somoza (Agudelo Builes and Cruz 2018, 27). I think that to frame it as a repetition of
memory would not suffice, but maybe a re-appropriation to give it another meaning. For me, this
process of constructing memory about the recent events has actually opened and revolted
previous memories and grieving about the violence in the 1970s and 80s. Many of the
testimonies of the mothers that are part of the archive of the Museum project mention how they
had lost members of their family in these previous episodes of violence, and how they demand a
different approach, both to the treatment of the families of victims as well as the memories of
their loved ones. Enrieth Martínez Palacios in her close reading of the testimonies of the victims
sees an “exemplary use of memory” following Todorov (Todorov 2000) as cited by Martínez
Palacios, as a way to broaden the notion of memory and justice and articulating various process
of morning in their own families, from the Revolutionary and Contra-war period and this recent
uprising moment (Martínez Palacios Forthcoming).
Agudelo and Martinez also mention the difference between the most recent memory or
short horizon of memory, which I described above; that in Central America refers to “the
violence of the 70s and 80s, and the subsequent transition to democracies that should have

29
brought peace” and a long horizon linked in our lands to the cycles of indigenous resistance to
colonial domination as indigenous and decolonial scholars have pointed out (Rivera Cusicanqui
2010). Agudelo and Martinez highlight the rebellions that emerge repeatedly in our national
geography, over time, in places with long-standing indigenous roots: Nueva Segovia, Monimbó,
Sutiava, the central region, Matagalpa and the Caribbean Coast (Agudelo Builes and Cruz 2018,
28). Some of these places in 2018, as presented later in the text, were the ones that had a stronger
resistance against the regime and were hit the hardest during the repression.
I am interested in revealing the existing relationships of power, where civil society and
the political sphere decide what is included in the national history. It should be clarified as
Trouillot and Foucault argue that is not only by acknowledging the silences in the production of
historical narrative that we can see how power works in the story, but by asking “how do they
enter?” (Trouillot 2015) or better yet who makes those silences? Similarly, even though there is a
struggle over the meaning of “what took place”, there is also a struggle over the meaning of
memory in itself. Jelin states that the space of memory is thus an “arena of political struggle that
is frequently conceived in terms of a struggle “against oblivion”, “remember so as not to repeat”
(Jelin 2003, 18:xviii). But she reminds us that these slogans that pit memory against forgetting,
however, can be tricky since in and of themselves, they may not pinpoint the actual relations of
power. Slogans such as “memory against oblivion” or “against silence” hide an opposition
between distinct and rival memories. In truth, what is at stake is an opposition of “memory
against memory” (Jelin 2003, 18:xviii), the memory that is official versus the unofficial or
alternative memories.

30

Positionality, Feminist and Decolonial Approach + Road Map

“I don't have things clear either, sister, what I have is a couple of intuitions with sharp edges that
break schemes, that seek to complement the edges of yours and that is why their only wisdom is
to know that they are incomplete”
— Mujeres Creando
12

I want to position myself when writing this text as a woman, young, transfeminist, middle
class, cisgender, queer, mixed race, mestiza, with Asian, European, and Indigenous descent, from
Central America with family links to Nicaragua and Costa Rica. My native language is Spanish,
I have the privilege to speak English and to be able to attend graduate school in the United
States. Like countless Nicaraguans and Central Americans, I have been a victim of state
violence, which came to me in a personal and devastating way when paramilitaries sponsored by
the Nicaraguan government murdered my uncle Vicente Rappaccioli on June 26 in Carazo, near
our house. My positionality differentiates me from many victims of violence who suffer greater
forms of structural violences, especially those with indigenous and afro-descent.
I first came to AMA as a volunteer, contributing my efforts and skills to demand justice–
as most Nicaraguans were – by cooking food for political prisoners arrested for protesting, and
organizing anonymous artistic interventions in the streets of Nicaragua’s capital. These
interventions came about because with a collective I was organized; we saw the urgency of
putting faces to what was becoming a death toll that surpassed the hundreds. I also assembled an
all-female group of artists to develop a series of short films about the direct victims of state
violence.

12
Mujeres Creando. 2005. La virgen de los deseos. Colección Pensar en movimiento. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Tinta
Limón. My translation.

31
After the death of my uncle I became part of the Association Mothers of April (AMA),
contributing my communicational know-how to create a communications strategy for the
organization, and turned the incipient idea of making short films into a much larger project: AMA
y No Olvida, Museum of Memory against Impunity, which I have been directing since its
creation. These events made me reorient my work and resources, becoming engaged as a
participant of this group as an activist and an action researcher (Reason and Bradbury 2008) and
aligning my research project with our collective goals. That is, I have been a designer and
Director of the Museum, in its research, information infrastructure, exhibition, and subsequent
projects.
I include my personal experience here in order to position this work and myself as a
participant, creator and a researcher. The “autobiographical example,” says Saidiya Hartman,
“it’s really about trying to look at historical and social processes and one’s own formation as a
window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them” (Saunders 2008, 5). Like
Hartman I include my view of the events, “to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the
violence of abstraction” (Saunders 2008, 5). Because of my activism with AMA organizing and
disseminating the memories of the victims of the State of Nicaragua, I also consider myself
another exile from my country, to which I cannot return in the near future. In my body and my
memory, I intertwine the story of my family’s previous political exile to Costa Rica, due to my
grandfather Vicente Rappaccioli's anti-Somoza activism, and pro-freedom for Nicaragua, with
this recent exile to which I have been forced to.
I inscribe this project as a theoretical journey that creates a bridge between theories and
movements of Chicana, Black, Latina and transnational feminists with Latin American, Central
American and Caribbean theorists concerned with temporality, memories, race and gender as

32
well as digital media, art, communication and performance scholars concerned with the political
possibilities of media texts, participatory design and audience participation. I try to combine our
academic and political concerns with our feelings and vital trajectories to make “the bridge” of a
radical and embodied theory (Moraga and Castillo 1988). In this project I draw on three feminist
research currents that are complementary:
• Following the proposal of Silvia Federici (Federici 2003) and Anelí Villa Avendaño
(Villa Avendaño 2020), I propose that a reading of the events based on the experiences of
women and with a feminist perspective allows to look in tandem at the mechanisms of
reproduction of the system (in the case of Nicaragua state, gendered, classist and
racialized necropolitics) and the sustainability of resistance and struggles against
domination.

• The need to center the body within the stakes of activist and action research, with the aim
of advancing on the path towards the project of academic decolonization. From
anthropology, people like Maya Berry, Claudia Chávez, Shania Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud,
Elizabeth Velásquez propose a “fugitive inquiry”, which situates itself as “activist,
feminist, and critical that makes us politically accountable to our interlocutors, as well as
to our own embodied reality, as part of the same liberatory struggle, albeit differently
situated, along the continuum of Black and Indigenous liberation” (Berry et al. 2017,
558).

• By approaching the body, I also aim to name the embodied experiences of the victims
and collaborators, approach the possibility to grieve, heal and rebuild the social fabric
together dismembered by violence. The search for healing of the lived pain and suffering
is a particular element of women's, indigenous, Afro-descendant and non-binary
movements (Ruiz Trejo 2020). In my writings, I try to honor my voice by focusing on the
relevance of a feminist making and reading of the work by centering situated knowledge
and embodiment.

Practice- based research is a form of research driven by creating art, media, performance
networks or community engagement instead of relying only on the close study of archives of text
or media (cárdenas 2022). For me, practice-based research also engages in experimental forms of
pedagogy of rights and activism, as this project will present in its upcoming chapters. I want to
highlight the importance for me to create work that gives my interlocutors opportunities for
growth, new experiences and new tools for thinking about our political and social role. This

33
gesture and my positionality also relate to a self-reflexive criticism, against cognitive
extractivism and power hierarchies that places certain subjects in the moral place of listening and
others in the place of giving testimony. I am inspired by Pilar-Riaño Alcalá’s centering praxis in
her anthropological work to emphasize “the pragmatics and processes of how research and
fieldwork are conducted: the ways the researcher relates to the subjects and communities studied,
the tangible contributions that the research can make to the social processes and communities,
and the use of methods that foster dialogic and reflexive processes” (Riaño-Alcalá 2011, 1:16).
My contributions in the sense of praxis are the centering of care as part of the research
process, and a set of decolonial and depatriarchal design principles that are the following:
• Conceptualizing memory as subjective, embodied and autobiographical, and recognizing
the emotional aspect of this labor
• Collectivizing memory by threading individual and collective stories through media
• Elevating organic practices of memorialization and resistance
• Modulating visibility, by refusing the demands of current regimes of visuality
• Opening new possibilities of spaces for engagement, participation, recognition and
vulnerability that cross gender, race and nationality lines
• Building power, learned knowledge and tools to foster intergenerational future visions
• Puncturing systems and narratives that uphold violence

These principles were implemented in both projects and will be further elaborated in the
coming text. I named them decolonial and depatriarchal, placing them both in the geopolitical
economy of knowledge (Mignolo 2009) subverting the chain of cultural domination in reference
to the United States and other knowledge centers in Latin America, and also as they subvert
forms of internal patriarchal, colonial and racist orders in Nicaragua. My interest lies in
countering domination and exploitation by multiple forms of thinking and creating, but more
significantly for the building of other ways of being and thinking in and with the world. The
chapters in this dissertation describe and analyze the collective embodied practices of memory
and organizing, community interests, and the possibilities of healing towards non-violence that

34
can challenge impunity, those of which I have helped to create in Nicaragua. They are the
following:
Chapter 1 Collectivizing Memory against Impunity and Transmedia Memory Practices
begins with an overview of the Association Mothers of April (AMA) organization, the research
questions posed by the team of the Museum project and a theoretical exploration of the use of the
concept of Transmedia by other authors. My use of Transmedia Memory Practices refers to how
activists coordinate, mobilize and build identities through the telling of their stories across
platforms, as well as how each element created helps to tell the story of each victim into a
collective experience. I argue that they should be analyzed as sites of narrative production
(creating, storing and delivery) as well as sites of convergence of the stories (circulation,
interaction, connection and co-creation). Throughout the chapter I narrate the process of archival
creation, data management, storage and the participatory website design to host all the materials
and the convergence that takes place once these transmedia memories are out in the public, since
they become connective and usable for future projects. One of my main contributions in this
chapter is the importance of centering the victims, granting community control and ownership
against revictimization and retraumatization of the circulation of images of death with what I call
“modular visibility” as a practice of refusal in design.
In Chapter 2 Participatory Witnessing and Emotional Communities I delve into another
layer of transmedia practices made possible by the museum exhibition in tandem with the
embodied performances of the families of the victims and visitors. It begins with a theoretical
framework of affect theory, to support thinking along with the elements of the exhibition that
were part of the uprising event. I theorize how the witnessing performed by these audiences
surpasses the human rights framework of memory museums with a participatory framework that

35
uses activist and performative expressions by sharing, communicating and creating emotional
communities. “Participatory witnessing” in this context, refers to the activation of sensory
memory through the observation of the collective maps, photographs, barricades, memory
artifacts, altars, video testimonies, and other archival materials hosted on the museum website, as
well as the creation of new political and affective communities through sharing intimate
experiences of embodied pain and grief, as well as demands for justice and reparations. I argue
that this sensorial and affective exhibition creates a counter monumentalization ritual that does
not inscribe on bravery and revolutionary strength, but on mourning of the lives that were, the
sustained sensation of loss of the families of the victims and our demands for justice, truth,
reparations and non-repetition measures.
Chapter 3: Virtual Experiences in the Face of Repression aims to discuss the process
and learning outcomes of creating interactive and digital experiences and the possibilities and
trade-offs of intervening public and online space with a digital layer for creating memory
spaces. With the design of the Interactive Art book AMA Constructing Memory we aim to
utilize this project to transgress the state of exception and reach wider audiences outside
Nicaraguan borders. With these new audiences we had to address viewers’ privilege and
distance, and consider issues of embodiment, access and place. The experience design proposes
the creation of a space (i.e. ritual), that contextualizes the experience and refuses its use without
the context of the victims lives and the activism and organizing of their families. I draw
examples of uses of digital media for remembrance from artists and collectives, and highlight
how these rituals and digital artifacts are culturally specific and have to be handled with care
and respect.

36
Chapter 4 Feminist Space Building: Futurist Portals and dream weaving argues that by
moving away from the state necropolitical violence and geopolitical neoliberal time we can
construct proposals of activism that strengthen our lives through solidarity, mutual aid and
collective and individual care. This Chapter engages temporality and the imagination threading
theorizations of different forms of futurism, speculation and world building with a feminist
focus. It describes the work of different collectives of women in Nicaragua and Latin America
and the possibilities of a less violent future that they bring forth. I argue that the initiatives
together are weaving networks as Feminist Futuristic Praxis and showing different entry points
to the future. Going in depth into the process of the Portals for the Feminist Future project I
describe the intentions and practices we engaged with and an analysis of three main
methodologies to move across temporalities: time travelling to heal, ritualistic feminist play for
space-building and a spiral methodology for the feminist future. Moving from a
conceptualization of a feminist memory that allows an identification of the specificity that the
mechanisms of violence have on women's bodies and feminized identities I propose a feminist
memory-based imagination, that allows us to imagine how these bodies can survive the violence,
heal and construct alternatives to the future, hopefully with poetry.
My conclusions engage the possibilities of four collective horizons: the future work of
memory, reparations, and justice. I argue that as we tried to accomplish in these projects, these
future endeavors have to continue centering the victims’ needs and political objectives. From this
project, we center the victims’ desires in relation to representation, organizing with care, and the
proliferation of pedagogies of human rights, media creation and expression. I argue that a
transitional justice process in Nicaragua, must be transformative, and not necessarily reformist.
My thinking around this idea has brought me to the point that collectivizing Justice means

37
collectivizing justice with the living, and by living I include all those that are usually excluded
from the categories (LGBTIQ+, Indigenous, Black, Migrants and youth at risk). This requires the
complexity of transforming reality, rooted in memory, not through screens or digital servers, but
rather by through concrete and material actions in the midst of continuous exploitation, precarity
and violence.

38
Denuncia 214- Denounce 214
13

With this piece I prove and archive the life and absence of my uncle Vicente Rappaccioli. The
piece is my way of denouncing and expressing the trauma and bureaucratic processes that we
experienced right after the events, since my family decided they did not want to make a public
complaint for fear of reprisals. When the on-site mission of the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights (IACHR) came to Nicaragua, the work of the relatives of victims was to prove the
existence of our loved ones, scanning and photocopying their personal documents.

A mi tío Vicente, a un año de su asesinato:

Nos dio miedo llorarte en público porque somos cobardes,
y como buenos católicos, nos llenamos de culpas.

Me acuerdo que hablamos una semana antes de que desaparecieras.
Estaba manejando, dando vuelta en la rotonda JPG
y platicábamos de ir a cenar “cuando esto pasara”.
“Que Ortega ya estaba terminado, sino desde adentro,
desde afuera” me dijiste
En la rotonda habían cruces de personas que no eran vos.
Me dijiste que no estabas saliendo a ningún lado,
¿por qué saliste esa noche? siempre me lo pregunto.

Te buscamos, te busqué, te buscaron,
llamé a todas las personas en tu libreta de notas,
todas estaban preocupadas por vos.
Tres días después, camino al Chipote,
recuerdo el instante en que me llamaron para reconocerte.

Reconocerlo, “¿por qué? ¿está perdido en un hospital?”
No, está muerto, (me lo dijo mi inconsciente).

En mis manos, un certificado de defunción,
y nos dejaron (como gran cosa) hacer la autopsia.
“Causa de muerte: herida por proyectil de arma de fuego con orificio de entrada y salida en la
cabeza, en la sien izquierda.
Orientación de trayectoria del proyectil, de adelante hacia atrás, de arriba hacia abajo y de
izquierda a derecha”

Recuerdo cuando te entregaron, la de RP de Medicina Legal estaba preocupada que todos nos
sintiéramos que habían hecho bien su trabajo. Yo le dije
“gracias, no se preocupe, ESTO no se va a quedar así”.
Sus ojos asustados, pero no lo suficiente.
Solicitamos los videos para ver quiénes te llevaron,
pero nunca los entregaron.

13
This is the accompanying text of a video piece that is part of my portfolio

39

Cuando fui a tu apartamento a limpiar me encontré
con un maletín azul, lleno de todos tus papeles.
Saqué todas tus pertenencias, tus marcas por el mundo,
tus innumerables libros y medicinas.
Aquí sigo con tus huellas, tus vestigios, y tu fantasma.

A un año de tu muerte, yo denuncio que eras inocente,
y estabas lleno de amor para mí
denuncio que fuiste asesinado sin motivos,
con lujo de violencia
denuncio que fuiste secuestrado,
intimidado y robado.
denuncio que no he podido llorar tu muerte,
y que lucharé por que se haga JUSTICIA.

Translation
To my uncle Vicente, a year after his murder:

We were afraid to cry you in public because we are cowards,
and as good Catholics, we filled ourselves with guilt.

I remember we talked a week before you disappeared.
I was driving around the roundabout
and we talked about going to dinner “when this was over”.
“That Ortega was already finished, if not from the inside, from outside” you told me
In the roundabout there were crosses of people who were not you.
You told me you weren't going anywhere
Why did you go out that night? I always wonder.

We looked for you, I looked for you, they looked for you,
I called all the people in your address notebook
They were all worried about you.
Three days later, on the way to Chipote (the detention center),
I remember the moment they called me to recognize you.

Recognize him, “why? Is he lost in a hospital?”
No, he is dead, (my unconscious told me).
In my hands, a death certificate,
and they let us (as a big deal) do an independent autopsy.
“Cause of death: gunshot wound with entry and exit hole in the head, in the left temple.
Projectile trajectory orientation, front to back, top to bottom, and left to right”

I remember when they handed your body over,
the Forensic Medicine Public Relations person was worried that we all felt that they had done
their job well.

40
I said “Thanks, don’t worry, this isn't going to stay like this."
Her eyes frightened, but not enough.
We requested the videos to see who took you,
but they were never delivered them.

When I went to your apartment to clean, I found
a blue briefcase, full of all your papers.
I took out all your belongings, your marks around the world,
your innumerable books and medicines.
Here I continue with your footprints, your vestiges, and your ghost.

A year after your death, I denounce that you were innocent,
and you were full of love for me
I denounce that you were murdered for no reason,
with luxury of violence
I denounce that you were kidnapped, bullied and robbed.
I denounce that I have not been able to mourn your death,
and that I will fight for JUSTICE to be done.

41
CHAPTER ONE: COLLECTIVIZING MEMORY AGAINST IMPUNITY AND
TRANSMEDIA
Chant in the streets:
“¡Las Madres no se rinden! ¡Exigen Justicia!”
Trans. “Mothers don’t surrender! They demand Justice!”

“Recuerdo, recordamos, hasta que la justicia se siente entre nosotros.”
Trans. “I remember, we remember, until justice sits among us.”
— Rosario Castellanos
Tlatelolco Memorial

Every Thursday of May 2018 at 4:00 P.M. a group of mothers gathered in a roundabout in
Managua popularly known as Metrocentro to denounce the killing of their children by the
Nicaraguan state. Even though gathering was very dangerous as state repression remained
ongoing, once the group of mothers started confronting the state publicly, more families joined
the Thursday sit-ins. They gathered solidarity and started calling themselves “Mothers of April.”
The mothers called to a march, on Mothers’ day, May 30th, 2018, known popularly as “the
Mother of all marches” to demand for justice. It had an attendance of around half a million
people in Managua – a city of 1.5 million -- and ended in the massacre of more than 18 young
people (Luna 2020). After this event, the Mothers had to find new ways to protest and demand
justice for their children.
The Nicaraguan government denied the existence of the mortal victims of state violence,
and criminalized protesters by framing them terrorists, vandals, criminals (Amnesty 2018). In the
midst of the ongoing police brutality, the Mothers of April raised their voices demanding that the
State authorities and international human rights organizations investigate the events that occurred
and continue happening until today. This public and collective search for justice was a new path
in Nicaragua (Nuñez 2014). Amnesty International found a failure to pursue any investigation by
the Public Ministry, instead they found concealment and obstruction of due process (Amnesty,

42
2018). In addition, families of the victims have been subject to various forms of intimidation
(jailing, policing, harassment) meant to silence their demand for justice and their efforts to
construct places for remembrance. On September 2018, the collective adopted by consensus the
name Association Mothers of April, “AMA,” which translates to “love,” and defined as its
purpose: “the union and representation of the mothers and relatives of the people assassinated by
the state repression in Nicaragua” (Madres de Abril 2018). Even though it is a women-led
organization, fathers and other family members play an active role (L. Lopez 2019). The Mothers
of April collective follows a tradition of parents whose children have been killed and that have
tried to publicly search for justice such as The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the
parents of the Normalistas of Ayotzinapa
14
in Mexico, and in the United States the parents of
victims of racialized police brutality, part of the movement for Black Lives (Rankine 2017)
(Crenshaw and Ritchie 2015).
In our Manifesto for Truth, Justice and Comprehensive Reparations we proposed the active
construction of memory as one of the organizational objectives; “to create a memory bank
against oblivion and impunity” (Madres de Abril, 2018). On September 27
th
, 2019, a year after
the launch of the Manifesto, we launched the transmedia digital project AMA y No Olvida,
translated “Love and do not forget,” Memory Museum against Impunity, composed of an archival
website
15
and physical temporary exhibition, with the objective to dignify the mortal victims of
the State of Nicaragua and to honor their memory. The museum aims to “counteract the official
narrative that criminalizes citizens who participated in civic protests and that fosters the climate
of impunity promoted by the current regime” (Museo de la Memoria 2019). It’s route “allows

14
43 students disappeared by police who were handed over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel linked to the Mayor
of Iguala (Valenzuela, 2015)

15
Museum Web Archive English version https://www.museodelamemorianicaragua.org/en/home/

43
visitors to get to know, through the voices of their families, who were the students, workers,
artisans, indigenous people, peasants, producers, women and political prisoners that made use of
their citizen rights to civic protest and were killed by the State” (Museo de la Memoria, 2019).
For AMA, this was our first collective memory effort that gathered our voices and made them
public, as stated by Francys Valdivia, President of AMA and sister of Franco Valdivia, a 24 year
old student killed on April 20th: “We have carried this endeavor out under the repression and
persecution of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship, which demonstrates our unwavering will, that,
despite so much pain, we make our commitment to freedom, justice and democracy stronger than
ever” (Museo de la Memoria, 2019). The physical temporary exhibition was exhibited at Institute
of History of Nicaragua and Central America – at the Central American University UCA and
received around 10,000 visitors and more than 80,000 virtual visits on its website and a wide
coverage in the national and international press.
Transmedia Memory Practices and methods
Marsha Kinder first used the term “transmedia” to describe the intertextuality created by
an “ever expanding multi-system of entertainment” (Kinder 1991, 40)Henry Jenkins
reintroduced the term in the context of storytelling (movies, digital media and games) to describe
“a process a story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a
distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole”(Jenkins 2006, 95). Some of the characteristics
Jenkins described included its base on “complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple
interrelated characters and their stories,” (Jenkins, 2007 para 3) instead of the individual
character story. For him Transmedia is “the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective
intelligence” (Jenkins 2006, 95).

