Coffee, Cocaine, and Roller Coasters

The Making of Memory in Colombian Theme Parks

“Coffee, cocaine […] That’s what the tourists expect when they come [to Colombia],” offered Gabriel with a half-smile. A self-described hippie and lifelong resident of the region that hosts the Parque del Café, he has witnessed waves of tourists arrive in search of a country they thought they already knew: its rolling hillsides draped with coffee trees, the pastoral charm of campesino life, and the lingering, perfumed shadow of narcotic excess. One a celebrated patrimonial crop,…

Disrupted (Post)identities

Memory, Place, and the Power of the ‘Post’

In a recent scholarly forum, I was invited to respond to a manuscript that explored the use of the prefix ‘post’ as a heuristic device, specifically in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. This exercise prompted me to pause and reflect on my own deployment of the term ‘post’ across multiple registers in my research, particularly as it relates to my positionality in (post)colonial Australia and (post)war/(post)socialist Poland. The exercise was catalytic: it opened a space to interrogate the ‘post’ not merely as a temporal marker, but as a powerful discursive tool that shapes our understanding of memory, place, and identity…

Interview With Franci Duran about her Video Art Installation 8401

8401 is a video installation that includes a video loop showing images of a building and the streets in front. Depending on the room in which the installation is being shown, there are one or more devices playing sound files. The image — or images — of the video shift slowly but constantly, and they look a bit like a collage made from the snippets of different pictures. […]