The Eloquent Silences:

Art and Performative Memory of the Shoah in Silencio (2005) by Erika Diettes (Colombia)

Abstract

The artworks of Erika Diettes explore the relationship between art and the memory of violence in conflicts. In Silencios (2005), Diettes addresses the memory of the Shoah in Colombia by creating photographic triptychs —text, portrait, and a personal object of the victims— that facilitate a direct confrontation between the viewer and the victims, fostering what Ricoeur calls a work of memory, where artistic representation allows access to what would otherwise remain forgotten. The brief texts written by the victims paradoxically reinforce the eloquence of silence, evoking the unspoken as a form of mnemonic testimony. Deleuze and Guattari (2005) propose that art does not merely preserve memories but generates blocks of sensations that transcend time and space. In Silencios, this is manifested through the use of black-and-white photographs, which evoke the historical and emotional permanence of the events. The object, often an old photograph, symbolizes the trace of loved ones, recreating, in Ricoeur's terms, the process of memory reconfiguration. Diettes makes forgotten victims visible and dissolves the fog of oblivion, dignifying their stories in a process of performative memory.