44
Even though Transmedia started as a way of thinking about fictional worlds that
generally are created by production companies and media corporations, others have thought of
the potential of this procedural medium in other social arenas. Transmedia producer Lina
Srivastava’s has described transmedia activism as “the coordinated cocreation of narrative and
cultural expression by various constituencies who distribute that narrative in various forms
through multiple platforms”(Srivastava, 2016, para. 12). Sasha Constanza-Schock introduced the
term “transmedia organizing” to talk about how “savvy community organizers engage their
movement’s social base in participatory media-making practices” (Costanza-Chock 2014, 47)
across media platforms. In this way they link organizing with media activism and challenge the
power relations vis a vis media corporation and the nation states.
Arelly Zimmerman coined the term “transmedia testimonio” in which DREAMERs
activists give accounts of their immigration experiences, reveal their legal status, and document
their participation in civil disobedience. For her, their “personal narrative represents a collective
experience that is shared across various media platforms” (Zimmerman 2016, 1886) beyond the
confines of formal and state sanctioned public spheres, challenging their own media
representations. By doing so, they “use testimonio to make claims to citizenship as new rights-
bearing subjects, even if the state has not legitimized them as such” (Zimmerman 2016, 1886). I
join their efforts in trying to think and understand media practices from the point of view of the
activists who coordinate, mobilize and build common identities through telling of their stories.
Others have engaged with Transmedia theory to think about memory and historiography.
Elmo Gonzaga thinks about transmedia memory “as the creation, storage, and distribution of
historical and cultural knowledge using the specific protocols of various media modalities, each
of which has something distinct to contribute to the larger aggregate” (Gonzaga 2019, 150).

45
Freeman talks about ‘transmedia historiography,’ as “the coordinated use of digital platforms
and non-digital materials – integrated dialogically in ways that encourage audience appropriation
– to transform how people make sense of a historical moment, encouraging more active ways of
learning about the complex, multi-perspectival components that make up a given history”
(Freeman, 2019, para 5 ). Interestingly both of them consider Marianne Hirsch’s theory of post
memory (Hirsch 2008; 2012) for succeeding generations who have not experienced first-hand the
past realities being recollected.
My use of Transmedia Memory Practices emphasizes the practices that the members of
AMA undertook to create community, challenge the media representation and the revictimization
of their family member created by the government communication apparatus and center
themselves, as well as the Transmedia universe that is created by the practices, and how each
element created helps to tell the story of each victim into a collective experience. Transmedia
Memory Practices can be analyzed as sites of narrative production, storing and delivery on the
side of the media activists and victims, as well as sites of convergence of the stories on the side
of the audiences (circulation, interaction, connection and co-creation). Jenkins defines
convergence as the flow of content across various platforms and networks, which rests on the
active participation of users (Jenkins 2006, 2–3).
Here, the term Transmedia practices is used interlocked with the Latin American tradition
of media practices, assuming activist practices are located in people’s lives, built from their own
knowledge. Thus, “when media practices are studied and analyzed, what we really understand is
people’s ways of narrating, of exposing their bodies and politicizing their lives from and in
communication” (Rincón and Marroquín 2019, 43). A media practices approach allows for an
analysis of a scenario of expression in people’s own codes, symbols, and rituals. The framing of

46
the media making practices engaged by the mothers and family members of AMA as transmedia
memory practices, adds to the repertoire of traditional activist practices that we also engaged
with (marches, sit-ins, etc.).
This chapter presents and analyzes the development of the digital project AMA y NO
Olvida, Memory Museum Against Impunity and the transmedia practices engaged by the
members of the Association of Mothers of April (AMA) that made public their private grieving.
In the following, I move to describe the interdisciplinary relationship between activist media
memory work, grief and mourning, and open up the process to share the design methods to create
the Transmedia Memory Practices:
- Data gathering and management: This includes the mapping of the violence, video
testimonies, and the gathering of the personal archive of the victims. The process of
archival creation and data management highlights the importance of community control
and ownership against revictimization and retraumatization with what I call “modular
visibility.”
- The participatory website design to host all the materials and the convergence that takes
place once these transmedia memories are out in the public, since they become
connective and usable for future projects.
Throughout the text, I am interested in the politics of transference of knowledge and
power inherent in archival procedures that takes place in the entanglement of stories, memories,
people, media and things; the critical use of corporate technology, taking into consideration
commodification, exploitation and censorship of data and images of suffering; and the
possibilities of continuing the work of construction of memory and human rights pedagogy with
the research created.

47
The labor of memory, from grieving to mourning

“Communal grief is an act of solidarity.”
16

The government denied the families the right to mourn and declared war against the
memory of the victims, their loved ones. The lives of the victims became unrecognized as lives,
devalued and therefore “ungrievable” (Butler 2006, 35–36). There is a violent dispute over
public spaces that prevents the construction of memory marks or memorials. Spontaneously,
people planted crosses with flowers on roundabouts as spaces for grieving and memory. They
were later ripped off and smothered with oil by government forces (Moncada 2018). Moreover,
funerary rituals, so important in the elaboration of mourning for family members and the
community, could not be carried out in peace since they were the object of terror and threats. In
many cases, the families had to perform the wake of their loved one in their house behind closed
doors, under siege from paramilitary groups that fired gunshots outside. In other cases, they even
entered the place. In some burials, there was little participation of members of their community
because people were afraid to go and be attacked. This prevented the family from having their
support networks to process their grief. After the funeral, there are stories of desecrated tombs (F.
Medina 2020). Many families chose to bury their relatives without performing an autopsy
because they do not trust the Institute of Legal Medicine. This means burying them thinking that
one day the body will have to be exhumed in order to carry out a reliable autopsy. According to
the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), as a result of this, the grieving
process remains pending, traversed by the absence of justice (GIEI 2019).

16
Graffiti in Seattle Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone during BLM uprisings. Get In The Zone. It´s going down. url:
https://itsgoingdown.org/get-in-the-zone/

48
According to Alan Wolfelt, people use grief and mourning interchangeably, but they
contain a subtle difference. Grief is internal, after the loss of a loved one, our initial, private
response is grief. Mourning, which is external, is the next step in the process. Mourning is the
shared, social response to loss, or grief gone public. Mourning takes our internal grief and
externalizes it in the form of an action, a symbol, a ceremony, or a ritual that activates social
support. It is essential to mourn, for creating forward movement in a state of grief. Without
external mourning, grief turns into “carried grief” (Wolfelt, 2016, para 3). The families of the
Association started their own private acts of mourning, moving within the line of private and
public. In this context, these personal acts were also political acts (Sturken 1997) since they
defied an unwritten rule that they were not allowed to do any type of memorialization or
gathering in public, or decorate their tombs for their anniversary or birthday (F. Medina 2020).
Team and research methodology
I had the privilege to led a multi-disciplinary technical team to do the project that
included members of the Directive Council of AMA, sociologists, architects, human rights
defenders, psychologists, artists, designers and archivists. This project was made in collaboration
with the Academy of Sciences of Nicaragua with the Nicaraguan Center of Human Rights
(CENIDH)
17
. This collaboration gave the project a human rights framework, by centering and
not re-victimizing the victims. It also allowed for the CENIDH team to gather new information
from new members of AMA for future processes of justice.
The conditions to do this project were dangerous since the team had to travel to each
province with film production equipment. This automatically would be ground for detainment if

17
In 2018, CENIDH’s offices were confiscated by the government and their legal entity removed (International
2018)

49
stopped by police. The gatherings took place in clandestine ways, aided by religious and
education organizations, in six departments
18
(Managua, Masaya, Chinandega, León, Carazo,
Jinotega), and each territory had around 20 to 30 family members that represented 10-15 of the
victims. In the first meeting held in the department of Chinandega Susana López, mother of
Gerald López, a 20-year-old university student who was killed in a paramilitary attack to the
National University (UNAN), gave the following introduction to the project:
“As a mother, I thank you for welcoming us and starting this important work. I
know it will be painful. We have to do it together, to clean the memory of our
sons, murdered by this Ortega Murillo regime. We will be firm until the last
consequences. I stand here today and will stand firm with you. We will continue
to represent our children with great pride, even though they will not see the fall of
this regime, they will be seeing what we are doing from above”.

Her framing of memory work as one of “cleaning the memory” and to be “in presence of
their loved ones”, was present throughout the rest of the project. Similarly, Ruha Benjamin talks
about how Zhaleh Boyd connects this form of invocation to the idea of “ancestral co-presence.”
She refers to hashtag signifiers, like #SayHerName, as gathering points that make present the
slain and call upon recent ancestors—Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Ayana Jones,
and so many others—as spiritual kin who can animate social movements (Benjamin 2018). The
participatory model, that recognizes and centers the knowledge of the victims’ families required
a theoretical-methodological approach based on the acknowledgment of the victims/survivors as
subjects of rights. The main research questions were:
1. How do we support future processes of truth and justice?
2. How do we conceptualize memory and memorialization practices in an organic way?
3. How do we care as practice, in the design, and in our thinking?

18
Nicaragua is divided for administrative purposes into fifteen departments and two autonomous regions.

50
In the following, I describe how we answered these research question through the mapping
practices, the archival practices and the different transmedia memories created, shared and then
connected online of the first phase of the project.
Narrative and mapping practices of the “routes of pain”
This section describes the mapping process, called by the team as “the routes of pain”.
They were meant to give a tool to the families of AMA to structure their testimony for future
legal process, as well as for the team to gather information about the events in territorial manner.
It implied that members of AMA created hand-drawn memory maps of the events that happened,
shared their testimonies collectively with the other families of the same locality and then
referenced the places into traditional cartography to create geographic information systems, that
allowed to find patterns in the repression and attacks.
At the beginning of the workshops, members of AMA introduced each other by stating
the relationship to the victims. For many, this was the first time to talk about their relative’s
murder, what happened to them and how they lived it, in front a group of people. There was a
psychotherapist on site that helped contain the emotional outburst that sometimes erupted. The
technical team presented the methodological guide and gave drawing supplies and support to the
family. Then, families drew a map that graphically captured the events related to the murder of
their relatives, in the sequence established by the methodological guide. The guide recommended
to try to tell the story from the time the victims left their house, until they were wounded or
killed, if they received any medical support, if they were able to do a wake, and when they were
buried.
Generally, one or two relatives proceeded to draw. This was a process of reflection and
discussion among family members, visibly emotional for some. They presented the story-

51
mapping on the events that occurred and, in some cases, that they witnessed. Both the map and
the oral narrative of the story were rich in graphic details. Sometimes they would place the
picture of their relative on top of the map, or include their nicknames on their header names. In
the maps, families give account of their perception of events and places through graphic
representation details for example: adding flags to the barricades and the trucks that carried the
paramilitaries that attacked the protesters, adding flowers and color to the home and the name of
the victim. In contrast, state offices like the Institute of Legal Medicine (IML) is painted gray,
suggesting sadness. See Figure 1 for example of hand-drawn map.

Figure 1 Map of Maycol Cipriano González Hernández murdered on May 30th, 2018. AMA y No Olvida, Museum
of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019.

52
The presentations helped the victims create community by learning each other’s stories in
each territory. The participation of relatives of other victims created a mnemonic community
19

(Zerubavel 2012, 4) among the territorial groups, thus generating an inter-discursive narrative at
the territory level. The shared knowledge of the spaces created allowed for them to create a
shared topography of the violent events. The meetings would end with a breathing exercise and
repeating the phrase “I am here for me, as I am here for you,” a mantra-like phrase that invited
victims to support each other. It was evident that this was a hard process for the members, but
they received collective strength from one another, as well as the process of creating a shared
social identity (i.e. victims and citizens with rights, members of AMA, families, mothers, etc.).
The maps were geo-referenced with the objective of supporting the narratives with
scientific tools, locating as precisely as possible the places where they occurred. This forensic
evidence will act as support for the narratives for the building of legal cases in the future. In this
innovative methodology different methodological tools intervene including: the mapped account,
the collective testimonies and GIS (Geographic Information System). In order to geo-reference
the sites noted by the relatives, the families were not able to do Global Positioning System (GPS)
references on site because of the dangerous conditions in which the mapping took place. The
maps they drew were referenced with scale maps produced by conventional cartography. After
the presentation of the individual hand drawn maps, the victims’ families helped to locate the
events indicated on the freehand maps on the printed maps. The information displayed on the
printed maps was manually entered into the open source program QGIS Software Madeira to
create the GIS maps. The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps show the collective
events and allow to identify spatial patterns of protest and repression. On later workshops, family

19
A community’s collective memory invokes a common past that they all seem to recall (Zerubavel, 2012, p.4).

53
members, learned about basic mapping techniques using GIS. This allows them to update and
add more information to the maps created in the initial workshops. These methods allowed for
the practices of story narration and mapping that moved from individual to collective memories.
Map creation was once the exclusive privilege of the state or corporations, (Milan and Gutiérrez
2018) but families of AMA took an active role in making the maps, and displayed critical
information about these killings.
Testimonios
Testimonio has an important relevance in Latin American tradition, since “is a form of
political action” (Zimmerman, 2016) (Zimmerman 2016, 1892) and has allowed victims to voice
their experiences in state sanctioned spaces such as Truth commissions like the ones in Bolivia,
Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina and Chile, leaving a mark on their national hegemonic
memories and ultimately “assert their dignity while also becoming cognizant of their rights to
speak and to be heard” Stephen, 2013, as cited in Zimmerman, 2016, 1,893).
In the case of AMA members, they have not been called to testify or give their testimonies,
because there has not been any type of investigation by the Public Ministry. Instead, human
rights defenders, first gathered their testimonies when the events happened via oral stories and
transcribed them. With the research process of the Memory museum, the testimonies were
recorded on video in the presence of a human rights defender. This way, new information could
be added to the file without interviewing the victims twice. The questions first gathered
information about who the victims were, how they remember them, what happened to them and
what kind of memory and justice they want. These interviews were cut to 5-8 minutes clips in
order to tell the story of each victim. At the end, the team took a picture of the family members
holding a picture of their relative demanding for justice. See Figure 2 for an example.

54

Figure 2 Portrait demanding justice, family of Cruz Alberto Obregon Lopez, 23 years old killed on May 30th, 2018.
AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019.
Modular Visibility and the politics of the archive
The gathering and organization of the data was part of the creation of the community
archive. This part was essential for the construction of the digital online museum and the
decision-making process of what data was made open access to the public and what was kept in
private. The type of data gathered on the workshops was divided in two categories:
1) Forensic evidence such as files, documents, accounts of the traumatic events for the
search for justice and reparations.
2) Memorialization, which included video and images for the visibility and ethical
reparation of the victims. This included the narratives of their lives and their dreams. The team
invited the families to bring the photographic archive of the victim, pictures and videos of life

55
milestones, birthdays, graduations, and newspaper clips. In some cases, the families would
narrate the event captured in the photo. Then, the team also gathered any digital media they had
on their phones and created a folder of media files for each victim. The team did an online
investigation of tributes and news to be part of the archive.
Through the creation of the Museum, the AMA organization created its own archive
building on a set of ethics of media representation and forms that I call “modular visibility.”
Modular visibility counters impunity & state surveillance by centering the victims and their
relatives’ testimonies, and modulating the information released in a way that makes sense to the
community. The main principle is that the community has control, access and ownership of the
narratives and materials. Visibility and representation are issues that concern many activists.
Mackenzie Wark has stated that “trans ‘visibility’ was a mixed blessing. It made it easier to find
each other, but now trans people are the wedge issue of choice for various kinds of fascists doing
their best to make trans life miserable, particularly for trans kids” (Wark, 2022, para. 2). Micha
Cardenas has also mentioned how Trans of color studies have wrestled with the challenges of
visibility and invisibility, pointing to the need for more than simple demands for representation
in necropolitical regimes (cárdenas 2022, 75). She proposes “shifting” to deal with specific
materiality of a shift from perceptibility to imperceptibility and consider the state between these
two states (cárdenas, 2020, p. 77). In Data Feminism Catherine D’Ignacio and Lauren Klein state
“being represented also means being made visible, and being made visible to the matrix of
domination poses significant risks to the health and safety of minoritized groups…(D’Ignazio
and Klein 2020, 110) When data are collected about real people and their lives, risks ranging
from exposure to violence are always present. But when deliberately considered, and when

56
consent is obtained, counting can contribute to efforts to increase valuable and desired visibility”
(D’Ignacio and Klein, 2020, p.118).
The community decided to make public the mapping and short clips of video testimonies,
but would not give to the public the evidence that will be part of future process of justice or the
images of their relatives dying, creating a private archive of all the evidence. This meant rather
than re-representing the traumatizing experience of their deaths and how they got injured (which
had already been streamed via social media), people could learn the stories of their family
members, while they were alive, and the struggle they fought for protesting against the regime.
In other words, we actively refuse to make visible and reproduce their cruel deaths. Instead, we
emphasize their absence, making that absence into a political statement and taking advantage of
the affordances of digitality to modulate visibility. Lev Manovich has discussed that one of
principles of New Media is modularity, as “being composed of several separate self-sufficient
modules that can act independently or together in synchronisation to complete the new media
object” (Manovich 2002, 30). Tara McPherson in her book Feminist in the Software Lab, has
discussed how modularity reduces complexity and “might be seen to be at odds with the
accretive and contextual practices many value in the interpretative humanities” (McPherson
2018, 6:66). But in this case, we use modularity in terms of representation accompanied with
refusal as used by decolonial scholars (Tuck and Yang 2014) in order to give more context to the
type of symbolic violence that the families of victims face, when seeing the images of their
children dead recirculating online.
Later on, the public and private information was organized with international archiving
standards, creating descriptors for metadata and the use of thesaurus of human rights
organizations for thematic analysis and search of documents. Multiple thinkers have noted an

57
important shift in the social archivization of memory, whereas collecting and storing were
traditionally specialized practices of the ruling elite, nowadays have become common and
popular (Nora 1989). For Amit Pinchevski the archive in itself “has become an eminently social
practice, a veritable living memory” (Pinchevski 2019, 254). The previous practices, that include
the mapping, testimonies and the creation of the archive allowed for the collectivization of
memories with the team and the territorial networks and the digital museum allowed for them to
reach a wider audience.
Museum and Digital Altar: Participatory Design

“The museum is showing what we did at home, what we naturally did to remember. So that our
own traditions are not forgotten.”
Francisca Machado, mother of Franco Valdivia

Another part of the workshop entailed the participatory design of the digital website of the
Memory museum. This process was informed by participatory art and design methods, which
emphasize collective exchange and collaboration. A key aspect of participatory projects is that
they allow input from other participants besides the maker, by learning from and building on
insights, experiences and practices of others (Huybrechts et al. 2014)in varying constellations.
The mutual interactions between the technical team and the families of victims that participated,
as well as the transmedia memories, defined the design and communication strategy of project.
The aesthetics of the archive were designed by researching the forms of memorialization
used by the victims’ families. In a brainstorming session, AMA members were asked what was
memory for them, why do we remember and in what ways the families remember their children
in their homes. The overarching feeling was that we should remember “for them to be present”,

58
“to prove the lives they had”, “to continue their struggle for freedom”, “to give them a place in
history”, “to have equal rights”, and “for this not happen ever again”. In the remembering
practices mentioned, most, if not all, had altars in their houses where they placed the victim’s
belongings, such as books, perfumes, trophies, and protest materials, as described in this vignette
by Carolina Carrión, mother of Jasser Zepeda Carrión, also known as Chavelo:
He was well known in Masaya; in the beginning of the protests he was already
known because he organized people. When they murdered him, the people felt it,
and we as a family felt that he was not ours, he belonged to the people. I did not
even get involved, it felt like it was a great loss for everyone. After the burial, I set
up an altar and place the Virgen Mary of Sorrows, Saint Michael and flowers and
candles that I never took away, and people brought me more stuff. We were
accumulating things, basically his own museum. We put his things on a shelf with
his photos facing the street. People go down the street and say there’s Chavelo
and recognize him. Since we placed it there, he is always there and for us he is
there. He has taken care of us. When they came to attack again in the Operation
Clean up, I was the only woman and at the time of the massacre we held hands
and he protected us. Out of fear I was going to remove the altar, but my son told
me not to, that he would take care of us. They passed in front and did not touch
us, for that day they could have killed us. We believe that he protects us.

AMA members state they like to have altars because they feel the presence of their loved
ones and they feel comfort in knowing “they will not be forgotten”. The decision was to create
an altar museum concept, grounded on the cultural matrix of religious devotion and
remembrance, but secular to respect the diversity of religions in the organization. The altar
concept also represents the labor the families undertake in our gestures of remembering. This
alludes to the performative aspect of memory, what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire of the
archive” (D. Taylor 2003, 20). Later on, in the temporary exhibition created, the altar became an
actual space that allowed for a further ritual of collectivization of grief and mourning.

59
Connective Transmedia Memories
“And by always honoring them as we walk, we will continue to sow the memory of our relatives
so that they flourish, grow and live full of truth and justice”
20
.

Once the museum was designed and validated by the families it was launched online and
exhibited in a temporary exhibition. The digital museum project AMA y No Olvida, Memory
Museum against Impunity
21
comprises of 100 profiles of victims in which the online user can
learn their stories with a video the testimony of the family, then a biographical written profile
and their lives' photographic archive, then learn about their killing, with both the hand drawn and
digital map, and a section called “memory” that has the portrait of their family claiming for
justice, that is dedicated to the homages made by each family. The website also has a space
called about the museum, for media and future research. The website is what Jenkins calls “the
mothership” meaning the primary media platform that anchors the rest of the transmedia story
and which all other platforms build upon (Freeman, 2019, para 13). The temporary exhibition
and subsequent projects such as the Interactive Art Book “AMA Constructing Memory,”
22
that
will be discussed in Chapter 3 and the Podcast called Barricades of Memory are all different
forms of transmediality that the archive takes.
Once these mediated memories are in the ecology of news and information, they become
connective memories. Hoskin posits that ‘new’ memories are evolving as they are continually
emerging in connection with media and technologies (Hoskins 2016). Abigail De Kosnik also
develops a theory about archontic production, in which memory is not only the record of cultural

20
About the museum http://www.museodelamemorianicaragua.org/sobre-el-museo/ accessed July 20
th
, 2020.
21
Website http://www.museodelamemorianicaragua.org/ accessed July 20
th
, 2020.
22
Link to download the book https://www.museodelamemorianicaragua.org/wp-
content/uploads/2021/09/AMA_ConstructingMemory_Web.pdf accessed November, 24
th
, 2020.

