From collecting an archive to artistic practice in the Intimal project: lessons learned from listening to a Colombian migrant women’s oral history archive

Abstract

This paper describes a multidisciplinary encounter with oral testimony archives and their incorporation in the artistic research project INTIMAL. It explores ways in which to creatively listen to stories which might be emotionally challenging, and to create and sustain empathy with these disembodied voices, which contain a shared history as fissures of sixty years of violence.

Keywords: listening; oral archives; retrieval; Colombian conflict.