60
production, but also its’ base for remixing
⁠23
(De Kosnik 2016). The pursuit of memory work is
increasingly fostered by social media platforms (Kaun and Stiernstedt 2016). In the case of the
Museum, the memories of each victim and their families are shared weekly on the social media
channels. According to its Creative Commons licensing
24
it is intended for people to share and
use the museum material. Various journalistic initiatives have started using the data of the
museum for their investigations
25
.
Conclusions
This chapter presents the repressive conditions in which AMA continues the active
construction of memory of our loved ones and how we tried to confront both the structural and
state violence trough transmedia memory practices designed to take into careful consideration for
the community’s needs and well-being. The members of AMA were clear about trying to create a
“memory bank to fight against oblivion and impunity” that turned into AMA y No Olvida,
Memory Museum Against Impunity, that has multiple media forms and texts that interwove in
multiple layers of practices of collectivization of grief and memory. The organization lived
through a process of creating territorial networks of support for our individual mourning, and
later on involving the rest of the population at large. It was evident from the vignettes of the
voices of the mothers, that memory work invigorated their agency, allowed to resist together,
care in relationship, and perform practices of collective identification and individual
transformation.

23
She makes reference to Lawrence Lessig Remix Culture (2008).
24
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Equal Share (CC BY-NC-SA). This license allows others to remix and create from
the museum's work in a non-commercial way.
25
Huellas de Impunidad, data journalistic project. https://www.huellasdeimpunidad.org/

61
Transmedia memory practices supported and organized the members of AMA to
recognize ourselves as part of a political collective by sharing our stories and deciding how to
represent the lives of our family members and what happened to them. The narrative and digital
mapping practices allowed for the collectivization in the victims’ territorial groups, while the
testimonials, community archiving and participatory design practices, allowed for the
collectivization of grief with a wider online and international audience. The theoretical and
practical contribution here lies in the description and inclusion of design methods that can
prompt these practices, and a detailed description and analysis of the different practices in their
role of collectivizing the grief. The building blocks of Transmedia memory practices in this case
are:
1) Narrative mapping practices and video testimonies that mediated the memories of human
rights violations
2) Participatory creation of the archive and the website to host and archive the transmedia
texts in the form of an altar. Both of them were created based on the community’s needs
and traditions. The altar concept was organically presented by the family members as
their ways for remembrance and was re-interpreted to do a collective altar.
3) New transmedia memory practices that are anchored in these mediated memories once
they connect online and in public space.
In this chapter, the practices and bodies that created situated knowledge are highlighted,
moving away from the centrality of networks, discourse and media texts. The power dynamic of
these activities shifted since they are usually performed by technical experts and government
officials, but in this case were taken on by the activists. We also center the community needs’ by
proposing “modular visibility” that counters the hypervisibilization and commodification of the

62
death images created by the government as well as social media platforms, by only showing the
families testimonies, the maps, the photographic archive of the victim and their memorialization
practices without representing again their violent deaths. I argue that all the transmedia memories
created live in a larger ecosystem of media and can become connective memories, shared on
social media and other digital platforms and as I present in the next sections, they have become
seeds for future projects.

63
CHAPTER 2: PARTICIPATORY WITNESSING, AFFECTIVE MEMORY AND
EMOTIONAL COMMUNITIES
“Even with everything they did, they could not erase what happened from our memory, because
we have it marked on our bodies.”
Duyerling Rios (Rios 2020).

As part of the communication strategy for the launch of the online museum and digital
archive www.museodelamemorianicaragua.org the museum technical team in collaboration with
the Association Mothers of April (AMA) created a temporary exhibition at the Institute of the
History of Nicaragua and Central America (IHNCA) at the Centroamericana University, UCA.
The opening of the temporal installation of the museum occurred in a complex moment in
Nicaragua. In 2019 a year and a half after the popular uprisings that took place in April 2018 and
were ended violently with the “Operation Clean Up” (I. Lopez 2019) until September 2018, and
a year after AMA had been created, the overall sentiment was of loss and impasse. One of the
few relevant changes was the upsurge in the government’s strategy to negate the problems
created by its violent response to citizens’ pleas of freedom of expression, justice and
democratization, as well as closing off any type of negotiation. Joel Hernández, a commissioner
on Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), in
Geneva, on September 9, 2019 in one of the forums held on Nicaragua at the United Nations
Human Rights Council stated that:
The silence of the Nicaraguan government in the face of repeated requests for a solution
is devastating. What we are seeing is a tendency for the authorities to give the image that
the crisis has been overcome and has returned to normality. But there is no normality. In
Nicaragua there is a state of exception. We have returned to a state of total closure to all
kinds of solutions. All the windows are closed (Equipo Envío 2019).

At the same time, since July 2019 and with increasing frequency, riot police have
permanently occupied the streets of the capital of Managua with weapons of war and trained
dogs, seeking to produce more effective forms of intimidation against people who try to

64
demonstrate against the regime. At this moment, there were 130 political prisoners in Nicaraguan
prisons (mostly for protesting in public spaces), as detainees, prosecuted and already convicted.
Some of them had been in prison for more than a year, and some had been released (supposedly
protected by the Amnesty law), recaptured, and accused of new crimes (Equipo Envío, 2019).
Memory transmission, protest and space
The concept of “a museum” was a “necessary monster” as Elsie Mather, a Yupik oral
historian named libraries in Alaska pointing at the distance between these tools and their sources
of information (Kurtz 2006, 89) . Mathew Kurtz discussing the possibility of postcolonial
archives talks about how the archive can be a necessary monster that gives an opportunity to
share stories and discussions, but is also part of a bureaucratic machine that produces facts,
subject formation and state construction. In this sense, we did not want to do a Museum with
capital M, in conjunction with any national or colonialist project. We used the concept
“museum” in order for people to understand what it was meant to do, to safeguard and display
the memories of human rights violations in time, and to create a community grassroots and
organizing endeavor around memory, as I explain in Chapter 1. Many authors have criticized the
human rights framework, that intends to archive the experiences of terror and abuse for a future
restorative justice. Allan Feldman asks “Does this prescriptive plotting ‘archaicize’ terror,
creating museums of suffering?” (Feldman 2004, 165)
This chapter goes against Feldman’s argument that considers memory museums as
freezers and petrifiers of the past and against the idea that they situate the past as an object of
spectatorship. I theorize that the witnessing performed in the museum exhibition is in less of a
remove and surpasses the human rights framework with a participatory framework that uses
artistic languages to create activist and performative expressions. The community logic and

65
dynamics created allowed for the museum to be “alive”, open to change and transformation
constantly, instead of static, which is how designers describe a website whose content is not
updated periodically.
The Central American University (UCA) was the location of the exhibition because of
their historic commitment to human rights’ defense. It had been involved supporting protesters,
created a Legal Aid office that supported the political prisoners’ families during the uprisings.
Across from the museum exhibition was a photographic exhibition called “Graphic Memory of
Citizen Resistance in Nicaragua, 2018, Claim for Justice and Democracy” with photojournalist
works from several news outlets including El Nuevo Diario, La Prensa Confidencial and
international photographers. Because of this activist work, the Dean of UCA, Father José
Idiaquez, received death threats multiple times in 2018 and 2019 (Arenas 2020). Since it was
also the only place in Nicaragua where people could protest freely, the University was always
under siege by riot police and paramilitary groups posted in each entrance. The constant
vigilance by police and paramilitaries made the exhibition effort and the security of the attendees
an important concern.

66

Figure 3 Mural of Jeisson Chavarría, before and after defacement. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against
Impunity Archive, 2019.
The museum exhibition had a great reception and impact as it opened to citizens the
possibility of having an experience of grieving, crying and sharing with the members of AMA in
a semi-public space. As mentioned in Chapter 1, all grieving and commemorative spaces were
attacked and destroyed (See Fig.3 for an example). In the museum's exhibition, the potential of
the experience lied in the interaction between people with the victims' families, generating
recognition from the visitors. Throughout the exhibition, the victims, and the pain of their family
members was centered.
The exhibition displayed the materials researched that lived online, in a physical and
sensorial manner. According to the description on its brochure “the virtual and physical tour of
the museum allows visitors to know, through the stories of their families, the students, workers,
artisans, indigenous people, peasants, producers, women and political prisoners who made use of

67
their citizen rights to civic protest and how the State assassinated them with accurate shots from
weapons of war with combined police and para-police forces” (Museo de la Memoria 2019).
This chapter will begin with the theoretical framework of affect theory, to think along
with the elements of the exhibition, as well as the performance of the families of the victims and
visitors describing and analyzing the role and effects of the components. While Chapter 1
dwelled on the practices the organization made to exteriorize and archive the testimonies,
experiences and archives, this section goes into detail into the sharing and communication of the
emotional memories, represented in the absences of the victims and the demand for justice from
their family members.
Affect, sensory memory, and emotional communities
Patricia Clough in her book the Affective turn, makes the claim that for the scholars
presented in her compilation “affect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be
affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect,
such that affection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive—that is, aliveness or vitality”
(Clough and Halley 2007, 2). Affect is the elusive concept that allows a focus on the body,
external and internal intensity and emotions. I argue that the affective registers of the
insurrection can be called back in tandem by the imagery and the memory objects of the victims
and the performance of people in the museum creating a “locative space of memory”. For me
this locative space of memory connects memory with the surroundings, stories and objects,
creating memorializing contexts. The maps and artifacts allow to recall the disproportionate
character of the politically motivated violence that most of the audience members witnessed, and
the participation of the families invited the audience to confront together the institutional
procedures that reproduce the violence. I argue that there is a memory transmission in space, but

68
not in a prosthetic sense (Landsberg 2004) but in the sense of activating what has been blocked
in order to continue living. Calling these memories back allows them to make sense of it. Cathy
Caruth states that traumatic events are never experienced or assimilated fully in time “but only
belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it”(Caruth 1995, 4). In a sense,
we block and bury certain events and have to excavate them to make them accessible to our
consciousness. In the upcoming section, I delineate how the relationship between art,
representation, affect and sensation has been theorized to move further into the collective
sociality produced in the museum. Secondly, I focus on how different authors have theorized the
role of affect and emotions as embodied, that are able to shape social settings, communities and
publics, and that can actually call these groups to socio-political resistance.
Affective and sensorial memory
Susannah Radstone, describing Benjamin’s conceptualization of memory, talks about
how “historical activity imprints on the mind as a knife leaves its scratches on a tin plate”
(Radstone and Hodgkin 2003, 8). In Benjamin’s thinking about memory, the traces of activities
of previous generations are "ready to burst out and scatter the fragile consensus of the present”
(Radstone and Hodgkin 2003, 8), but they are sometimes repressed by the society in which they
are embedded. “These (repressed) traces are remembered, for instance in the body’s ritual
movements in dance.” If these traces remain hidden… “[it] is due to civilization’s repression of
the links between traces and social activities – links that might sunder the hold of particular
power relations” (Clough and Halley 2007, 8). Here Benjamin highlights the role of the body in
the activation of memory. As I will describe later, the historical traces of activities are material,
spatial, social and political.

69
The possibility of art or an aesthetic experience activating the memory’s traces is what
concerns me in the beginning of this section. Jill Bennet (2003) follows Gilles Deleuze to discuss
the transmission of traumatic affect through photographic practices. She suggests the possibility
of artworks to evoke an affective experience “of being a spectator of one’s own feelings”
(Bennett 2003, 28). For her, this type of somatic experience, is no longer what we know as
“representation,” since traumatic experiences and memories resist such processing: “The
imagery of traumatic memory deals not simply with a past event, or with the objects of memory,
but with the present experience of memory. It therefore calls for a theorization of the dynamic in
which the work is both produced and received – a theory, in other words, of affect” (Bennett
2003, 28).
Bennet proposes what she calls “sense memory”, which operates through the body
‘‘seeing truth” rather than “thinking truth”, registering the pain of memory as it is directly
experienced, and communicating at a level of bodily affect. For her, this is a contingent and
culturally situated, and motivated practice that aims to constitute a subjective language, of
affective and emotional processes, linked to social histories that requires framing against a
backdrop of cultural knowledge. She thinks along Deleuze’s concept of the “encountered sign”
(Deleuze, 1972 as cited by Bennett), “which he distinguishes from a recognized object insofar as
it can only be felt or sensed” (Feldman 2004, 164). For her, the importance of this lies in the
linking of “the affective actions of the image with a thinking process without asserting the
primacy of either the affective experience (sense memory) or representation (common memory)”
(Bennett 2003, 28). The combination of both is the experience that is felt and seen. Its poetics
“involve not so much speaking of but speaking out of a particular memory or experience – in
other words, speaking from the body sustaining sensation” (Bennett, 2003, p. 33).

70
For her, art that mobilizes sense memory does not have to represent “the horrific scene,
the graphic spectacle of violence”, but the physical imprint of the ordeal of violence: “a
(compromised and compromising) position to see from” (Bennett, 2003, p. 33). It does not make
a claim to represent the original cause of the trauma, but to enact the state or experience of post-
traumatic memory. In the case of the museum, the collection of the victims’ objects, which will
be described later in the chapter, have the trace of the victims’ life in their choices that portray
their interests and dreams as well their relationships to other communities. They also index the
family’s experience of going to the victims' empty rooms to collect their objects, once they were
no longer there, and the lives they have had to live without these family members. From the
point of view of the victims’ family, which is the main subject of the exhibition, the sense
memory is sustaining the sensation of loss of a loved one, after surviving extreme violence.
Bodies, affect and space
How can the transmission of affect and emotions, through speech and performative acts
create both a community of feelings, as well as a political community with an objective? In this
bonding, the group transmitting their feelings, have to be recognized by a witness willing to join
them. Allan Feldman talks about the relationship created when the victim gives the “naked
truth”—unadorned testimony and discourse in which events and actors are allowed to speak for
themselves without ornamentation or mediation. The witnesses that listen to these testimonies
and recognize them are beneficiaries in the complex dynamic in which the audiences’ humanity
is ratified by being affected. Feldman citing Adorno talks about the relationship between the
response of the subject and its own subjectivity: “The subject is lifeless except when it is able to
shudder in response to the total spell…Without shudder, consciousness is trapped in reification.

71
Shudder is a kind of premonition of subjectivity, a sense of being touched by the other"
(Feldman 2004, 176)
Yasmeen Arif argues that “affect plays an analytical role in showing how its socialization
in conditions of suffering make possible emotional arenas of social connectivity...that underline
experience and representation in the afterlife” (Arif 2016, 18). For her, pain, suffering, loss and
grief alongside sympathy and compassion produce theaters of passion in which human suffering
can be recognized and affirmed. In this case, emotions can be read as “social expressions'' that
create affective relationalities. She states that what organizes the suffering is the pathos, “the
indestructible, but quite gossamer web that incessantly proliferates ever growing fractals of
relations, connections, experiences and eventually strategies, institutions and mechanisms that
constitute the social of the afterlife” (Arif 2016, 20). These articulations, that for her have a
dramaturgical character, can create political and strategic communities that rearrange the society;
they “make populations affectively recognizable, narrate gendered experiences all within or
beyond given territoriality of locality, nation or trans-nation” (Arif 2016, 20).
Furthermore, other scholars have stated the intentionality that activists can have in both
portraying pain and making sense of these emotions for their cause and motivations. Scholars
from Colombia, such as the anthropologist Myriam Jimeno use the term “emotional
communities'' for analyzing the ways in which emotions are embodied and publicly expressed,
from performative actions as a type of cultural policy to reach broader audiences (Macleod and
Marinis 2019, 14). For Macleod and Marinis, the process of narrating to another, witnessing for
another, produces a suffering experience, and achieves that the other identifies in that suffering
through a story, a narrative. Sometimes it is a scenic narrative, sometimes it is a ritual narrative,
sometimes it is a political narrative. For me, it could be all of them at once. What they argue is

72
that this political narrative takes on a real effect when it builds emotional community (Macleod
and Marinis 2019, 14). When pain is not “particularized on the victim”, but is extended to an
audience willing to create a political bond, but not just “momentary compassion”, instead they
help reivindicative strategies in the search for justice, truth and reparations.
Similarly, but giving a more gendered perspective, Seremetakis's (1991) study looks to
communities of women organized around social pain as a strategy of resistance in Mani, Greece,
in which the manipulation of pain can create a rupture between the embodied self and dominant
institutions: “Here embodied and expressive pain is not a debilitating blockage or disability of
traumatization, but rather a cultural tool for collectivizing truth claims, while antiphonal response
is an active recording and historicization of the presence, pain, and speech of the witness”
(Seremetakis 1991, 176). She suggests that such emotional, experiential and semiotic
configurations dramatize the dissonance between self, the collective and the society and are
integral to the cultural construction of truth vis a vis the social order. Such communities of
shared emotional inference and reference correspond to Bauman’s (1977 as cited by Seremakis,
1991) notion of performance spaces as disruptive and disjunctive and as alternative social
structures within or at the margins of a social structure.
Deborah Gould discussing ACT Up Aids Activism in the United States, also discusses
how affect can be a force in social change and social movements since its intensity can make
people “feel the need to change” and social movements make sense of these affective states,
guiding the movements’ feelings and discourses. The tension between dominant accounts of
what is and what might be, on the one hand, and lived experience that contradicts those accounts,
and on the other, is not always consciously understood; rather, it is often experience “at the very
edge of semantic availability” felt as “an unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency” (Gould

73
2009, 31–34). These feelings can be translated by social movements, as in this case the victims’
families’ organization and our demand for truth and justice. Movements can “provide a language
for people’s affective states as well as pedagogy of sorts regarding what and how to feel and
what to do in light of those feelings” (Gould 2009, 28).
During the popular uprisings many emotions were in place, since disruptive events create
legitimate spectacles of emotion. Because of the common misdirected relationship of irrationality
and emotions, AMA women in public appearances usually did not display grief, they displayed
anger. In the case of the museum, they gave themselves and others the opportunity to be
vulnerable, to grieve and cry in public. The emotional community of shared pain the mothers
and young family members present in the exhibition opened the space up to gather more people
that had an affinity with the cause in a double movement of recognition: the audience recognized
the families as grieving and suffering subjects, as well as being recognized at the same time by
the families as suffering subjects that lived the same political terror. In a sense these shared pains
became politicized through its exteriorization and articulation around a common demand for
justice.
Their bodies came together to create political affinities in a public space through a
display of embodied vulnerability, similar to the politicization that takes place in marches and
rallies, but centered in emotions of grief and pain. In what follows, I will show how both
movements took place during the exhibition of the museum, the activation of sensory memory
through the observation of the collective maps, photographs and memory artifacts, as well as the
creation of a political and affective community through sharing experiences of embodied pain
and grief, as well as demands for justice and reparations.

74
Collective mapping, soundscapes and stitches
“Memories are always attached to, or inherent in places; place is the house of memory and
memory is the house of place in the soul.”
—(Perlman 1988).

The exhibition consists of materials displayed in three rooms with different components.
The first room presents the audience the context of the repression and the extent of the massacres
perpetrated by the government by showcasing the list of victims’ names, the locations in which
they were killed with the aid of collective and individual maps, and a section of embroideries for
memory made by the family members. I argue that some of the elements were taken from the
street into an exhibition space, placing the audience/visitor into the locative space of memory.
Locative denotes the place where things occurred. For example, individual maps that were
collectivized by departamental territories allowed people to memorialize main events that
happened in each city anchored in city spaces, with the aid of illustrations. It became an
imaginary city walk that was not possible to make on site because of the repression. The
embroideries created by the families during the temporary exhibition transformed the memories
of their loved ones into a gesture of love and community. I compare it with other embroidery for
memory initiatives in countries such as El Salvador, Chile and Mexico.
For this staging of the museum exhibition, 20 young family members of AMA were
trained and became docents of the museum to give guided tours to the visitors of the site. They
were called “Museum Ambassadors” and used their own testimonies to illustrate some of the
events. The 15 young ambassadors of the museum were between 16-30 years old, men and
women with varied higher education. Some are finishing high school and others are college
students and professionals. They are all family members affiliated with AMA: brothers, cousins
and nephews of victims. From the first moment, they expressed commitment to becoming trained

75
in human rights (which we collectively made those opportunities available through partnerships
with the Center for Justice and International Law CEJIL) and actively participated in the
construction of the memory of their relatives. They received an immersive workshop to develop
skills to appropriate the objectives of the AMA and the museum and take guided tours and learn
the stories of the victims to pass them on to visitors. They received and gave guided visits to
multiple political, social and cultural personalities, teams of human rights defenders, students
from human rights graduate classes, and the general public. The inclusion of young family
members, included them as subjects of the protests, as in many cases were victims and survivors
of the massacres.
When you entered the exhibition, the first thing that immersed you in the experience was
a soundscape created by a group of artists. It started with guitar strings of a popularized song by
Jandir Rodriguez, combined with the folkloric song called “La Danza Negra” (trans. The Black
Dance) played in marimba. The Marimba is a percussion instrument similar to the xylophone,
which is originally from Africa, and part of the Nicaraguan folklore soundscape, specially from
the department of Masaya. La Danza Negra was played in multiple funerary processions of the
victims of Masaya. The marimbas were also common elements in the protest marches. The
soundscape included sounds of protest and the calling of the names of those that had been killed.
In some cases, visitors wondered if a small protest was coming towards the museum as they
listened to the voices yelling justice from afar.
In the first room on the right side of the building was a folding screen in which the
visitors could read was the name, age, date of birth and date of death of the 75 victims presented
in the museum. Protesters would mark the list of victims as a practice in demonstrations and on
the streets. In other cases they would enact a roll call of the victims' names and subsequently

76
responded with ¡Presente!, what could be considered “as a war cry in the face of nullification”
(D. Taylor 2020, 4). This was re-enacted by student leader Madeleine Caracas and a group of
university students in front of President Daniel Ortega and his wife Vice-President Rosario
Murillo in a pivotal and emotional moment on the first day of the National Dialogue in 2018.
The list presented in the museum room was accompanied with a legend “They were citizens,
students, workers, artisans, indigenous, peasants, producers, women and political prisoners!”.
This was made in response to the hate discourse against protesters that spokesperson and Vice
President Rosario Murillo used to dehumanize them, naming them as “delinquents”, “vandals”,
“vendepatrias” (countrysellers), traitors and more.
On the other side of the folding screen visitors could see the process of the research of the
museum with a brief description. It stated the museum’s objectives, the research process and a
quote by AMA’s president Francys Valdivia “AMA y No Olvida (Love and do not Forget) is an
expression of resistance in itself, the voice and the memory of those who are absent are reborn
here”.
On a big monitor, a video loop that presented the name of the victim, the individual
traced maps drawn by families that represented the events of their killings, next to the GIS
created map. On each wall of the room the visitors could see hanging a series of collective maps
of six territories, the ones that had more presence of families and heavier repression, Managua,
Masaya, Carazo, León, Estelí, and Chinandega. Each one of them had six illustrations that
represented pivotal moments of the testimonies of the victims. Even though some cities
portrayed similar events, some were very specific to their location. In a similar fashion of the
events that happened, the illustrations combined moments of joy and acts of rebellion and
solidarity, with heavy repression and the military operations deployed by the government. It also

77
presented a legend on the bottom that noted where the attacks were registered and where in the
maps the victims had been killed. Some of the events represented were the following:

78

79

80

81
Figure 4 Collective Maps by territory with illustrations. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity
Archive, 2019.
Managua (capital of Nicaragua), presented the two main marches, to the Polytechnic
University that was occupied by students and the Mothers March on May 30th. An illustration
presented the attack to the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) where two
students were killed and another presented a series of cruxes that represented the victims of the
repression, that had been removed by the government in a main roundabout called Jean Paul
Genie, named after a previous victim of state violence (Del Cid 2018).
From Masaya, the illustrations presented some of the forms of resistance people enacted,
such as changing the flags of Sandinista Monuments and adding the white and blue flag of the
country, people with different identities in the barricades sending messages to the Police
Commissioner who was trenched in the police station that had become a social media viral news,
the church of San Miguel that became a makeshift medical center. Two traumatic events
represented were the slingshot that was left by Marcelo Mayorga, one of the prominent leaders
that was killed on the street, and the burials of some of the victims that placed their folkloric
masks and the country’s flag on top of the coffins.
Similar images were presented in each city in which you could see images of the
paramilitaries taken over the streets in the “Operation Clean Up”, and taking over health
facilities. In Leon, an illustration of the cruxes that were erected in The Alacran Corner'', in the
indigenous neighborhood of Subtiava. Here was “the last barricade was crushed with excessive
and lethal force by the Ortega in León” (Torres 2019). In Chinandega, Jose Manuel Berrios,
(another victim) was represented taking over the monument to the worker and hanging a flag. An
illustration showed when the paramilitaries took over the departmental clinic called AMOCSA.

82
In Estelí, it also showed marches (in April and May 30
th
) and illustrated how the
paramilitaries were seen coming out of a state-owned building, the tax collection building and
moments in which the paramilitaries were outside the Adventist Hospital. In Carazo,
paramilitaries were shown when they took over the Public University of Jinotepe (FAREM), and
use of state-owned bulldozers and front loaders to remove the barricades. According to José
Manuel Narvaez’ testimony, one of the things that hurt him the most, was that the body of his
son José Manuel Narvaez (Chema) was thrown into one of these machines with bricks and
dirt. Another dramatic moment that was presented was when mothers of the victims of Carazo
were searching for the body of their children with white flags during the military operation.
The memories of places included the violence perpetrated by government forces, the
search of the families of victims for their bodies, intertwined with communities’ forms of
resistance, that include barricades, as well as other forms of memorialization such as public altars
and cruxes that are no longer there, because the government violently removed them. These
collective maps allowed the audience to create a common route in memory spaces, some known
by the visitors, but that could not be visited in person to see them because of the repression. As
Diana Taylor states talking about Villa Grimaldi in Chile “people can remember certain events
by associating them with place. Through the recorrido, the act of walking, the body remembers”
(D. Taylor 2020, 188). If the possibility to walk as a group existed, the group could have noticed
the traces of the resistance, and still the ongoing repression forces posted in every possible space
of congregation. The maps grounded and recreated the practices and the bodily movements that
the communities created around the resistance, the hiding, the running and the mourning. Each
visitor traced their own form of memorialization in this imaginary public space. The museum

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docents who participated in the protests used their own testimonies of their experiences or the
experiences of their relatives to illustrate some of the events.
Anthropologist Pilar Riaño, in her study of how youth in Colombia make sense and cope
with political violence to construct themselves makes the case for the strong articulation between
memory and territory: places that serve as triggers of memories, whether it is place (the barrio,
the street, the park, the corner store), and practices of memory and oral history which create
connections between places. For her “attention to memory as an experienced, situated and sensed
practice is fundamental” (Riaño-Alcalá 2011, 1:12). In this case, this first area of the exhibition
delves into the shared experiences of the visitors, where they were touched and could identify
one of the scenes presented in the illustrations. The following ones share an intimacy with the
experiences of the family members of AMA.

Bordo letras, bordo historias.
te bordo y a ti me bordo, paisano muerto...

Embroidering letters, embroidering stories
I embroider you and myself together, fellow dead country men
Beatriz Eugenia Andrade Iturribarría

The embroidery section was a presentation of the products made from a workshop for
“embroidery for memory” made by family members of AMA as a gesture to maintain their
memory alive. This was led by Hojita de Agua Dulce, a Nicaraguan embroidery artist. For four
weeks 20 members of AMA would gather in this room to design and create their embroidery
pieces. The group was heterogeneous with both fathers and mothers of the victims participating
as well as younger family members and some of the museum ambassadors also participated. We
were able to share as a group and talk about their relatives among themselves in an intimate way.

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At some point, we even received some visitors while they were in the workshop, combining the
tour inside the museum with the family members of AMA showing their work in progress.

Figure 5 Photograph of embroidery workshops with members of AMA. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory
Against Impunity Archive, 2019.
Some of the images of the embroideries contained the names of the victims, iconic
images that represented them such as their garments (political prisoner uniform), bandanas, hat
and mortar, molotov cocktails, the Nicaraguan flag. My mom and I embroidered together plants
and trees that both symbolized the fire of the insurrection as well as how memory is a seed that
grows. In an opening event of this small exhibition wing of the museum, family members
described their process of creation. One of the mothers stated that the space allowed them to
work and express their pain: “My name is Francisca Machado. I am the mother Franco Valdivia,

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a student murdered in Estelí on April 20. For me this is a space to be able to express our pain and
also to try to cope with this manual therapy", said Machado.

Figure 6 Photographs of embroideries for memory results of workshop. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory
Against Impunity Archive, 2019.
The embroideries motifs connected with the multimodal history of each one of the
victims in the rest of the exhibition. For example, Carlos Pavón, father of Richard Pavon
embroidered drum sticks, because Richard played in the marching band of his high school and in
the following room of objects his drumsticks were on display. He stated “it is a complicated
experience. On the one hand it is painful because we know that he is no longer with us and it
hurts us to remember him in this way, but it is also nice to see how we are manually inspired by
embroidery and his things. I am a father and I feel the pain of my son,” says. In his case, and in

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the case of many fathers of AMA, they were able to express their emotions, which is generally
not accepted in Nicaragua for men to be “emotionally affected”.
Embroidery has been used as a storytelling and writing form for centuries, and people use
the verb tejiendo, “embroidering” or “weaving” memory when talking about memory initiatives,
because they stitch together individual memories into a collective one. There are various
examples of political and popular art made in embroideries from Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile,
and many others. In the 1970s and ’80s in Chile, women created bright embroideries called
arpilleras, as an act of resistance against Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The
arpilleras, which memorialized family members “disappeared” by the regime, were so
threatening to the government that it became a crime to own one. In El Salvador, refugees from
violence have told their stories in testimonial embroideries during the civil war.
Nowadays, many activist groups gather and create collective exhibitions of
embroideries in public space. These exhibitions re-signify the embroidery practice, which has
been known as a feminine and private activity, into a public, collective and political expression
activity. In the cases I will describe, these practices allow a reflection about human rights, the
bodies, memory and ways of creatively visualizing the pain caused by the absence of victims of
violence. Examples of contemporary projects are Bordados por la Paz y la Memoria
(Embroideries for Peace and Memory), Fuentes Rojas (Red Fountains) and Vivas en la Memoria
(Alive in Memory) all of them from Mexico and with some international chapters. In most of
these cases are the activists who are trying to propose a symbolic approach to each of the
personal tragedies that are only known as spectacles through the media. Embroideries for Peace
and Fuentes Rojas proposed actions that consisted of embroidering handkerchiefs with the name
or description of those 50,000 dead in the war against drugs. One of their members Ivelin Meza,

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stated “We embroidered the construction of a memorial that crosses the whole country”
(Colectivos Bordados por la paz 2014).
Vivas en la Memoria, a Mexican collective that uses embroideries to recuperate the
memories of those women killed by femicide. Alí Aguilera, one of her members narrates how
they started this process: “we began to embroider the femicides to have a handkerchief where
their story is narrated. Told from a different place than from the story told by the media, the
ministries of investigation, the State. By uniting all these handkerchiefs, putting them together,
we can start thinking that the murder of girls and women are not an isolated case. In this way we
systematize them in the first person and leave a trace that they were murdered and that they exist
and that they existed” (Aguilera 2020). Embroidery is a careful, caring and tender experience,
and when done in collective it can serve to counter violence. The stitching and stitches united the
members of AMA in conversation and further politicization, and united also their relationship
with their children’s interest, becoming inspired by them and sharing their emotions and
experiences in public.
Parents participating in the embroidery workshops and the exhibition "Embroidering
Memory" demonstrates an emotional involvement with their children's memories through
creative expressions. Hilgert and List discuss AMA's possibility of "mobilizing
motherhood"(List and Hilgert 2018, 25). They refer to "thinking maternally," which means
preserving and acknowledging the fragility of life, in a necropolitical state, being maternx
becomes articulation of resistance. To be maternx is to witness life; it is to externalize pain and
trauma to demand justice (2018, p. 25). It is worth reflecting on whether expanding motherhood
subverts traditional gender roles, or if at least subverts the models of hegemonic masculinity
exercised in Nicaragua.

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Photographic Installation: an animated demand in time
The second room, which was the center room, presents the audience the pain and absence
the victims have left in their homes and families through the portraits demanding justice and
through the presentation of what we denominated “memory objects” of the victims on top of
barricades/altars. In the entrance of the room, a backward flag of the country was posted on the
right-side gesturing protest and disobedience against the government. The photo installation
allowed people to have an intimate moment surrounded by the victims' family portraits that are
missing a member, in a sense a mutilated family, that looked at the audience asking them to join
them in their struggle.
Seventy-two black and white photographs of each family affiliated to AMA that demand
justice holding a picture of their victim. They were taken on analog film, printed at 18” by 12”
dimensions on both sides and hung from the ceiling with nylon on different heights, with a small
black sachet full of sand holding them to the ground. Sergio Ramirez, laureate writer wrote this
description about the installation: “the photographs suspended by threads that hang from the
ceiling move slightly, like the leaves of a tree blown by the breeze. They are photos that have a
photo. Sometimes single mothers, a grandmother, a married couple, a married couple and their
children hold with loving care the photograph of their relatives, teenagers and boys fallen under
the bullets in the fateful year of 2018” (Ramírez 2020).

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Figure 7 Photograph of installation temporary exhibition Institute for History of Nicaragua and Central America,
Central American University, Managua, Nicaragua. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity
Archive, 2019.
The victims’ names, the family members’ names and relationship to the victim was
written in the description of the image. As described by Ramírez, in the pictures, sometimes they
were holding a photograph, sometimes grabbed from their Facebook profiles and printed, others
made their own posters with messages like “we will never forget you” or others had printed
photographs of milestones in their lives, in other cases they were holding their cellphones with
their images. Some families hold the possessions of the victims in the photo, like the case of
Dodanim Castilblanco, who was a champion in Taekwondo and his family holds his medals and
trophies (see Fig.8). Some also wore t-shirts with the faces of the victims printed on them. In
some cases, those who were afraid to show their faces, photographs of their hands holding the
pictures were placed instead. In one case the family member didn’t have a photo of their family
member. They used their written name instead. Because in some cases they only had printed

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photos of the victims when they were little, this relationship also plays with time, the time when
they were babies, when they had more time of their lives ahead.

Figure 8 Portrait demanding Justice. Family Dodanim Jared Castilblanco Blandón AMA y No Olvida, Museum of
Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019.
The different “types” of families that exist in Nicaragua was always present during the
research of the museum, in the sense that many of the victims had only a mother as family,
sometimes a grandmother, because the mother had to migrate to other countries to provide for
their children (specially to Costa Rica). In other cases, it was only their children who were
willing to organize around justice. According to Marianne Hirsch, family photos walk the line
between what the family aims to be and what it really is (Hirsch 1997, 11). In the same direction,
Fortuny states that family photos are the place where the intersection between public and private
history, between individual or group memories and social history is traced (Fortuny 2014). The
public aspect of these family portraits shows the mutilated family, that lacks a member, that

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becomes a document in the archive, a testimony that states visually “this is my missing son” and
an animated action that states “I demand justice for him”. In the following I will delve into these
photographs and I will introduce the collective aspect of this as being installed in a spatial
exhibition in which people can walk among and get close to them.
Daniella Wurst in her investigation of memory practices and photography in Argentina,
Chile and Peru, states that “similar to wearing a portrait in jewelry or clothes, the gesture of
holding a photograph within a photograph is a tradition that began in the XIX century that
answers the need to include the virtual presence of those absent, as if a symbolic union can be
achieved”. The new portrait created aims to “stand against the second death of not being
remembered, but also includes those who remember in the same temporal and visual plane”
(Wurst 2019, 59). For Ileana Rodriguez, this procedure articulates the visible and occult, but
touches on the “tenderness of family affection” (Rodríguez 2020, 33), expressed as a request of
“bring them back”.
The photo of the families with their victims makes a double emphasis on the victim, and
in the lives left behind in their absence, who have to survive their absences on a daily basis with
dignity. I have stated that the heart of the exhibition is the strength and resilience of the families
represented in these portraits. The labor of representing the dignity and humanity of the victims,
entails documenting their families’ efforts and struggles as well. By including them in the
exhibition it gives the victims’ family relevance, acknowledging their story and identity of their
own, besides their condition of family of victims/ and victims subjects of rights themselves. This
mode of dignified representation also challenges previous depictions of racialized victims of
violence in Nicaragua, for example from the indigenous and afro-descendent populations of the
Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua that were victims of the Contra Civil War, were historically and

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often represented as subaltern and impoverished. In a forthcoming article about Photography and
communities of mourning, I argue that this previous gaze and representation forms, inflicted by
miserabilism (Cusicanqui Rivera 2015), is one that depoliticizes the subjects, leaving them
without a voice (Yang, Selejan, and Camaleoni Forthcoming).
Wurst also describes Sebastian Moreno’s documentary, La ciudad de los fotógrafos, 2006
in which Claudio Pérez, one of the founding members of the Association of Independent
Photographers (AFI), searches through all of the lists and memorials of the disappeared in Chile,
in order to create a complete visual archive of every detained-disappeared with the picture of
their family member victim of state terrorism. She states “the photographs of his search and the
archive he attempts to construct do not highlight death, but instead aims to produce an animated
memory against the possible effacement and oblivion present in being considered just a list of
victims” (Wurst 2019, 59). I argue that the animation of memory is inscribed more clearly in the
demand for Justice the family members pose while looking at the camera that travels into the
present and connects with the future.
While demonstrating their bravery and love for their loved one the victims’ families
make a concrete relationship with the spectator. Their intense look makes the spectators
understand that they are bravely transmitting a message of “standing” against the impunity and
oblivion the government wants to install. Ariella Azoulay has pointed out “the photographed
subjects’ act of addressing the spectator” (Azoulay 2008, 19) as a new “virtual” political
community created by the photograph. In this case, the community addressed by members of
AMA, include Nicaraguan citizens and foreigners visiting the museum, and maybe (and very
likely) by the people in government or the killer of their family member, who think the members
of AMA as non-citizens.

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Figure 9 Photographic installation temporary exhibition Institute for History of Nicaragua and Central America,
view from above. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2019.

Seen as a whole, the installation represented a collective of people demanding justice,
collectivizing their plea and presence visually. To be able to walk among them meant to be in
proximity and faced by their demand and grievance. The exhibition states, “in this moment in
time these 75 families are still demanding justice without impunity in this country”. It is a
performance that already took place on the streets and is no longer possible to do and it travels
into the future. This immersive quality of the installation is different from the collective mural
with photo IDs used by family victims such as las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, that “functions as
markers, identifying an entire movement” (D. Taylor 1997, 159). In the case of the AMA
museum, we allowed for the audience to walk among us, with us, next to us. Lauren Berlant
states that intimacy “involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about

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both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way” (Berlant 1998, 281). Both the
sharing with the families as well as the symbolic encounter with all the organization, creates
spaces through intimate practices, that allow for people to imagine the horizon of justice
together. In her visual ethnography Ludmila da Silva Catela traces the use of photography in
three different realms: its ritualistic use in the domestic space, it's political use in the urban space
of protests, and its institutional use in the cultural memory realm (publications, exhibitions, and
museums) (Da Silva Catela 2009). This work dilutes the realms, to place what happened in the
streets and in the home of the victims in the cultural memory realm creating a in between ness,
that challenges the state, the justice system and the nation as a whole.
Barricades, counter monuments and objects of memory
“This knowing-just-what-to-do around barricades, even without any prior experience, is
something of a mystery.”
(BaŞak 2016, 194)
In the main room, barricades which were elements used as resistance against the
government forces were reinterpreted as altars. The performance and creativity of putting up
barricades was vivid during the 2018 uprisings. Old women and children erected barricades in
the barrios of Nicaragua. The same barricades were erected in 1979 during the popular uprising
against the Somoza dictatorship. The dictator’s company sold the adoquines (a type of octagonal
prism-shaped cobblestone) that people later ripped out of the streets to use as barricades).
Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan poet has a poem called Barricada about the Nicaraguan
Insurrection in 1979 talking about how it was “everyone’s job, the people united”, “children
hauling cobblestones, the ones who brought coffee to the boys at the barricades...The truth is that
we all put paving stones on the great barricade” (My translation). Barricades can be framed as
both tactics of collective memory and collective creativity and action.

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Talking about the Gezi Barricades, BaŞak Ertür states that they “embody the ways in
which something of a structure emerges when bodies that are moved by or are beside themselves
with indignation, desire, grief, or desperation act in concert (BaŞak 2016, 235).” The barricades
in Nicaragua happened in the second phase of the repression, when the whole country was in
civil disobedience. By June 14th, across the country there were 140 tranques (major roadblocks)
between cities and 720 barricades inside each neighborhood. Similar to Gezi, the people that
defended and articulated around the barricades were a combination of “the dispossessed and
disenfranchised kids—predominantly male, but there were also young women present”(BaŞak
2016, 240). Artists also invited to do “cultural tranques”, taking music, poetry and dance to these
spaces.
People decorated barricades as altars with flags, candles, flowers, images of saints,
especially the Virgin Mary, messages of non-rendition, as Fig.10 shows. In most cases, people
could pass the barricades, and during burials the coffin had to pass the barricades too. Even
though they were great testimony to collective labor and memory of resistance, they represented
the vulnerability “with and despite which the actual bodies in resistance stood against police
violence” (BaŞak 2016, 242). Many victims died near barricades. For example, Sandor Dolmus,
a 15-year old victim from León was killed putting a barricade in the middle of an afternoon near
his house.

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Figure 10 Photographs of barricades as altars. ABC Stereo News Facebook Page Estelí, 2018
On the exhibition floor, five barricades representing each territory were erected gallery
plinths to hold the memory objects the families lend to the museum. Around 200 objects that
include the masks that they use to face police including a Guy Fawkes one, shoes, caps, sport
shirts, folkloric dancer shirts, T-shirts of the brotherhood of San Jeronimo (a saint patron of
Masaya) chef, graduation robes, and churchly custom, teddy bear, socks when they were babies,
tools, games, backpacks, trophies, medals, instruments, watches, rosaries, diplomas, calculators,
engineering tools, rulers, school ids and regular ids, guitar, flute, harmonic, guiro, glasses. The

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Misérables book, helmets, drawings, band playing, marbles and slingshots that were used to
confront police. These highly symbolic and emotional personal objects that complement the
museum experience with the concept of the altar. They also demonstrate the contradictions with
the narrative of the regime. As mentioned above, the government tried to dehumanize the victims
to divide and polarize the country.

Figure 11 Collective altar of Managua with memory objects by territory. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory
Against Impunity Archive, 2019.
Each territory ensemble had its own personality, highlighting the personality of the victims
represented, even though all of them were very diverse. They showed the range of interests the
victims had. For example, Carazo was predominantly instruments, and students’ belongings.
Similar to Estelí, that many of the victims were students, their belongings represented the objects
that people use to go to the university. Masaya represented its folkloric character by showing a
folkloric dress and masks. Managua was diverse including tools, protest materials and other

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belongings as shown in Fig. 11. Next to each object plaques described what the object meant to
the victim. These are some examples of the descriptions of the objects:
“This robe represents his wish to be a veterinarian doctor” Daniel Josias Reyes
“These are the electrical tools in which he was jumpstarting his future” Hammer Salinas
“He used this to play in his school marching band” Richard Pavon
“When Alvaro learned TaeKwonDo he was 12 and he wanted to defend himself, be an athlete
and be in shape” Alvaro Conrado
“The termometer is part of the kit he was gathering to create his AgroIndustrial lab, one of his
dreams” Dodanim Castilblanco
These plaques articulate the future their families saw they had and were communicated
by them in the workshops. The objects were animated by the families’ stories on the floor of the
exhibition. For example, Alejandro Ochoa father of Alejandro Ochoa played the harmonic of his
son and Alvaro Conrado would take Alvarito’s skateboard and play with it. The closeness to the
objects showed to the audience that they weren’t guerrilla fighters living in clandestine, they
were young people trying to fulfill their dreams. The use of the barricades that are not durable,
and eventually were taken down violently by the government, next to the objects of these young
people “defy monumental premises of representation, closure, fixity, stasis, continuity,
durability, pristineness... embodying something of the ecstasy of resistance” (BaŞak 2016, 265).
A reference of this object collection is “La Piel de la Memoria” (The Skin Of Memory)”,
a project by Suzanne Lacy and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá. This public art project was situated in Barrio
Antioquia, a community in the middle of Medellin, Colombia. In this neighborhood competed
various memories of loss, stigmatization, and violence as a common experience for multiple
generations. Before the project, an estimated 200 youth have died violently from gang territorial

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battles. Their project focused on the uses of memory workshops to prevent forms of localized
violence. A team of young people interviewed families of victims/survivors of violence to collect
objects loaded with personal memories for display in a temporary museum. The use of the word
“skin of memory” in this project allures to the sensorial, affective and material aspects of
memory. Skin is also fragile, as Lacy states, “when you penetrate that skin, the body is
vulnerable, exposed, revealed and pain results” (Lacy and Riaño-Alcalá 2006). So, this metaphor
indicates that behind the aesthetized collection of memories of this group of people there was
also pain, and that memories are not necessarily always in display, they need to be pierced
through.
This archive creates a counter monumentalization that does not inscribe on “bravery and
revolutionary strength,” but on mourning of the lives that were and the “sustained sensation of
loss” of their family. A puncture of the history of sacrifice and martyrdom that has been
inscribed in the country’s memory of struggle and resistance. The relationship between the
objects, that were both common and used every day with the barricades, that were part of the
disruptive event of the insurrection, could possibly be read with further depth if one knows and
recognizes what happened. I believe they show also the everydayness of the absence and lack of
these families. The noise that is no longer created in the case of the instruments, or the balls that
no longer bounce. But only when thinking in terms of vulnerability that displays the trauma and
the sense memory.
Participatory Witnessing
The participation and unexpected acts of the audience were multiple. After their tour
people usually would raise their fists and ask for justice and join the demand for justice. At the
end this section will describe some of the unexpected “happenings” that were part of the

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exhibition. The encounters between mothers and the visitors that knew or helped their children. I
argue that the participation of family members allowed the participation and political action of
the audience with their bodies with the intent of them to also be the protagonist of the memories
narrated. In that sense the exhibition space had a political profile, transiting from exhibition to a
conceptual space that creates new realities. Other forms of participation are discussed in Chapter
1 and 3 in relation to digital artefacts.
The third room was a room meant for people to reflect, to learn the commitment that
families of victims have to fight for justice and keep their memory alive and to go deeper into the
stories of the victims that were interesting for them. The space had an area that projected the
images of all the victims and a soundscape that presented their families concept of justice and
memory. The altar design was inspired by the rituals and spaces the victims' families created in
their homes and people in the streets, with a photograph, a flag, candles, flowers, and lights.
Many people brought flowers, candles and rocks to the space as offerings creating an ever-
changing landscape of public mourning. See Fig. 12 for illustration.

Figure 12 Mixed Media Altar part of the temporary exhibition, third room. AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory
Against Impunity Archive, 2019.

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This embodied space made clearer the relationship between media, objects and people. The
website became an interactive documentary piece of this larger exhibition and political narrative
in which the audience could go deeper into the individual story of each of the victims going to
the website and listening to the testimony of their relatives. This space also allowed for people to
make sense of all the emotions and affective charge they had just experienced. At the end of the
tour people could take a small souvenir (postcard) of the victim they wish, and many people took
them to their home and made their own altars, replicating the museum’s motif.
Bringing back Feldman’s argument about the witnessing that takes place by the spectators in
the museum-archive of suffering, which he calls “a witnessing at a remove: in controlled
conditions, and within spatial divisions between life and death, viewer and the observed, now
and then” (Feldman 2004, 165). I contrast it with what I call participatory witnessing.
Witnessing, in Haraway’s (Haraway 1988, 167) words, is: seeing; attesting; standing publicly
accountable for, and psychically vulnerable to, one’s visions and representations. Borrowing
from media and design literature about participation I believe in the possibility for a type of
witnessing in which the participants “believe their contribution matters, and feel some degree of
social connection to one another” (Jenkins 2006). Henry Jenkins first used the term
“participatory culture” in Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture contrasting
participation and spectatorship, and describing how fans were no longer only consumers of mass
produced content, but also a creative community that took its raw materials from commercial and
entertainment texts and re-appropriated them as the basis for their own creative culture (Jenkins
2012) He followed Michel de Certeau’s analyses of readers in the Practice of Everyday Life to
discuss the ways those outside of cultural institutions participate in the interpretation and
production of meaning, and showed how fans, who were neglected by Cultural Studies at the

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time, participated in alternative social fan fiction communities of emancipated spectators defined
around notions of equality, reciprocity, sociality and diversity. Huybrechts talks about
participatory projects that have the goal to open up new engagements for participation, pushing
back against a closed artifact, to a re-discussion of its procedural elements, their
interdependencies and a reactivation of some of their virtualities and multiplicities (Huybrechts
et al. 2014). For me this means that participatory witnessing, requires interpretation and the
possibility of continuing the demand to the grievance that is being witnessed. Three vignettes
from the families of the victims and visitors represent better this concept:
Susana López, mother of Gerald Vásquez Lopez, who was a construction technician
student and folklore dancer, known as the dancer of the trenches, and was assassinated on
December 16th, in the attack to the University and the Divine Mercy church stated:
It is painful to share our pain with the people. But I like how people are with us. Many of
them shared spaces with our relatives. When they are with us, they remember that they
shared. The boys of the UNAN, whom I have shared with them, they tell me “mother, the
Chino danced with us, encouraged us, said that we were going to be victorious from the
university, their struggle was to regain university autonomy.

Friends of Gerald made a tribute in the museum singing the national anthem to his clothes in the
museum further ritualizing the space and creating their own space and practices. Tamara
Morazán, sister of Jonathan Morazán, who was killed on May 30th, and ambassador of the
museum also stated in an interview about the museum experience and the possibility of people
supporting the families:
When it was ready to open it was a great impact, the truth is that it caused me a lot of
feelings because I felt like I was in my brother's wake. It became a special corner for us,
but also the feeling the opportunity to tell people that who they really were, to tell them
that what the government states is a lie, that here is his family standing up for them and
talking about them and not only in the personal of Jonathan, but of each one of the
victims. It also helped us get to know the people who carried our brothers, our relatives.
For example, my brother was shot and taken out in the crossfire. I admire the courage of
those kids who did not leave their bodies thrown away and have come here to support us.

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Another visitor stated that they knew the space had a “sensitive load”, but he felt he could
accompany the victims and that their presence was important:
I thought about it when I came, because of the sensitive load that is in the place, I have
just started and it feels that somehow, we can accompany the family with our presence.
You can't forget something that had such a big impact. It is a seed that in the end will
flourish in Nicaragua and that all these people made a sacrifice to try to improve
something that they believed was not right and that it is not fair that they kill you for that.
Several people who came to the museum exhibit and said that “it was the first time I had
a chance to cry”. We had the opportunity to give them the space to recognize their own
emotions. This participatory witnessing is similar to what Diana Taylor theorizes as Presente,
“coming into presence, into ¡Presente!”, means becoming a “who” to one another in spaces that
withhold recognition, and forging spaces of appearance out of spaces of disappearance. The
witnesses enter into what Hannah Arendt calls the “space of appearance”: “the organization of
the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together . . . [whose] true space lies between
people living together for this purpose” (D. Taylor 2020, 46). A participatory witnessing creates
an emotional community that not only lies on the momentary compassion but on a moral and
political commitment. It articulates a political future in which justice will prevail and the
reconfiguration of victims into active instead of passive. Jimeno and Pearce talk about politico-
affective communities, in order to politicize the affects and affective strategies of other memory
activists in Colombia and El Salvador. In a sense what I am trying to do both theoretically and
practically is to include the bodies and the practices of all of those that perform their experiences
to engage others as well as those that are moved. As Diana Taylor defines the repertoire as
“embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all
those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge”(D. Taylor 2003, 19–

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20). I imagine the combination of participatory witnessing and sense and embodied memory
creating other forms of political and resistance repertoire.
Closing of the exhibition, popular intensity and collective intimacy
Three months after the opening, the closing of the exhibition was made in a rush in the
midst of a spike of repression. On November 15th, ten mothers of political prisoners began a
hunger strike in Masaya demanding the freedom of political prisoners. This spiked a systematic
aggression against priests and temples of the Catholic Church, maintaining the police siege in
churches around the country. The government sent shock groups denominated "turbas'' to injure
a group of mothers of political prisoners who started a hunger strike in demand of their children
in the Cathedral of Managua.
Three members of the museum team were arrested when they tried to bring food and
water to the mothers who were on hunger strike for a week without water or electricity in the
Church San Miguel Archangel. They were named the “Band of water carriers”. Between
November and December AMA organized international solidarity with political prisoners’
members of the Museum team, including staging demonstrations in Washington D.C., Mexico
and Costa Rica. For the closing ceremony AMA joined efforts with the mothers of the political
prisoners and gave them a space to denounce their incarceration. The museum allowed for the
witnessing of the pain of both the mothers of mortal victims, as well as for the mothers of
political prisoners. Together they created a larger emotional and political community that
requested both freedom of political prisoners, and justice, truth and reparations as well as the
right to mourn and memory. See Fig 13 for illustration.
I argue that the space allowed for a series of encounters with other victims, artists and
audiences, but even more, it allowed for the further indignation and politicization of the audience

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making sense of the affective charge and creating a larger emotional and political communities.
This larger community points to what Ileana Rodriguez calls “popular intensity”, “the
communion of all with all”, when “the collective tightens into a community, dissolving one into
the multiple” (Rodríguez 2020, 5) in which life itself depends on the feeling of total intimacy
that emerges in those moments of the collective.

Figure 13 Participatory witnessing, audience of the Museum engaged in collective acts of protest

Throughout this chapter, I have moved from the possibility of artworks to evoke an
affective experience of loss after the traumatic massacres of young people, to community
building to demand for justice and freedom. As stated by Bennet, the positioning of sense
memory artworks should not be “speaking of” but ‘speaking out’ a specific point of view. The
point of view of the museum audience moves from protests’ participant (trying to make people
remember the events they lived), to witness (hearing the testimonies of the ambassadors and
family members), to becoming part of an emotional community of mourning (being part of those

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who seek justice) by having intimate moments with the families and the victims' objects. This
sensorial and affective archive creates a counter monumentalization that does not inscribe on
“bravery and revolutionary strength,” but on mourning of the lives that were and the “sustained
sensation of loss” of their families.
The locative space of memory allowed for cross pollination between the private familiar
space, the streets, the exhibition space, and the public space. The reenactment of certain protest
practices (barricade building, saying the names and protesting) serves the purpose of
participatory witnessing as it invites participants to be part of the actions that took place in the
space. Furthermore, there is an open possibility for visitors also to be laborers of memory (as
they share their own experience) and co-creators as they leave their own marks on the space. All
participants are framed as possible allies, people who remember, as well as people who will fight
together for justice. I argue that the combination of the documentation of violence, the sharing of
the sense memory of loss, memorializing the lives of the victims, and the intimacy of the shared
space among mourners allowed for the multiple “happenings” of witnessing that diluted the line
between visitors and activists.
I tried to create a participatory art experience that is ethical as it works with victims of
state violence and centers them, as well as political in that it confronts some of the strategies of
denial of the humanity of the victims by the regime. Claire Bishop talking about participatory art
practices states that the risk factor of change materializes the “artistic work” of the piece (Bishop
2012), in which it becomes a non-scripted or directed reality – rather than in the ethical black-
and-white of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ collaboration. I am interested in the ethics of working with
collectives, while I am also concerned with what energizes collectivities and points critically to
power, as well as with how to push the boundaries of what is possible.

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Finally, the mothers and families as shown in the vignettes have expressed that the
Museum has been one of the most important accomplishments of the Association in its struggle
against impunity. They have continued affirming the existence of victims as subjects of rights,
and bearers of their stories, against the regime's dehumanization and violence. Their lives did not
end in their absence as they will live in their memories. They have also shown the possibility of
creating larger political and emotional communities based on an appreciation and caring for the
lives of our loved ones.

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CHAPTER 3: VIRTUAL EXPERIENCES IN THE FACE OF REPRESSION
“Rituals anchor the community in the body.”
Byung-Chul Han (Han 2020)

After the exhibition, the project has gone digital again to continue our work. I created the
Interactive Art Book AMA Constructing Memory
26
with the intention of translating the museum
experience into a portable object and activating the memories of the events and the victims in
public and private spaces during the repression. It is categorized as an “interactive art book”
because it presents the stories of the victims, and through QR codes it links to the maps and
video testimonies of each victim. The audience is able interact with 3D photogrammetry replicas
of the barricade altars created by the victims’ relatives to memorialize our loved ones in their
own spaces, by using Spark AR Augmented Reality filters and image trackers. The term
“augmented reality” (AR) refers to the use of digital overlays on existing material environments.
Users access AR resources through the smartphone applications or headsets, usually associated
with a specific object or location. AR is distinguished from Virtual Reality by the fact that it
supplements, rather than replaces, a field of view (Szabo 2018).
The process of creating the 3D models using photogrammetry was done in very
improvised conditions. We scanned over one hundred objects that are now part of the Museum
archive. During the scanning process to create the 3D Models the University was heavily policed
after a peak in repression. Initially, this digital extension of the project was going to be a VR
companion to the travelling exhibition, but because of COVID we decided to pivot into an
Augmented Reality Experience. The components and different digital formats of this project
allow the stories of the victims to travel beyond their homes and families and reach international

26
AMA Constructing Memory, Interactive Art Book. https://www.museodelamemorianicaragua.org/wp-
content/uploads/2021/09/AMA_ConstructingMemory_Web.pdf

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audiences, such as Nicaraguan exiles in the diasporas. Despite the de facto state of exception in
Nicaragua we were able to place the altars in highly policed spaces, like for example in the
National University of Engineering where many of the victims were killed. This chapter was
written a year after the launch of the book, and in a moment where the Nicaraguan State has
removed personal jurisdiction and confiscated 17 universities, and the Central American
University, where the temporary exhibition of the Museum was hosted, had multiple threats of
being closed down by government officials (Divergentes 2022). We were forced to create
security procedures to return the physical memory objects that belong to the families while they
were being stored in the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America, which is the
biggest private archive and repository of historical materials in Nicaragua.
In this chapter, I aim to discuss the process and learning outcomes of creating interactive
and digital experiences and the possibilities of intervening public and online space with a digital
layer for creating memory spaces. Through the design of the experience I aim to address
viewers’ privilege, and consider issues of embodiment, access and place. To talk about AR to
engage in memory work I discuss theories of annotation such as documentary and interpretative
posed by Victoria Szabo (2018) and include another analytical possibility for Augmented Reality
to perform rituals of collective grieving. For this section, I draw examples of uses of digital
media for remembrance from artists and collectives to compare their use and possibilities. At the
end, aim to critically engage the use of proprietary technology such as Social Media platforms,
and some of the trade-offs, risks and threats faced by the community with their use. I
acknowledge that fewer and fewer spaces are “free” from the contouring influence of the
arrangements of capital that the Internet supports and is supported by. As Rob Horning
observes, that by using “proprietary tech platforms to conduct your ascetic radical disclosure and

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unveil your latent integrity also happens to be highly lucrative for tech companies” (Horning
2013). At the end, I enter into a discussion about public space, the streets and memory in
relationship with digital pieces and projection mapping experiences.
Museum as a portable object
The book contains 180 pages, and is printed in an 8*10 inches format in full color. The
book was created as a portable medium with the objective to engage in advocacy with it, and for
people to be able to learn about the stories of the victims, access the website, and access the
added layer of Augmented Reality, that consists of the victims’ objects. The opening texts
include words by me as director of the Museum, Francys Valdivia, the President of AMA, Vilma
Nunez the Director of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights CENIDH and Victor Hugo
Acuña, a Costa Rican Historian that studies Nicaragua. In my text I state “We construct memory
as lived and embodied stories that struggle to not be forgotten” (Yang 2021). I make emphasis
on embodied stories, because this book as an artefact considers issues of embodiment through
design, by thinking of the user experience in relation to tactility, positionality and representation.
The visual language of the book recuperates the mothers participatory design, transmedia
practices, and artistic explorations that I narrated and analyzed in the previous chapters of this
dissertation. The book was designed with consideration of the main visual elements of the
exhibition: the embroideries for memory and the handwritten names and maps created by the
families that are members of AMA. The book presents in its inner pages, images of the protests,
of the mothers organizing, and of the museum exhibition, a collection that represents the work
and transmedia memory practices that the organization and the museum have engaged with. The
book also incorporates profiles of each victim that were part of the website. Similar to the
organization of the temporary travelling exhibition and the Museum’s website, the Interactive

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Art Book is also divided by territories, considered departments of Nicaragua. Each Department
has photographs and a brief description of the events that took place in that locality, and a list
names of the victims of each department. Each name is handwritten by their families, which
were part of the hand drawn maps that are elements of the archive of the museum (as seen in
Chapter 1). The use of the handwritten motifs has a tactility and texture that tries to counter
traditional digital design aesthetics. Laura Marks talks about traditions of tactile modes of
representation in western art that involve “intimate, detailed images, that invite a small, caressing
gaze” (Marks 1998, 336). Florian Cramer uses post-digital aesthetics to discuss a media
aesthetics which opposes such digital high-tech and high-fidelity cleanness (Cramer 2015). Our
objective in using hand drawn reference materials was for the book to feel like a collective
endeavour. I argue that these aesthetic gestures of tactility position the victims and their families
closer to the book’s audience.
After the list of the victims each section contains profiles for each victim. There is a
paragraph that tells the biography of the victim, as well as one that narrates the events (see Fig.
14). In the profile you can also see the portraits of the families demanding justice that were
analyzed in depth in Chapter 2, and one image of the victim at a younger age and one at the
image of their death. With these two images we connect the victim’s timeline. One of our
collaborators stated that “there is a richness in the dialogue of the three images. The combination
between the spontaneous images taken by their friends or family as part of a life milestone, and
the pain and resistance that presents the photos demanding justice. Another issue that strikes me
is access to image making linked to your socioeconomic situation. It is less “usual” for low
income families to have images of themselves. So that effort to search and recover these images

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is more moving for me” (Personal Communication). It is important to highlight this in relation to
the visibility of certain classes and races in Nicaragua’s visual culture.

Figure 14 Layout profile victims in the Interactive Art book AMA Constructing Memory, AMA y No Olvida
Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2021.
Digital Layer and User Experience Design

Each profile of the victims has a QR code that links to the video testimony of the family
on the website and one that links to the events page that narrates the events of their killing
through text, maps and digital maps. In the pages of the departments there are two QR codes that
link to filters on Instagram and Facebook. By using cell phones cameras, these platforms allow
the imposition of an augmented layer to the real-world using 3D models, surface tracking, and
target tracking (Cárdenas Gasca et al. 2022). We used the image of the maps with crosses as a
target tracker to trigger the effect (See Fig. 16). The target tracking image helps to situate and
blend the Augmented Reality layer together with objects and/or imagery in the real space. Once
the user points the rear camera at the image of the stitched crosses the altar appears on the map’s
surface.

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Figure 15 Image spread of Interactive Art Book section with target tracker to AR filters and QR codes, AMA y No
Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity archive, 2021.

The book has another element which is a tabloid size poster meant to be removed from
the book and pasted on people’s private spaces or public spaces with the message “Mothers don’t
give up” which is a chant people used during protest. This poster also had QR codes that link to a
filter that is meant to use the front camera for people to record a message stating “I do not forget
April”. (See Fig.16) In the following, I will discuss how we designed the experience and the
elements we decided to include as Augmented Reality filters, and the considerations we had to
make in terms of content, prototyping, platforms of access, and issues we found in relation to the
technology available and what was supported by the platforms.

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Figure 16 Poster insert part of the Interactive Art book for face filter, AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory
Against Impunity Archive, 2021.
The AR filters used to represent each department were based on the altars created in the
exhibition of the personal objects of the victims. As discussed in Chapter 3 the memory objects
of the victims bring the private experiences of the absence of the victims in their homes as well
as represent their connection with other communities they belonged to. In order to create these
3D replicas, we used photogrammetry. Originally developed for topographical mapping,
photogrammetry is now commonly used for high-end visual effects and in consumer systems for
converting sequences of photographic images into 3D models (Anderson 2017, 181). The team
followed the process created by Creative Producer Emilia Mason to scan each object (Mason
2019). For each 3D model the team took approximately 50-75 pictures, in some cases the more
complex were 200 pictures, of the same memory object from 360 degrees angle, using cell
phones cameras. This was not a straightforward process, because we collaborated with people
that did not have the technical know-how and we moved from using DSLR cameras to cell
phones as way to streamline the process. We used the QLONE Pro Scanner App to speed up the
process of scanning, and to export the 3D models. The original 3D models had a lot of detail,

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which meant high polygon density
27
, so we had to do a retopologization process of each asset, to
rebuild the models to reduce the amount of polygon count and be optimized to be used in Spark
AR and decreasing the amount of data needed to visualize it.
Spark AR is a studio tool from Meta company
28
that allows users to create their own AR
effects or filters to be used through mobile phones. When we were designing this project, we
investigated the possibility of running the AR experience through the web, using engines that
allow Web AR experiences without the need for an application to be downloaded on the
smartphones. We discovered that these options required people to have a high-speed internet
connection. We also realized that most of these Engines, such as 8
th
wall, are so expensive that
they become inaccessible for us as developers. Therefore, we decided to use the most accessible
and cost-efficient option. These commercial platforms make the filter more accessible to people
in Nicaragua that use prepaid data plans for short periods of time that include free social media
29
.
In the upcoming sections I will address how technology is deployed tactically here, even though
we understand that the use of AR technologies and social media platforms are used for multiple
purposes, mostly with harmful and exploitative impacts and outcomes.
In order to design experience, we took into consideration our multiple audiences and the
possibility for some of our viewers to have the “privilege” of not being close to the suffering
represented in our experience (Cárdenas Gasca et al. 2022). The three distinct audiences were
considered when developing the project, the Members of AMA, Nicaraguan in Diaspora as well
as external viewers that could see the book in Nicaragua and in the exterior. For the members of

27
In 3D computer graphics and solid modeling, a polygon mesh is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that
defines the shape of a polyhedral object. See more information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_mesh
28
The company is the parent organization of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among other subsidiaries.
29
Data packages in Nicaragua have validity for days according to price the lowest being 75MB that costs $.50 a day
to $15 2.5 GB that lasts a whole month. They all include using Social Media Platforms for free.

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AMA, we recognized the lack of access to technology that many of the families had. We also
found out that Spark AR stopped supporting previous releases to Android 10 operating system in
2020. Currently Android has 12 versions and version 10 was released in September 2019. This
means that any device older than 2019 could not experience the AR filters with image trackers.
Most phones released with version 10 operating system could be considered mid-range, their
price between $250-$400 in the US. This was a big challenge for a Nicaraguan audience, for
which the minimum monthly wage is $132 according to Data of the Chamber of Commerce
30

while only 27% of the population is part of the formal economy and the rest of the population
makes even less. For the launch of the book young ambassadors of the Museum facilitated the
use of the filters and had tablets in case family members didn’t have social media platforms in
their phones or their phone model was not supported by Spark AR. We also created a version of
the Altars that did not require a target tracker, for people that used previous Android versions.
For the experience of exterior audiences visualizing the Augmented Reality altars, the use
of filters has become a common practice. We recommended in the instructions that the book
should be opened on a flat surface, like a table or the floor. We dismissed the possibility of
people being able to place the altars on the walls. In that sense we limited users’ agency with
regards to the experience. We wanted the book to allow access for the user, but not without
context. As the museum exhibition was in a physical space that gave more context for the
audience, the book brings context by showing the events that took place and the stories of the
victims. In order to use the filter, we invited people to create a ritual of a sacred space,
contemplation, and reflection. As one of the designers of the experience Ana Carolina Estarita
stated

30
Minimum wage 2022, Chamber of Commerce Nicaragua Website https://www.cadin.org.ni/?p=1163

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In this short attention span that we all have, where everything is an easy swipe to
the left, we are going to make it a bit harder for you. You’ll have to find a surface,
and will have to make the exercise to position yourself, in relation to the families
with respect to the memories of their loved ones. We are bringing you in, but with
a border that requires your agency and refuses your participation if you are not in
the right mind set (Personal communication, 2022).

In that sense we engage in a politics of refusal as a political and ethical stand that
questions the positioning of recognition (Tuck and Yang 2014), and instead requires one’s
political sovereignty to be acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for
those that are usually in the position of recognizing. Instead of refusing retrieval of people that
are not proximate to the situation completely, we limit it by crafting an experience design that
requires acknowledgment of the situation and the context in which the memories of these events
took place.
Writing about the context of the Museum of Memory in Colombia, viewers’ privilege is
defined by Cardenas et al “as the difference in context between the exhibition and actual events
and the difference between any visitor of the museum and the victims, who also often face
economic disadvantages” (Cárdenas Gasca et al. 2022, 11). The privilege users might have in
relation to the experiences presented, is addressed in the case of the book by not allowing the
user to engage with the experience without creating a space for it. In the coming section I will
discuss how this project joins other existing development and research that uses AR and Virtual
Reality as tools for memory initiatives, rituals and community space creation, and how we also
used Augmented Reality to disrupt the impossibility to intervening public space created by the
state of exception imposed by the Nicaraguan Government.

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Digital altars for rituals of collective grieving

Because of the large body of literature that exists around VR/AR for multiple fields
31
, I
want to focus on uses of AR/VR for remembering, ritual and space creation. I want to
acknowledge the fact that these technologies have been used for simulation of violent ends such
as air force pilot training, to “increase lethality,” (Reventlow 2019) and casualty care training (G.
Taylor et al. 2018). The more commercial ones used on Social Media Platforms are mostly used
for cosmetic manipulation and marketing (Cárdenas Gasca et al. 2022). Others have used AR to
insert themselves in canonical art spaces, for art and cultural heritage, and for activism
(Geroimenko 2014). Victoria Szabo provides a review of uses of “Digital heritage”, a term used
to describe the confluence of digital technologies with cultural heritage initiatives. She mentions
two types of AR annotation relevant to digital heritage interventions, the first one being
documentary annotation, “directly related to, and representative of, the history or attributes of the
object of inquiry—for example, an historic photo of a current site or a 3-D model documenting
vanished architectural detail” (Szabo 2018, 374). She mentions the Digital Durham AR app,
which reframes Preservation Durham’s walking tours of Durham, North Carolina as augmented
Tobacco Heritage and Civil Rights AR experiences with both historic imagery and audio tracks
(Digital Durham 2015 as cited by Szabo). To this type of annotation, I add the example of the
artist collective Antes del olvido which formed in 2019 during the crisis in Chile to document
significant monuments, locations and graffiti of the protest through photogrammetry. Their goal
is “to collectively produce an archive of the uprising as a political tool, an artifact for collective
memory.”(Pfaller n.d.) The second type of annotation is what she calls “the interpretive

31
For a good review on Virtual Reality experiences with relationships to real life experiences and trauma See
Chapter 3 of Technologies of Vision: the War between Data and Images (Anderson 2017)

119
annotation”, that adds a complementary, interpretative layer to the experience (Szabo 2018, 375).
For example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum adds a layer of information of the
name of the Holocaust victims in their experience (Palladino 2018). She also mentions
“Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination,” an exhibition in 2015, which
combined AR elements with existing artwork in a critically engaged intervention about
Afrofuturism (Frederick 2015 as cited by Szabo).
Manifest.AR was one of the first public artist collective that started using augmented
reality (AR) to create art and activist works. The collective was found in 2010 by doing a We AR
in MoMA intervention. Their interest was to challenge the Museum of Modern Art’s exclusivity
by placing artworks inside and around the museum and invited selected artists to participate.
(Geroimenko 2014, vii). Many others have created AR activist pieces that include Cultural
Jamming of billboards (re-figuring logos, fashion statements, and product images), erasing
border divisions (Israeli–Palestinian Separation Barrier, Korean Unification Project), and
environmental concerns such as the Glacier Erosion AR project. Others have used AR to
represent iconic spaces such as an AR app that recreated the World Trade Center in scale, at the
real-world site of ground zero with an interface which allowed viewers to retell their memories
and leave them at the location. One work by the group “The 4 Gentleman”, “Tiananmen
Squared” recreates the Goddess of Democracy statue from the Tiananmen Square uprising in
Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. In these projects there is a combination of interpretive and
documentary virtual annotations as described by Szabo. In a sense, AR and other forms of
locative media, draw inspiration from the Situationist movement of the 1960s where artists
intervened in the urban landscape to provide alternate visions and readings of urban spaces.

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We used Augmented Reality because of an interest in the political potential of urban
space (intervention, occupation, protests) and the potential of the media generated by the users to
circulate online. The streets are the contested space because they are one of the few public spaces
left. In Nicaragua public spaces like parks or plazas are heavily policed and even commercial
spaces such as malls do not allow any type of demonstration and activelly collude with the police
to stop them. As I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, we were able to place the altars in
spaces that had great significance because they were the places where victims were killed, such
as in front of the Engineering University or the Central American University (See Fig. 17) with
the possibility of users passing undetected by forces policing the streets. The AR altars that
represent the objects of the families can describe the documentary annotation practice of AR,
since many of the places where people placed the altars were locations that had an emotional
charge of previous existing barricades, police violence and assassinations. This AR intervention
in its documentary and interpretive aspects contrast the places of memory with digital replicas of
barricades that remember the barricades that were erected in 2018, and those that were
assassinated near them. The media created by the users in these spaces creates a type of elusive
media, that after being recorded can circulate online freely.

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Figure 17 Augmented Reality filter of Barricade with memory objects in front of the National Engineering
University, AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2021.

These AR altars have a third possibility besides documenting the events, and adding a
layer of interpretation, which is one of creating a space for ritual and remembrance. In the
possibility of designing rituals, I follow Joshua McVeigh Schultz who argues that rituals and
other forms of action can be approached as objects of design, even though his work focuses on
speculative design (McVeigh-Schultz 2015, 3). According to anthropology scholars of rituals, in
cases of social breaches or crisis, people create redressive actions that include political, legal and
ritual processes in order to reintegrate the events. In many rituals there are a communication with
the sacred for the community to become united and continue existing after some of their
members are gone (examples of these are exhibitions of objects) (Schechner and Schechner
2013) . Incorporating rituals also provides the possibility of the community to heal through a
performative practice (Bell 1997). In this digital augmented reality experience, the only
interaction allowed of the user is to light a candle, this action relates to other rituals that families

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performed in their homes or sacred spaces such as churches and cemeteries. For the families,
these expressions re-represent only what they have performed in their other spaces, whereas for
the external audiences it gives the opportunity to join in their remembrance of the victims and the
events. Emilia Mason, creative producer who lives in the diaspora stated that this was a powerful
experience for her:
The altars were extremely powerful for me, since I was not able to share or mourn. I was
really grateful for being able to replicate what people in Nicaragua were doing. I was
never in the space of the museum. This makes me very emotional. People who I shared
the filters with, said that they felt honored to have them on their own spaces. All of us
who were watching from afar, did not have the chance to pass through the mourning
period. Life went on for us.

It is important to highlight how these rituals are culturally specific and have to be handled
with care and respect. Other examples of these types of these ritualized practices through digital
experiences are VR Día de los Muertos
32
created by Alejandro Quant Madriz, a virtual reality
altar that he made for his late grandmother who passed away in 1995. Breonna’s Garden
33
is an
AR created by LADY PHEØNIX in collaboration with Ju'Niyah Palmer, Breonna’s sister and
other members of her family. This project is available on iPad, meant “to honor Breonna Taylor's
life and cultivate a safe healing space to process emotions such as grief. Breonna's Garden is a
sacred space for anyone who wants to share a message of hope for Breonna's family. Or, a
message in remembrance of someone they miss. It's a sacred space and a protest” (Pheønix
2021). Another example is the project Digital Gardens created by lillyanne phạm in
collaboration with Maria Mejia, Gavrielle Thompson, Bea Yeh, Maria Mayorya, Chanel
Matsunami Govreau, virtual care lab (Richard Phu, Alice Yuan Zhang, Taylor Murray), Roz
Crews, and Candace Avalos in which they use the social simulation game Animal Crossing: New

32
Aquma Website Portfolio VR Dia de los Muertos https://www.aquma4livez.com/VR-de-los-Muertos
33
Breonna’s Garden Website https://breonnasgarden.com

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Horizons (ACNH) as a digital collective altar. Some of the reflections of this group have to do
with the use of culturally and ethnically specific 3D models. They mentioned that in the Stanford
3D scanning repository for the Happy Buddha Model, it states “please remember that Buddha is
a religious symbol”, other examples they mention were the Open Source Afro Hair Library
34

(OSAHL) a feminist, anti-racist database for 3D models of Black hair textures and styles created
by A.M Darke, closeisnthome.com a multidisciplinary collective and 3D resource platform by
and for BIPOC identities (Pham 2021). To these examples of 3D culturally specific artefacts I
add Moreshin Allayhari’s work that uses 3D modeling, 3D scanning, 3D printing, and
storytelling to re-create monstrous female/queer figures of Middle Eastern origin and recreations
of artefacts destroyed by ISIS in 2015 at the Mosul Museum
35
; and I also add koa.xyz
36
a
collaboration of self-representation between Violeta Ayala, Roly Elias, Fashion Maria Corvera,
Rilda Paco and Dan Fallshaw that create 3D assets and virtual experiences for the metaverse
with a Quechua and Aymara aesthetics, philosophy and mythology.
Relatedly, many of the objects of the altars include things that are specific to Nicaraguan
and Latin American culture, to mention a few: the jícara of Junior Gaitán is a wood container
made from the calabash tree use to serve beverages and food. Some of the belongings of the
victims related to their participation in folkloric traditions and dancing, for example the masks
that belonged to many of the victims are used in the Agüizotes in Masaya, as part of a
carnivalesque parade in which participants dress in costumes and wear masks of traditional
myths and legends.

34
Afro Hair Library Website https://afrohairlibrary.org/
35
Morehshin Allayhari Portfolio http://www.morehshin.com/
36
Koa.xyz website https://www.koa.xyz/

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To summarize this section, the augmented reality altars with the personal objects that
belonged to the victims, have three analytical elements: 1) the documentary inscription of the
real life events and actions that took place in the different locations where they happened; 2) the
interpretative inscription that brings the objects of memory of the victims into other spaces
(private or exterior of Nicaragua); 3) the possibility of creating a private ritual for collective
grieving that combine the public space, the private space of the smartphone, and the
“private/public space” of online virtual spaces. At the same time, the altars and their use by
external audiences bring out considerations about user experience, privilege, refusal, as well as
issues of access and culturally-specific meaning as well as shared emotions of mourning. The
following section of this chapter discusses the other public intervention created by this project
that takes the form of projection mapping.
Projection Mapping: From the Collective to the Individual
The last part use of virtual experiences in the face of repression is the projection mapping
we set up in the façade of the legislative Assembly of Costa Rica. This part of the project
recuperates the portraits demanding justice and the handwritten names of the victims in large
scale projections in public space (See Fig.18). They were accompanied by texts that stated: We
Demand Justice, We Demand Memory, We Demand Truth. The building of the Legislative
Assembly of Costa Rica had been intervened before by an image of Black Lives Matter and a
held-up fist organized by Costa Rica Afro, Transparencias Collective and the Center for Afro
Women of Costa Rica.
These types of interventions are similar to what Jenny Holzer, Rafael Lozano Hemmer
and Krzysztof Wodiczko have done in the past. Wodiczko talks about his practice as
“interrogative design”, arguing that design should respond with a double urgency to today’s

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world, “first it should function as an emergency aid in the process of survival, resistance and the
healing of social and psychological and physical wounds. Second, it needs to increase and
sustain the high level of ethical alertness that creates in the words of Benjamin a state of
emergency” (Wodiczko 1999, 16). Interestingly, he uses the reference of a bandage that covers
and treats the wound while at the same time exposing its presence, signifying both the experience
of pain and the hope of recovery.
In the case of the projection mappings of the photos demanding justice, some of the
elements of the photos have been analyzed in Chapter 2. What I think of this large-scale
presentation of the photographs enacts is moving back from the collective representation to the
individual traces of each victim. This piece works in a sense to acknowledge the demand of the
victims in a real public space, while also going back to the individual pain of their families in the
search for justice. The individual victim takes precedence again by seeing each one of their
names projected with the tactile quality of the handwritten typography of their names by their
families. Interrogative design works here because after these images had been previously
presented some ago time in the installations, they kept asking the questions: how long until we
see justice? How long until this end?

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Figure 18 Projection Mapping Demanding Justice Portraits and Handwritten name, Costa Rican Legislative
Assembly, AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory Against Impunity Archive, 2021.
The political potential of memory objects and rituals in public and virtual spaces

In his study of the public sphere, Habermas (1989) outlined a conception of the relationship
between communication and its political potential. Habermas defines the bourgeois public sphere
as a distinctive space where individuals assemble together and form a public body to constitute
their interests (Habermas 1989). For him, “public” is the space of freedom and where public
opinion is formulated to keep the political body in check, in the interest of all. The assumption lies
here in that there is the possibility of democratic dialogue, while in the case of Nicaragua, and
many other places with autocratic regimes, public space is regulated or to a greater extent banned
from existing. Because of this, many people including those who worked on this project use the
internet as a place of intervention, to be able to position the demands of AMA in multiple registers.

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With the advent of the Internet, multiple theorists have argued that its access gives users
creative autonomy and communicative freedom (Castells 1996), which grants more pluralism in
the “online” public sphere, and this supposedly equates to political participation and better
democracies. Similar critiques of the exclusionary nature of Habermas’ concept of the bourgeois
public sphere, such as those made by Nancy Fraser (Fraser 2014) and Calhoun (Calhoun 1993),
have been developed to the Internet as a political and expressive space. As Natalie Fenton
suggests, creative autonomy is difficult to express in conditions of material poverty, exploitation,
and oppression (Fenton 2018). Instead, some argue that we should take into consideration the
underlying assumption that there is a “framework of politics in which in principle every voice
could be heard, without giving attention to the very structuring of those frameworks and the ways
in which the visibility of subjects is structured” (Norval as cited by Fenton, 2016, p.79).
Jodi Dean has warned us about the apolitical nature of communicative capitalism (2005).
This takes the form of the commodification of both information and democracy, where ideals of
access, inclusion, discussion and participation come to be realized in and through expansions,
intensifications and interconnections of global telecommunications. It has morphed the idea that an
individual particular message or content is a contribution to political discussion, without
considering any understanding or aggregation of meaning (Dean 2005). For Dean, the circulation
of communication is depoliticizing because “the form of our involvement ultimately empowers
those it is supposed to resist” (Dean 2005, 61). This means that we are constantly feeding the
monster with more information that does not make any difference to the state of things. The second
problem, according to her, is that struggles on the Net reiterate struggles in real life, but insofar as
they reiterate these struggles, they displace them, and this displacement, in turn, secures and
protects the space of “official” politics (Dean 2005, 61). For Dean, the Internet battles only

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displace political energy from the hard work of organizing and struggle. For these reasons, she
states that politics in the sense of working to change current conditions, may well require breaking
with and through the fantasies attaching us to communicative capitalism.
Is the Internet dead? Hito Steyerl asked this question in 2013, when according to her, the
Internet seemed to stop being a space of possibility, even before the Snowden revelations. On what
is known as Social Media Sites, the commodification of people’s data and events is the driving
force that creates value. Geert Lovink, a previous proponent of Tactical Media
37
states that the
‘subject as user’ has some options of deliberation: “you can insert what feels like speech into the
comment section, or continue as a lurker, while the occasional deviant personality appears as a
troll” (Lovink 2017, 77). Today, GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) have accumulated a
totalitarian power, a private state where international law does not apply, “the digital version of
state monopoly capitalism” (Lovink, 2017). In a post-Snowden era, it is known that the GAFA
algorithms are fed with data collected by them, handed to the National Security Agency (NSA),
and that information gets filtered and sold which creates real impact in times of crisis. Whereas in
its beginnings, a lot of people saw the opportunity for the Internet to create new spaces of
deliberation and liberation, now we see a complete business cycle in which we have to pay with
our own information to entertain ourselves.
Lefebvre argued that every society - and every mode of production - produces a certain
space, its own space. I argue that in the 21st century society, we have produced the Internet and its
accompanying forms of pervasive computing as a space that is both a representational and a social
space. It is representational in the sense that it lives in the same realm of data, images, pixels and
art. For Lefebvre, representational spaces are the ones that the imagination seeks to change and

37
Tactical Media has been used denote a form of media activism that privileges temporary interventions in the
media sphere.

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appropriate. The Internet is also a “social space” in the Lefebvrian sense, in that it incorporates
social actions (Lefebvre 1992). Jason Farman argues that “objects affected in one environment
affect the other. Eventually, the collaboration between virtual space and what might be called
“actual” space becomes so intertwined that it is no longer useful to think of them as distinct
categories” (Farman 2020, 42).
Even though the Internet has become a corporate space, I feel that there still may be
possibilities for subversion in “the takeover of urban space and the alteration of capitalist media for
experimental ends” (Holmes 2009, 23). Technologies and media as human creations are still
becoming. I still see a possibility of using technologies not only for creating content for the
platforms of capitalism, but also to use and create the technologies for our political needs.
Especially in places like Central and Latin America since users there are conceptualized mainly as
passive consumers. Because we should recognize all spaces as “always under
construction”(Massey and Massey 2005), there is a possibility for the Internet to not only benefit
the technocrats. Lefebvre envisages the creation of an alternative mode of spatial production
through a politics of ‘autogestion’, referring specifically to workers in a factory who take control of
the means of production and manage production themselves. “each time a social group . . . refuses
to accept passively its conditions of existence, of life, or of survival, each time such a group forces
itself not only to understand but to master its own conditions of existence, autogestion is
occurring” (Lefebvre 1992, p. 135). In the case of the museum, we have bypassed some of the
gatekeeping of the technical production of Augmented Reality that is usually taken by corporations
and non-activist producers (usually white, usually male), as well as some of the guidelines that
Social Media applies to political projects.

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Rosanna Reguillo argues that public space has been amplified to what she calls networked
space (Reguillo 2017). She also uses “space of inscription” to name the social and digital space in
which people inscribe through words, imagery or gestures, their fears, hopes, affects and desires .
Maybe one of the things to consider here is that this networked space in which we can inscribe
affect, desires and digital objects (as in the case of the altars) can create spaces of remembrance
when public spaces have been closed, while at the same time face multiple risks and trade-offs. As
mentioned before, the most accessible options for us as developers and our intended audiences
were Social Media platforms, because they work as a monopoly in tandem with other corporations
such as the telephone companies in each country and are widely used by people. In this case they
allowed wider access, but access that is limited by the purchasing power of the audience, in the
case of the phones running on Android operating system.
With the same nuance I can argue that the 3D models of the objects of the victims, of which
copies were safeguarded to avoid physical risk in Nicaragua, by being online on these platforms
they face the risks of damaging, inappropriate and abusive use by users. Elizabeth Povinelli has
stated that projects driven by community interests often seek to precisely delimit and constrain the
movement of digital objects that are not always detachable from thick social worlds (Povinelli
2011). Because of these risks and the need to respect the memories of the victims, we created an
experience design that required the creation of a space in different places, that contextualized the
filters and refused its use without the context of the victims lives and the activism and organizing
of their families.
Moreover, the use of digital spaces and virtual elements does not equate to a disembodied
or decontextualized activism. This project has demonstrated the need to base the organizing in
face-to-face interactions, as the ones described in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, and that the digital can

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serve to reach wider audiences and create relationships with other bodies and places. The political
realm, as conceived by Arendt, “emerges out of acting together” (Arendt 1958), when the
collective actions of bodies organize the space differently, creating counter spaces, as described by
Lefebvre (1992). Whereas Arendt maintains that politics requires the space of appearance, she also
claims that space is precisely what politics brings about: “it is the space of appearance in the widest
sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men
exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly” (Arendt
1958, 198) . It is Judith Butler, who following Arendt’s space of appearance, reminds us “for
politics to take place, the body must appear. I appear to others, and they appear to me, which
means that some space between us allows each to appear”(Butler 2011, 3). Marcela Fuentes talks
about the efficacy of new social movements, which resides “not in the activists’ use of technology
per se but rather in their capacity to articulate bodies in combination with embodied, digitally
mediated action to produce a politics of appearance (Arendt) in which bodies—their vulnerability,
their strength, and their ways of working together—are the main symbolic and material vehicles in
the struggle for social change” (Fuentes 2015, 26). As cited by Fuentes, Javier Toret calls “the
augmented event,” one in which physical and digital practices combine to give meaning and
sustain their potency through a collective transmedia narrative (Fuentes 2015, 37). As in the case
of the digital layer of the AR altars and the projection mapping of the photographs of the victims’
families, there are other bodies who are also engaging, viewing and appearing with these practices.
Steve Anderson discusses the potential influence of technology on social change activism
by narrating how Sam Gregory, program director of the activist media organization Witness,
argues that the ability to elicit viewer empathy—frequently touted by VR creators and promoters—
is not the most important factor when producing media for social change. He advocates strategies

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that produce empathy with activists on the front lines of social struggle. For him solidarity and
compassion, elicit more actions than empathy. Then the real potential for virtual technologies “lies
not in creating a stronger sense of presence for viewers but a stronger sense of copresence among
activists—a feeling that their work is recognized and supported by a broader public” (As cited by
Anderson, 2017, p. 209). Because of the experimentation with technology, this project has been
shown in multiple venues, film festivals, this has allowed to cast a wider net of impact and
witnessing. We have been able to create a network of collaborators, bringing in people from
Diaspora, that as Emilia Mason stated needed also the support system and recognition that they
have mourned and grieved, the victims, the violence and the place they called home.

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CHAPTER 4: FEMINIST SPACE BUILDING: FUTURIST PORTALS
Who gets to write the story of the future? and who gets to survive? These are some of the
most important questions of our time. The necropolitical situation against the youth in Nicaragua
presented in the introduction, the foreclosing and confiscation of almost twenty universities by
the regime, the closing of more than eight hundred non-governmental organizations that
supported women, children, youth at risk and LGBTQ+ communities, the forced migration that
Nicaraguan people have had to experience because of the political persecution into situations of
further violence
38
and the loss of possibilities of economic survival make up a dire situation,
bringing about a feeling of the foreclosure of possibilities of the future
39
. At the same time, we
can foresee how multilateral organizations, the states and global capitalism will respond to the
crises of the future by how they have *not* handled the climate crisis and the COVID-19
pandemic. Most likely, we will see a continuation of systemic racial and gendered violence and
fascist necropolitical strategies by the nation states, an increase in technological aided
surveillance supported by technological monopolies and algorithmic infrastructures instantiating
the claim that “the future is already here”.
Furthermore, it is evident that global capitalism is invested in the use of speculative
corporate scenarios to maintain profitable decision-making into the future (Keeling 2019). As
Kara Keeling presents in her book Queer Times Black Futures, Royal Dutch Shell is invested in
maximizing their profits and ensuring its survival. The other side of these futurist corporate
scenarios is that its existence is predicated on a system of racial capitalism that thrives on the

38
Multiple Nicaraguan migrants have been kidnapped by organized crime groups in Mexico, demanding ransom for
their freedom. (Bonmati 2021)
39
No Future Fatima Villalta, Nicaraguan writer and exiled in Mexico states that the Sex Pistols song No Future It
was not just a metaphor for the decline of the English dream, but a reality that from the peripheries would not cease
to worsen. (Villalta 2021)

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dispossession and exploitation of Black people, Indigenous peoples (some of whom describe
themselves as “Black”), and people of color. The future of these types of extractivist
corporations “forecloses upon a future in which those groups of living beings we currently can
identify as ‘Black people’ and/or Indigenous peoples, have the resources to enjoy a sustainable
and joyful existence on this planet. As Diana Taylor states there is a “the colonization of the
future” as “preemptive strikes that simultaneously perpetuate the racist, colonialist, imperialist,
and extractivist violence of the past, ensuring that nothing will grow there but more violence”
(D. Taylor 2020, 21). She mentions as examples of how billionaires “defy limits by sending
Teslas into space, even as their border officials reinforce boundaries by building walls and
placing migrant children in cages”. Part of the future scenarios are the proliferation of images
and media to represent these future scenarios, that work as an investment of them in the present.
Thinking about the representation of future extrapolations, Kodwo Eshun talks about how power
deploys a mode the critic Mark Fisher (2111) calls SF (science fiction) capital, defines “as the
synergy, the positive feedback between future-oriented media and capital” (Eshun 2003, 290).
Nevertheless, we can see how people organize in times of imposed death to defend
territories and communities with an outlook to the future. For example, Indigenous Futures is a
network of resistance in Mexico, “uniting their efforts and their hearts and the creation of
narratives in the defense of life”. They argue that “in times of climate crisis, the future is a
territory to defend”(Indigenous 2021). Similarly, in Nicaragua, the work that women and
feminist collectives are doing demonstrate a shared horizon of change and hope in lieu of the
current darkness and despair that the dictatorship has imposed. If we move away from the time
and pace of the state and geopolitics, which are neoliberal times of urgency, in a constant
acceleration to continue forging new alliances that guarantees its survival, we can disrupt

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linearity of time and capital through networking and play. As women have gone in strike in paro
general across the world to demonstrate how we support the economy (Branigan and Palmeiro
2018), play allows us to stop, to be in our own time, and to create the time we need to foresee a
less violent future. By moving away from the state necropolitical violence, geopolitical
neoliberal and colonial time, we can construct proposals of activism that strengthens our lives
through solidarity, mutual aid and collective and individual care.
In the following, I will delve into a discussion about temporality and the imagination
threading different forms of futurism, speculation and world building with a feminist focus.
Then, I will describe the work of different collectives of women in Nicaragua and Latin America
such as the Mothers, the Defensoras, the Enredadas and the Portaleras, and the possibilities of a
less violent future that they bring forth. I argue that these initiatives are together weaving
networks as Feminist Futuristic Praxis and showing different entry points to the future. Danielle
Lorenz (Lorenz 2013) argues for dream weaving as a decolonial and anti-racist praxis. She
brings forth the dreaming phase in the decolonizing framework developed by Poka Laeuni
(2009) which “allows colonized peoples to explore their own cultures, experience their own
aspirations for the future, and consider their own structures of government and social order”
(Lorenz 2013, 155). This phase focuses on revaluation and creation, allowing current political,
economic, social and judicial systems to be assessed to better-determine what will be to the
greatest strength of the people. In a similar fashion, I argue that the possibility of weaving
networks with dreaming can bring forth memory and justice with care and healing.
Going in depth into the process of the Portals for the Feminist Future, I describe the
intentions and practices we engaged with and an analysis of three main methodologies: time
travelling to heal, ritualistic feminist play for space-building and a spiral methodology for the

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feminist future. Here I consider Kara Keeling’s use of “poetry from the future” (Keeling 2019),
which she borrows from Fanon, who in turn borrows from Marx, to analyze how systematic
processes of feminist political education can politicize self-care and well-being in our activism as
women and human rights defenders, but also brings a temporal dimension, that allows for the
creation of more feminist spaces based on the participants’ knowledge and interests. I am
interested similarly to Keeling, in poetic, affective and embodied knowledge, as the possibility to
“spark whatever viable kindling might be found in ‘the desolation that surrounds us’ to light a
fire here in this now” (Keeling 2019, 84). For Keeling a poetry from the future “functions
primarily at the level of affect in ways that resist narration and qualitative description. It is a felt
presence of the unknowable, the content of which exceeds its expression and therefore points
toward a different epistemological, if not ontological and empirical regime” (Keeling 2019, 83).
For her a poetry from the future interrupts the habitual formation of bodies, and “it is an index of
a time to come in which what today exists potently—even if not (yet) effectively—but escapes
us will find its time” (Keeling 2019, 83).
Poetry from the future: the black, radical, civic and feminist imagination
Multiple scholars have stated that radical thought is inscribed in the ability to imagine the
future in reference to the present, “rather than accepting the world as it is, they always keep in
mind all the other ways the world could be” (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014, 55060:272). Ernst
Bloch aimed to redevelop Marxist criticism from the standpoint of hope and the imagination –
what Bloch referred to as a “forward dream” (Bloch 1995). He mines the possibilities of the
world as an open space, and suggests that the fuel to forward the past, was in many existing
imaginative works of art. Following Bloch, Esteban Muñoz uses futurity as a possibility,
specifically a queer futurity, as an opening or horizon, yet to come: “Put another way, we are not

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yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We
have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the
past and used to imagine a future” ((Muñoz 2019, 1). As Muñoz, I imagine a future in which
queer kids can exist and thrive without danger or harm.
Writers, artists and other creators have sought to speculate in the future by using
temporality to think about the “political conditions that might be” (Carl DiSalvo 2012) or
fostering what Henry Jenkins et all call the “civic imagination” as “the capacity to imagine
alternatives to current social, political, or economic conditions” (Jenkins, Peters-Lazaro, and
Shresthova 2020, 5) or what Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish call the “radical imagination”,
“the ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are, but as they might
otherwise be” (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014, 55060:3). They state that the radical imagination is
not just about dreaming of different futures. “It’s about bringing those possible futures ‘back’ to
work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today” (Haiven and
Khasnabish 2014, 55060:3). Examples of these practices are Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism,
and Latino Futurism.
Afrofuturism has been defined by Alondra Nelson as a way of covering discussions about
race, identity, alienation, and the aspirations of the black community in a utopic future (Nelson
2002, 49). Afrofuturist scholar Ytasha Womack defines Afrofuturism as “the intersection
between black culture, technology, liberation and the imagination, with some mysticism thrown
in, too… It’s a way of bridging the future and the past and essentially helping to reimagine the
experience of people of color.” (Womack 2013, 51) . Indigenous Futurism confronts past and
present colonial ramifications, transforms Indigenous knowledge bases, and imagines ways to
heal and build better futures for Indigenous communities and for 21st-century culture. Latinx

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Futurism builds on Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism to “excavate and creatively recycle the
seeming detritus of the past to imagine and galvanize more desirable presents and futures”
(Merla-Watson and Williams 2017). According to Merla-Watson these visions are heterogeneous
and dissensual, bespeaking the actual pluriversality comprising Latin@ identity and our shared
alternative futures.
In Farm Workers Futurism, Speculative Technologies of Resistance Curtis Marez
discusses and analyses both agribusiness and farm worker futurism visual discourses and
practices that promote utopian images of distinct yet overlapping future imaginaries. Farm
worker futurisms “were simultaneously antagonistic to and in sympathy with elements of
agribusiness futurism, and this contradictory convergence of otherwise opposed formations is the
result of a partly shared model of linear, progressive time, characteristic of the forms of
“historicism” criticized by Walter Benjamin, but directed at imagining the future rather than
narrating the past” (Marez 2016, 9). He argues that in response to corporate imaginaries of a time
when farm workers are reduced to the machinery of production, farm workers unions like
Galarza’s National Farm Labor Union and the more famous United Farm Workers responded
with alternative imaginaries of social reality that contradicted the techno utopias of
agribusinesses. For him, the slogan Sí Se Puede! (Incorrectly attributed to Cesar Chavez since it
was Dolores Huerta) encapsulates the speculative, alternative, world building qualities of the
farmworker’s movement, that at the same time resonated with post-war decolonization and Third
World movements imaginaries of the time.
The feminist imaginary has also harnessed the future with currents such as Donna
Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 2006) Cyberfeminism and Xenofeminism. Both of these
imaginaries have highlighted the potentials of technology and technoscience, and have put forth

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a critique to the erasure of women in the genealogies of development of such technologies.
While Cyberfeminism can be defined as a “critical engagement with new technologies and their
entanglement with power structures and systemic oppression” (Consalvo 2002) and has been the
predecessor of Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Xenofeminism has been described by
one of its proponent as ‘a technomaterialist, anti-naturalist and gender abolitionist form of
feminism’ (Hester 2018) in a form of accelerationist agenda. Hester argues for a xeno-solidarity
of kinship, rooted in a ‘xeno-hospitality’ which strongly refutes the essentialist, cis-
heteronormative and capitalist models of kinship which underpin the traditional nuclear family
(Goh 2019). Meanwhile, an entirely independent concept of cyberfeminism has been developed
in Latin America, where cyberfeminist activists have explicitly defined themselves against their
theoretical precursors and have based their understanding of the term exclusively on their own
practices (Sollfrank 2020). All of these currents try to articulate a version of feminism for this
century in different localities but with shared global concerns. Here, I will focus on other
practices of women and feminists and consider how they can inform the future for Nicaragua and
the Americas.
Women’s collectives dream weaving futures

To write
to heal
in the open flesh
in everyone's pain
in that death that flows
in me and is everyone's
(MAILLARD 1990)

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Even though participating in activism and organizing in Nicaragua is a very risky
endeavour, especially for women, women participated in every aspect of the Rebellion. As
Amaya Coppens, a feminist student said in an interview two years after the April Rebellion that:
Women were present in all the spaces of the April Insurrection, from all sectors resisting,
in the streets, barricades, hospitals, organizing, in communication, preparing medical kits,
the struggle of women is inseparable from the struggle of the people and so much would
not have been achieved without women. We continue to being political prisoners, victims
and we continue to resist. The whole women's organization has been a structure of
support networks, a base for this struggle, before April, long before denouncing what has
happened in Nicaragua (Coppens 2020).
Tamara Morazán, a member of AMA talks about how the women's organizations
supported all organizations. She assures that it was women, feminists and activists who helped
organize the Mothers of April and also accompanied the political prisoners of La Esperanza.
Within the organizing spaces I take up the words of Tamara who says that we learned to “never
again have any silence of our bodies and spaces” (Morazán 2020a). All of our demands and
reflections articulate a common horizon of change and hope. María Teresa Blandón in that same
special of the Autonomous Women's Movement two years after April highlights the importance
of women being not only included in the stories, but valued as heroic:
The intense history of women's participation in this Rebellion tells us that even the
victims who lived unspeakably any kind of violence have had the courage to speak and
turn their pain and trauma, into a banner of vindication and struggle and of an enormous
dignity that dignifies all those who have kept silent out of fear. Women have never been
on the margins of history, those who have told the story, those who have assigned value
to the tasks, have marginalized them. It is the story that puts men at the center of
importance, of men from both the left and the right, but defending and caring for life is
also heroic. Challenging repressive forces in defense of the freedom and dignity of
Nicaraguans is heroic, and has been exercised by women (Blandón 2020).
The contributions of women in the struggle against the dictatorship have many axes. I
emphasize the struggle against impunity and the demand for justice as the most important and

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unifying one. We can name the physical presence in the places as Amaya commented, but more
importantly the criticism of the ethic of sacrifice and martyrdom inherited by the revolution, the
non-violent ways we have fostered, present in the new slogans, to valuing the tasks of care and
safeguarding life. Mothers and relatives of victims’ criticism of the police state, violence and
legalization of impunity by the justice system has been visible, in addition to the importance of
focusing on the victims in the process and their testimonies and working for the transformation
and politicization of emotions such as pain and loss of a loved one, in struggle and awareness of
rights. Feminists and students’ have criticized the State, pointing at the president and the justice
system in cases of sexual violence. They have also given accompaniment to all women's groups
and activists, and have fostered an organizing politics within activist spaces the struggle against
silences and abuses of power. Mothers and students also have a common line of work,
demanding universities’ autonomy, since many of the victims were also students killed inside or
in front of their universities.
From the reflections of the Mothers and AMA members in the struggle for truth, justice,
reparation and non-repetition, we have worked on the collective denunciation of the violations of
human rights, as presented in the previous chapters, the transformation of pain into healing, and
offering space to other family members to make an intergenerational dialogue with younger
ones, involving fathers and other people to be part of a broader emotional community of memory
with a political commitment. This arises from the need to vindicate our rights, a politicization
from the embodied experience, and the need to focus on the possibilities of change and continue
living in a state of repression with the simultaneous opportunity of creating a different future.
One that upholds the values and demands of all of those that are no longer here. We also moved
from the individual situation of each case, giving each one its space and importance, towards

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weaving the organized collectivity through caring for memory and searching for justice. We have
articulated “memory as a collective path for resistance, healing and care for life” (Yang 2020) as
a horizon of hope.
This collective project entails a paradigm shift that breaks from the cycles of impunity
and re-victimization to the victims of political violence for possibilities of healing the
community that extends to the future. We challenge the victimization drive that “overdetermine
the experience of peoples and individuals in endless narratives of suffering” (Quinceno 2021, 3).
The trauma of the violence requires healing, because if not we will also reproduce this violence
onto other people and thus maintain the cycle of violence. I underline the benefits of opening up
that pain, that grief and that space to emotions in a participatory witnessing as I mentioned in
Chapter 2, so that other people could also connect with their emotions and their experiences of
pain and loss. The possibilities of transforming pain into resistance were analyzed by María José
Díaz, who describes this work as something new for the country:
The Mothers of April are other political subjects since none of those who died in April
wanted to give their lives nor were they constituted themselves as martyrs or heroes of
the homeland. Their mothers are saying the same thing: ‘my son did not offer his life, he
was taken from me, he was taken from me’ and therefore the counterweight to that is
access to truth, justice and non-repetition. (Díaz Reyes 2020)
For María José, the museum is a symbol that anchors all these reflections, where she tells
us that in this work of memory pain, rage and the fact that through a recognition of being
victims/survivors/activists becomes the engine of a new society, we can visualize a
transformative future: “AMA is telling us: we are different, we can do it differently...In their
speeches they articulate the future, we visualize and breathe futures and we see ways out of the
conflict” (Díaz Reyes 2020). In the feedback workshops with the members of AMA that were

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described on Chapter 1 the families imagined visions of the future of justice through theatrical
exercises and image making that were full of joy and hope, and discussed how we “carry forward
the legacy of our family members to create change”. Tamara Morazán, sister of Jonathan
Morazán narrates that part of her commitment is the possibility of a change envisioned by those
that are no longer with us:
As an Association we are going to fight for these changes, not only to get justice for our
relatives, but also to achieve what our relatives were murdered for, that there will be
democracy, human rights and that the rights of young people and citizens will never be
violated again. Our main demand is always justice, but also that the dreams of our
relatives are fulfilled. (Morazán 2020b).
Even though we reclaim their dreams, our practices are creative in the sense that we are
envisioning the possibility where us and future generations continue living through healing. I
understand that moving towards fairer futures is not a process of moving only in one direction as
a progression, but also a spatial and material problem. The work that Defensoras do, compliment
the mothers’ activism in the sense that the defensoras support the mothers in terms of physical
security and network building with other activists across Latin America to be able to continue
doing their work.
When I was planning my departure from Nicaragua, I was helped by the network of
Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders (who I refer to throughout this
chapter as Defensoras which is the gendered and plural word in Spanish and how they identify).
They started their work in 2010 from the result of the feminist vision and experience of
defenders and organizations in diverse social movements in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala,
Nicaragua, and El Salvador. They describe their mission as following,
We inherited centuries of colonization, inequality, dispossession, and violence on our
bodies and territories. We have resisted violence and repression imposed by capitalism,
patriarchy, and racism, and we have opened paths of rebelliousness, justice, and life with

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dignity for ourselves and our communities. We also know about caring. We learned to
care for and preserve life, although most times in situations of exploitation and without
the deserved recognition. We learned from our peoples that no one survives without the
daily protection of those who feed us, hold us, heal us. We work to also safeguard what
sustains us – water, crops, forests. We know that all beings are vulnerable and we all
need collective care in order to survive. As women human rights defenders (WHRDs),
transgressing the gender mandates that force us to attend to the needs of others above our
lives and our rights, we have used this wisdom of caring to protect each other, weaving
networks of solidarity and healing that make our emancipation path possible and protect
the legacy and continuity of our diverse struggles for social transformation. We save
ourselves together, and together we keep ourselves safe from the multiple sources of
violence that hound us (Burgos et al. 2021).

They use secure online communication channels to accompany defensoras on security
issues. Faced with movement restrictions, they have developed different actions so that defenders
can travel safely across territories. They keep other women and feminist groups safe by using
“Feminist Holistic Protection strategies”, in which they connect with more than 2.000
Defensoras in different countries in the region. These strategies “place caring for our lives and
our struggles at the center of the political action, and make protection a collective act that
strengthens the wisdom and resources that we already have, giving authority, legitimacy, and
justice to women, their needs, and their dreams” (Burgos et al. 2021). Similarly, to the work the
mothers are doing, they use dreams as a metaphor to the future to come.
By weaving this network of Defensoras, they create decentralized networks in each
country, and each country network has a team that coordinates activities and accompanies
defenders at risk, their families, organizations, and communities. This team is made up of
defenders who know the reality in each territory and develop protection strategies side-by-side
with sister defenders at risk, based on the context and concrete needs of each defender. They also
come together in the regional space, where they mobilize resources; activate urgent alerts and
campaigns to denounce, express solidarity and support; strengthen capacities; and connect with

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other networks and organizations globally. This organizational architecture has been crucial for
timely activation of all the accompaniment, resources, strategies and support, which has
multiplied since the arrival of the health crisis in our region.
Above all, this network was constituted as a community of care, of closeness and
permanent contact. The local networks have also been mobilizing resources so defenders can
purchase food and basic necessities for themselves and their families. They provide support
through the networks in the form of resources, medicines, health insurance, or the processing of
safe-passage letters that allow defenders to attend to their health needs and those of their
families. In Nicaragua, special assistance has been given to defensoras who are in prison or have
been released, who have diverse health problems and are not being treated.
Other projects that weave the network of feminist organizations with the mothers and
Defensoras are La Digna Rabia, Las Enredadas, Las Malcriadas and Volcánicas. La Digna
Rabia, trans The Dignified Rage, is a feminist Collective that defines itself as anti-patriarchal,
anti-racist and anti-capitalist, which uses art for the struggle of memory. They developed the
website “Nada está olvidado
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” trans. “Nothing is forgotten”, a multimedia special that compiles
resistance and critical perspectives through words and art about the memories of the April
Insurrection. Las Enredadas trans. “Entangled” is another feminist collective interested in the
participation of women in technology, that created the Feminist Quimera, an autonomous digital
magazine; which aims to contribute to the creation of new feminist horizons and make visible the
daily and structural problems faced by young women in the country, as well as the creative
solutions that women themselves are developing. Las Malcriadas have also engaged in other
uses of digital media to present data and human rights violations. They created a fanzine that

40
Nada está Olvidado Website https://nadaestaolvidado.com/

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touches on many issues including migration, diverse bodies and vulnerability. Volcánicas is
another feminist collective that was born at the end of 2018, which focuses on positioning the
rights of migrant and exiled women in Costa Rica. They created a campaign called "Migramos
para Para Vivir” trans. “We migrate to live” to inform the social rights that Nicaraguan migrant
women, asylum seekers and refugees have in Costa Rica for processes such as refugee
applications and complaints of gender violence.
This larger network dream weaves the possibilities of a future that is complementary in a
sense that each one is focusing on a different issue that concerns women in the present. The
mothers and Digna Rabia aim for a future with truth, reparations, memory and justice. In the
case of the mothers the future entails the values of democracy and freedom that their relatives
defended as well as care and healing that we have fostered through the memory work we have
engaged in. Relatedly, the Defensoras, Malcriadas, and Volcanicas aim for a future with dignity,
care and safety across Nicaragua and the region. The Enredadas also take into consideration the
importance of technology use, development and digital security to think about the future of the
lives of young Nicaraguan women. In the following, I will present another collective born out of
the project “Feminist Futurist Portal” that tries to bring some of those values and future dreams
into the present through play and other space-building methodologies.
Portaleras “Time travelling to heal”
Now I focus on a project I developed with a group of women, artists, healers, educators,
and researchers where we asked ourselves: what would Nicaragua be like based on a feminist
ethic? What would be a feminist education and justice? How can we build social dynamics from
art and feminism? What are the ways to share and collectivize power for everyone? We met
throughout 2019 to think and design how we want to materialize our personal, collective and

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structural desires. We decided to create a Feminist Portal to the Future, that opens in the midst of
everyday life in Nicaragua to express support, security and freedom among us. Through
dialogues from our bodies and collective imaginations, we approach other possible realities and
aesthetics based on collaboration and the sharing of knowledge among women. We encouraged
each other to recover the agency of dreaming. As presented in the previous section dream
weaving can be a futurist feminist praxis in itself.
At this stage, we focused on two areas: Feminist Education and Healing Justice. We
created audio-visual archives of the future that we envision, as a political and demanding act to
act as guardians of our historical memory: the past, the present and the future. As part of this
future dreaming, we created a Fanzine with a video Manifesto. In the following I will present a
description of the practices we engaged in and an analysis of three main methodologies: time
travelling to heal, feminist play for space building and a spiral methodology for the feminist
future. I will thread how moving away from the present conjunction of state and gendered
violence, and dispossession of the state and neoliberal temporality allows us to grasp the
“impossible possibility” of a “poetry from the future” as theorized by Kara Keeling.
I collaborated with four women to organize and hold the space among us, after which we
invited a larger group of 12 young feminists in a secret place with personalized invitations. We
created a common manifesto that included the need for a collective based on consent, feminist,
autonomous, self-managed, intergenerational, intersectional, plural, open, circular,
unconventional understandings. The first line of the manifesto states “We love each other, we
forgive each other, we thank each other” three times. These three verbs used as repetitive
ritualistic mantra foregrounded healing. First love, because as stated by bell hooks “our hope lies
in the reality that many of us continue to believe in love’s power…We still hope love will

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prevail. We still believe in love’s promise” (Hooks 2001, xxvii). We believe that love between
activists can also heal us from the violence of the world. We forgive each other, for all the times
we did not act in a compassionate way towards others, especially other women, and we thank
each other, because we were there in presence for the others.
Part of the process to create the portal was first recognizing where we come from. We
knew that before we speculate on the future, we needed to ground it in the past. We used
memory as a base and the body as a space of memory. First, we gathered and discussed what
makes us angry and threaded themes and connections between us. This activity was similar to
consciousness raising activities that women engaged in the US as part of the second wave of
feminist activism. The New York Radical Feminist Consciousness-raising Group Guide defines
consciousness raising as “a way to use our own lives—our combined experiences—to understand
concretely how we are oppressed and who was actually doing the oppressing. We regarded this
knowledge as necessary for building such a movement”
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. As I will present later in this chapter,
this also aligns with the first step of the spiral model of popular education, based on people’s
experiences and knowledge, instead of trying to use a “banking model” for learning. In our case,
we discussed the historical cycle of impunity for people in power (as the Nicaraguan President),
the patriarchal pact that defends sexual predators and its operation through laws and the judicial
system, the economic and political exclusion and erasure of women in all Nicaraguan history, the
violence activists face with the police state, and the abortion prohibition of the Nicaraguan
government in all cases, even the therapeutic ones. We always focused on the bodily experiences
of these issues, as in the manifesto we stated:

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New York Radical Feminist Consciousness-raising Group Guide. Archive.org.
https://archive.org/details/FeministConsciousness-raisingGroupGuideTopics/NYRFIntro4Last76.9fCR.jpg

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We do not forget the traumas that have gone through us for being women and the abuses
that our ancestors and companions experienced. We do not forget the exploitation of our
bodies. We do not forget that we have been excluded economically and politically. We do
not forget that we have been disappeared, tortured, raped, imprisoned, assaulted,
persecuted, we have been erased from history for being women. We do not forget that
they have made us give birth by force. We do not forget that justice is still pending.
In the video of the Manifesto section of the Manifesto video where we mentioned the last
paragraph, we are holding in circle and images of the Nicaraguan historical archive appear,
images of war displacement, sexualizing advertisement, and images of the denounces that
Zoilamérica, Ortega’s stepdaughter, made publicly when she stated that was sexually abused by
him. The crimes against her are also still in impunity. In a way we are summoning and holding
this history, the history of Nicaraguan women and bringing it to the present to hold and heal i

Figure 19 Portaleras circle of time travelling to heal past violences, Photograph by Camaleoni, 2019.

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As part of the exercise, we integrated body therapies and collective healing practices. We
stated that pain should not be individualized, and instead healing is a collective endeavor, in
which “we seek to cross our own, family, social knots in collective support”. In an exercise
accompanied by meditation we aimed to recognize what material about the past we wanted to
keep, recover and what to let go of, otherwise what stimulates us to the future that makes us feel
safe and pleasant. The fanzine also contained a guide on how to do this individually, which we
called it “time travelling for healing” (See Fig 19). It invites people to close their eyes, breathe
deeply and go back in time to a childhood moment:
• Remember an image a smell, something that reminds you of your younger self
• How did you feel when you were little?
• What would you tell your younger self?
Then we invited people to also imagine themselves in the future and have a conversation
between their future selves and their younger selves.
• How do you see yourself in 10 years?
• What would your future self-tell your younger self?
• What do you want to keep from your 10-year-old self?
We emphasized the diversity of knowledge and brought new information to the shared
group knowledge. One of the activities was presenting collectives and groups we admired, which
after the presentations we moved to share about our own making practices, knowledge and skills.
Some of the practices shared were theatre exercises to modulate breathing, voice and to become
aware of where desires live in the body. Others skills were based on research, interviewing, art
making, drawing and production design.
The need to center the body and our practices of care and self-care can be read as a way
to challenge capitalist demands for productivity and efficiency. As stated in the manifesto, the
bodies in movement give spaces for rest, laughter and creation. They create a temporal break

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with the capitalist and state time. “We put the body in motion, we give life to safe spaces, self-
love, rest, laughter, creative, erotic, affective energy and physical strength”. Similar to the work
of communitarian feminists, we made emphasis on the relationship to locality and the need to
heal the body as territory. The Manifesto stated, “we recognize that healed bodies and territories
are emancipated. That healing is political, healing your healthy self and healing I heal you”. The
video manifesto presented parts of the body, hands, and feet, to ground this experience in our
bodies and the landscape. The portal also had a physical element, that was supposed to act as a
flag, by “hovering above space” to signify a safe space for women in the area to access it and
participate (See Fig 20).

Figure 20 Portaleras flag signalling safe space for women, Photograph by Camaleoni, 2019.
Space building, feminist play and a critique of world-building

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We assume our power of construction and growth by creating visions from the future and
space-building. I use space building instead of worldbuilding, because world building focuses on
creating new worlds, sometimes without questioning the premises of the actual world, and
secondly, because worldbuilding requires the world to be coherent in all its parts and we do not
conceive a future with such logic. As Nora Khan states “When you are the worldbuilder, you can
position yourself as neutral, as the origin” (Khan, 2019). At USC's World Building Lab, the
concept of World Building is used as a technology of the imagination as elaborated by Laura
Cechanowicz, Brian Cantrell and Alex McDowell that envisions the future of media and
technology. For these authors World Building “allows designers to intelligently project plausible
scenarios and outcomes through the creation of diegetic prototypes and models” (Cechanowicz,
Cantrell, and McDowell 2016, 29).
In a similar approach to Worldbuilding methodologies that taps on multiple domains such
as world, city, community, family and individual scale (Cechanowicz, Cantrell, and McDowell
2016, 37) one of our exercises invited us to create a vision of a macro structure of the future –
organization, country, company, etc. and to also create a micro vision that could translate the
macro vision. Some of the visions became projects presented in the fanzine, such as the
betterment of home gardens, a school for feminist political education and the opening of more
future portals. The fanzine also had a word game meant for people to imagine multiple feminist
structures with the following formula:
In the feminist future there is a __________ (space)
Related to ___________ (interest, desire or action)

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Some of the space options included: school, party, group, field, house, community, office,
garden, workshop, lab, park, square, theatre and the interests, desires and actions included
research, create, dance, manifesting, dreaming, listening, loving, flowing, respecting, rescuing,
memorializing, growing, building, telling, laughing, designing, writing, moving, regenerating,
proclaiming, directing, organizing, learning, connecting, playing and thinking

Figure 21 Portaleras word game for feminist space building, Fanzine Portal Feminista a la Futura, Photographs by
Camaleoni, 2019.
This playful generative game about the future uses a similar approach to The Thing from
The Future designed by Jeff Watson and Stuart Candy at the Situation Lab, which is a foresight
tool and imagination exercise in the form of a deck of cards described as “part scenario
generator, part design method, and part party game that invites players to collaborate and
compete in describing, telling stories about, and sketching or physically prototyping artefacts that

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could exist in alternative futures” (Candy and Watson 2018). Instead of focusing on an object
from the future, or probing into different time horizons (Arc), or the mood of the object, we
focused on the generation of feminist spaces for diverse interests and discussed how to bring
them to the present.
Spiral Methodology for the Feminist Future
On the fanzine we included the methodology to open up a Portal to multiply this type of
space. The steps were the following:
• Find a safe place
• Call upon friends and other women
• Listen to each other
• Identify all of those things that overwhelm us and harm us in the present
• Share organizations, artists, collectives, inspirations, skills, knowledge
• Dream and construct our future
• Create pieces about our future
• Take care of our emotional well being
• Present the results to other women
• Replicate it
• Multiply hope and the dream of a better future
The steps included a spiral with the following words: find, summon, listen, share, dream, create,
care, expose, replicate.

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Figure 22 Portaleras spiral methodology, Fanzine Portal Feminista a la Futura, Photographs by Camaleoni, 2019

In the Manifesto, we walk in a circle that represents the same spiral, opening space for
future women who will walk the same path. This methodology can be read as the spiral model in
popular education, which begins with the experience and knowledge of the participants and
combines collective analysis to develop strategies for action for positive change. The spiral is not
a one-time journey; as the group develops and grows, facilitators can take the group through
multiple turns of the spiral – the fifth stage ('apply what's been learned in the world') can follow
back into the first ('start with the experience and knowledge of the participants') (Glass 2014).
The difference we add to this model is the creation of future visions and the importance of
centering care and healing throughout the process.

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Image from Educating for Change (Arnold 1991)
The group continues engaging with each other, sharing information of interest such as
feminist denounces, imaginative practices and plans to continue doing online activities. In a
group interview, members of the portal recorded some of their experiences. Clara records this
experience detailing encounters where she began processes of self-observation, empathic
listening, deepening her individual and collective love, and expanded her network of affection
and support, which to this day “sustains her with compassion and trust”. Raquel, another member
stated that she felt “identified in this women's space, as a safe and stimulating place to continue
living despite the inhospitality of the present”. Going back to Kara Keeling’s use of poetry from
the future, she sees poetry as a capacity to disrupt habitual ways of knowing and feeling. She
cites Robin D. G. Kelley, who also takes the lead from Aimé Césaire, to state that “progressive
social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best
ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to re-live horrors
and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society” (Kelley 2003). Similarly, we can see
how the poetry of the portal allowed participants to relive the horrors of the past, but at the same
time transport us to a different place.

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This formulation is anchored in the now, but strives “toward the future of a different
present” as “a future presently accessible as a kind of yearning within a shared imagination”. She
argues that the imagination is central because it animates this poetic knowledge and gives “it a
form and content through which it might accrue a material force” (Keeling 2019, 84). For me one
of the key things is “the shared imagination”, the possibility of collectivizing the act of creating
the poetry. In the case of the futurist portals, the space created and space-creating methodology is
meant to generate new material experiments and spaces. Even though Keelings’ theorizations
are based on the Black Radical Imagination, and on the “freedom dreams” that animated prior
movements that aimed to change the world by eradicating racism, colonialism, sexism,
homophobia, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation, they are also shared dreams with the type
of feminist imaginations that the portals are bringing forth, in the context of Nicaragua.
Hopefully this new knowledge, will disrupt the present to “take us to another place, envision a
different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.” In that sense the metaphor of the
portal works well in tandem with the possibility of transporting us to a different and more just
future. One that holds the wounds of the past, and cares for all in the present.

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Memory based feminist imagination for the future and healing
“No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

As presented in this chapter the future is also a disputed terrain. On one hand we can see
corporations investing in the future to maintain the status quo or maximize profits, and on the
other we can see different communities defending their existences and possibility of living in the
future. The Indigenous Futurists, Afrofuturists, ChicanoFuturists, LatinoFuturists artists and
activists are all creating new possibilities for these communities to exist in the future as well as
call attention to the situation in the present. They challenge the spatiotemporal reality of
colonization and neoliberalization disguised as progress and the rise of authoritarianism that
could be thought as a regression to a nostalgic past in the vein of “all past time was better” or
“making America great again”.
In this chapter, I used the decolonial metaphor of dream weaving borrowing from Poka
Laeuni (Lorenz 2013) to describe how different women and feminist groups are creating the
possibilities of a future. Then, I analyzed the project of the Futurist Feminist Portal to think about
how a “poetry from the future” as theorized by Black author Kara Keeling, can help us imagine a
different way of being, knowing and feeling. I highlighted the temporal break that play allows in
contrast to the state and neoliberal temporal dimensions. The methodologies of the Portaleras,
using play and the metaphor of the spiral to space-build feminist spaces, was presented. I also
engaged in a critique to Worldbuilding that I will continue thinking about, especially in relation
to race and gender. Afropessimist scholars have argued that the creation of worlds and its needs
for cohesion, can respond to a dominant logic that is already anti-black (Palmer, 2020).

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In this last section, I want to argue for a “memory-based feminist imagination”;
conceptually, this procedure lies somewhere between “proving” the wounds of the past and
“healing” them by creating the future. Memory in Nicaragua has emerged as a way to organize
to confront the necropolitical strategies and support the recognition of the lives of those that were
killed by the state. It has also emerged as a possibility of healing and asserting the power of the
victims without further revictimization. In this section, I have portrayed how the future also
allows us to collectivize dreams, and imagine new ways of being with a shared imagination.
Here, I want to combine these temporal moves or tactics to add to the imagination, but always
with an awareness of what has happened in the past.
Memory holds potential for the production of affects of indignation, that can also
translate into the future, because the wounds have deep roots. As presented by the Portals, in
order to reconstruct the possibilities of agency and creativity, we need to engage with the
narratives of the past. A feminist memory allows us to identify the specificity that the
mechanisms of violence had on women's bodies and feminized identities; therefore, a memory-
based imagination, allows us to imagine how these bodies can survive the violence, heal and
construct alternatives to the future, hopefully with poetry in community. As Alejandra Pizarnik
writes “To write a poem is to repair the fundamental wound, the tear.”

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FURTHER THOUGHTS ON COLLECTIVE HORIZONS: MEMORY, JUSTICE AND
REPARATIONS
There are no conclusions
Life is inconclusive.
Read on Twitter

Violence atomizes societies, and as presented in the introduction, it is usually confronted
with different strategies of resistance that try to rebuild relationships and communities, and to
rebuild the social fabric that disintegrates out of fear, pain and trauma. The resistance strategies
that we decided to embark on as direct victims, were the collective searches for truth, justice,
memory and integral reparations as stated by AMA’s manifesto. As presented in the previous
chapters, we were able to interlink the search for justice by gathering and organizing information
about the events, with the construction of memory, by honoring the lives of the victims and
acknowledging the experiences that the members of AMA lived, and raising our continuous
demands to the state and the Nicaraguan society. Throughout the text, I acknowledge that this
was possible by the contribution of women organized in AMA, feminist groups and the support
of human rights organizations and many people committed to our cause.
The title of the dissertation Collectivizing Justice: Transmedia Memory Practices,
Participatory Witnessing, and Feminist Space Building in Nicaragua refers to the different
strategies we engaged with, in trying to collectivize the search for justice to the rest of the
country, Nicaraguan people in diaspora, and other audiences as well as the creation of feminist
spaces that counter the violence and imagine other possible futures. For us collectivizing did not
refer only to sharing these experiences, but engaging audiences in the building of new
communities of care. We did this through the creation of a participatory designed website that
tells the stories and killings of around 100 victims of state violence through the voices of more
than 200 family members, a traveling exhibition and a book with an Augmented Reality

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Component. Some of these practices were able to transpose some of the private experiences of
the victims into different forms of public and mediated spaces, and into private spaces as well. I
also engaged in methodologies for building feminist spaces through skill sharing activities, a
video manifesto and a feminist future making zine.
According to normative human rights frameworks, memory should not be utilitarian, the
voices of the victims of human rights violations must occupy a privileged place, and avoid
competition among victims, and the cult of martyrdom and enclosing the person in the victim
condition in the name of past violence should be avoided (Rashid 2004). As presented
throughout the project the collectivization of memory center the victims’ voices and needs in an
integral way supporting our individual and collective becoming activists/survivors/protagonists.
The prioritization of the community, its learning, empowerment, growth and transformation,
instead of just catering and translating for the exterior audiences, is one of the measures of
success of the project. An epistemological shift is made if the stories are told by their
protagonists. In that sense, we challenge “epistemic injustices” as conceptualized by José
Medina, challenging racial and gender hierarchies that not only value certain lives, but also the
validity to speak and give testimony of certain groups (J. Medina 2013).
One of the ways that the needs of the victims were centered was through modular
visibility, in terms of our representation and the representation of the lives of our loved ones.
Another was through a careful approach to the embodied experiences, prioritizing psychosocial
support to grieve and mourn the loss in community, and the third is the opportunity to continue
threading community through pedagogical projects. For me care also relates to reciprocity, to
being answerable to the communities that writers and knowledge producers claim to belong to or
claim to serve (Tuck and Yang 2016).

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The memory construction projects have a pedagogical component, including efforts to
promote healing spaces and pedagogical interchanges with the community of victims and
members of the museum team. As presented throughout the text, we engaged in mapping,
photography, embroidery, podcasts, photogrammetry and transitional justice workshops as well
as other spaces for listening and dialogue. As Freire states, pedagogical projects allow people to
“come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation”
(Freire 2014, 83). Even for the wider society the project has become a center for the pedagogy of
human rights by creating three seasons of the Podcasts Barricades of Memory, an International
Online Conference titled “Collective Struggle Against Oblivion”, becoming a source for data
journalism projects and by presenting yearly homages and concerts in the anniversary of the
massacres. I believe that the possibility of having a systematization and written project of the
dissertation allows for the construction and sharing of knowledge even further. I want to reiterate
my contributions from praxis as a set of decolonial and depatriarchal design principles that are
the following:
• Conceptualizing memory as subjective, embodied and autobiographical and recognize the
emotional aspect of this labor
• Collectivizing memory by thread individual and collective stories through media
• Elevating organic practices of resistance and memorialization
• Modulating visibility, by refusing the demands of current regimes of visuality
• Opening new possibilities spaces for engagement, participation, recognition and
vulnerability that cross gender, race and nationality lines
• Building power, learning and tools to foster intergenerational future visions
• Puncturing systems and narratives that uphold violence

163

To add to a larger academic and interdisciplinary discourse, I argue that the use of
transmedia allows us to think about how the stories are able to be represented and archived by the
victims, and used and connected by other activists. I use them interlocked with Latin American
tradition of popular communication, assuming activist practices are located in people’s lives, and
built from their own knowledge, adding to the repertoire of traditional activist practices that AMA
also engaged with (marches, sit-ins, etc.). Furthermore, through the idea of participatory
witnessing, I contend that the exhibition space had a political profile, transiting from exhibition to a
conceptual space that creates new realities. There was an open invitation for visitors to become
activists of memory, as they shared their own experiences, and as co-creators who left their own
marks and performed activities in the space, while sharing the pain and mourning of the
community. With regards to wider audiences, and the uses of digital media for remembrance, I
consider issues of refusal for users that are not interested in being invested with the political and
social demands of the victims.
With these learning outcomes I want to grapple with the inherent contradictions of what
justice and reparations constitute in the midst of a human rights crisis that has lasted four years
and might last much more. If we consider the framework of transitional justice, the objectives we
would like to achieve with a process as such is based on the restitution of the rights of the
victims, among them:
1) The right to truth, to know through independent investigations about the facts.
2) The right to justice by judging the guilty actors and dismantle the system of repression
and complicity to prevent it from happening again.

164
3) The right to reparations of the victims who must be repaired, compensated and
rehabilitated.
4) The right to guarantees of non-repetition, including the dissolution of parastatal armed
groups and the repeal of all emergency provisions, legislative or otherwise.
The program of transitional justice develops the practical application of different options
available to confront situations of internal war or dictatorships, where massive violations of
human rights have occurred, in order to access justice and restore the rule of law. If one restores
the rule of law, there is a confidence that the new institutions will make their best efforts to serve
justice. I want to problematize this framework with a couple of ideas from feminist and
abolitionist thinkers. I am invested in continuing thinking about these issues as the situation
evolves in Nicaragua and as AMA also faces new challenges. I engage with the concept of justice
with a hopeful attitude, as Villa Avendaño affirms that “hope is the iron defense of life in the
face of the necrophilia of the world of capital”(Villa Avendaño 2020, 206).
Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, argue that by considering what justice desires, we might
examine the role of the State and its functioning through promising, harnessing, and
manufacturing hopes for justice (Tuck and Yang 2016). They state that it might be more
productive to think what justice lacks in its promises. I agree with them that justice in its legal
conceptualization is a system of punishment and rewards, and that at best, such mechanisms
achieve only a “temporary armistice between me and my oppression” (Tuck and Yang 2016, 6).
Furthermore, many feminists and abolitionists have criticized the limits of the patriarchal justice,
because the role of the state in perpetuating violence against women and feminized bodies. María
Galindo of Mujeres Creando in Bolivia says that “there are not enough police to contain macho
violence, since the police itself is an arm of production of patriarchal violence”(Galindo 2020). I

165
would say that all institutional arms of the state, the judicial system, the police and military
system, are producers of patriarchal, classist and racialized violence. We must establish that
justice, truth, reparation and non-repetition also require new legal and maybe para-legal
mechanisms. Here, I am arguing for a new set of questions about the conceptualization of
collective justice, which take in their consideration the reverberations of pain, violence across
time, media and space. It is a conceptual work that has to center the wellbeing of all victims,
both of the state and of sexual abuse, that does not represent more trauma in the process and also
considers the racial and class character of the violence exercised.
Fernanda Zeledón, a young feminist, in a writing about Transitional Justice in Nicaragua
talks about how the place of mothers, survivors, human rights defenders, journalists,
psychologists, researchers, educators, students, activists among other essential subjects in this a
path of transformation, is an unquestionable reality. For her, our perspectives and experiences are
fundamental in the structural re-construction of Nicaragua: “The struggles that organized women
undertake on a daily basis for the transformation of trauma, the construction of safe spaces, the
resignification of pain and justice are radical alternatives to the dystopian regressions so longed
for by big capital” (Zeledon 2020).
For future dream weaving, collectivizing Justice means collectivizing Justice with the
living. And when I talk about living, I include all the lives that are usually excluded trans
women, black women, migrant women, indigenous women, young people at risk, and more. In
that sense, I follow abolitionist and transformative work authors that state that “justice is
removing the capacity for police to kill and continue to harm people in that community…That
brings us closer to community-based justice—justice not just for the dead, but also for the living
(Purnell and Evans 2018).

166
I argue we need to imagine what Justice really would mean, to imagine not only a
framework for “justice” or “the emancipation of women”, but to name the specific and collective
experience of victims across nation boundaries, and experiences of exile and dispossesion before
a Necro state, before the abysmal device and Necro-machine (Reguillo 2021, 9). Facing these
unsurmountable challenges with projects of memory, justice, healing, the creation of safe spaces
for the transformation of trauma and politicization. To continue building, imagining and being
light in this abyss, which seems endless, but that only we can illuminate.

167

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Untitled: an exploration of virtual reality as a cinematic medium

Asset Metadata

Creator Yang Rappaccioli, Emilia Tzaoting (author)

Core Title Collectivizing justice: transmedia memory practices, participatory witnessing, and feminist space building in Nicaragua

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Juris Doctor / Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/19/2022

Defense Date 04/21/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 3D,activism,affect,archives,augmented reality,dictatorship,digital media,embodiment,Feminism,futurism,gender,GIS,human rights,imagination,Justice,mapping,Memory,OAI-PMH Harvest,participatory design,Race,state violence,Transmedia,trauma,Truth,visibility,witnessing

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kratky, Andreas (committee chair), McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Anderson, Steve (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Riaño-Alcalá, Pilar (committee member)

Creator Email emilia.yang.rappaccioli@gmail.com,emiliaya@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111373232

Unique identifier UC111373232

Legacy Identifier etd-YangRappac-10862

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Yang Rappaccioli, Emilia Tzaoting

Type texts

Source 20220719-usctheses-batch-956 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu