Art Is How We Remember What Power Wants Us to Forget

In 2019, I talked to a group of women looking for asylum who told me about the months they spent in a detention center in South Texas after trying to get refuge on the US-Mexico border. For a few weeks, they were denied in the soul, forced to go through clothes during periods, and they were given food. These women transferred the conditions to break them. But instead of silent, they organized Crying freedom– Creek for freedom.

One night more than a thousand women shouted unison. It was a lamentation, a protest, a collective act of resistance, a requirement and release.

Imagine the act contrary to: a thousand women shouted for freedom when the armed guards followed them.

They believed when those who of us from outside heard them do not care. But we refused to hear them, and therefore no one came.

Them Crying freedom For many years he pursued me. The cry is unheard of. The story is not like that. Now I understand: they not only demanded their freedom. They tried to warn us. If we only paid attention.

In March, our government, acting in our name, forcibly directed 238 Venezuelan men to the notorious mega-scratch in Salvador, known as Sycot. Some were removed in accordance with the law on foreign enemies of the 18th century. Many of these men were asylum seekers or had legal grounds in the US. However, they were assembled on a dead night, called the criminal and disappeared in a third country prison.

Although the United States government insisted that these men were “dangerous”, it did not give any evidence confirming such claims. State officials consistently mislead the court and the public. These gross human rights violations are built on the lie of the government. The government must manipulate memory to record us in your false story and substantiate the erosion of our most fundamental values. It must erase the story. This should overcome us misinformation and fear.

This is a car of authoritarianism. And it is here that the art becomes important – not decorative, not symbolic, but urgent and necessary. In the conditions of institutional gas lighting, the arts for the passage of truth becomes. He resists silence. Art insists: We were here, we saw, we remember.

On June 1, I turned my own grief into protest – and protest into art.

I conceived, managed and organized more than 50 people who gathered on the steps of the statue of freedom to bring back our public space as a place of memory and denunciation. We gathered to show that our country, a place that once welcomed immigrants, is now disappearing. We insisted on the truth in the country that is now being built on silence.

With the cold wind, which struck us through the clouds, a ray of sunlight made its way when I started talking the names of 238 men disappeared into the silver. One by one. Every name is breathing. Each name is early. Each warning name.

It was the ritual of their existence. Repeated. Public refusal to forget.

And then we shouted from silence.

Our own Crying freedom.

Collective cry, demand: Freedom for 238 men who have illegally disappeared.

Art has always been our memory – imposed on cave walls, woven into the fabric painted on the sides of the buildings. This is how we remembered ourselves through the centuries of violence, silence and erasure. We only need to look a few years ago to find road maps to resist through art.

All over the world, the movement used art to move the memory where the governments tried to erase it. In Chile Ramon Paron (BRP) reminds us that the walls are never neutral; This is a battlefield for memory and truth. Under the dictatorship of Pinochet, public expression was defeated, protested in criminal responsibility, and the memory of the disappeared. But in the following years, BRP was restored on the streets by bold, collective martialism – actions of disobeying color and shape. They painted what official history tried to erase. They showed that art is not a passive display of a moment – it is a tool for confronting power, memory carrying and ignition.

In Argentina, Las Madres de La Plaza -de -May turned the grief into the form of art -living, breathing a denunciation of state terror. As the military dictatorship disappeared thousands of sons and daughters, the regime insisted that they never existed. But Madres refused to erase. They gathered every Thursday at the site of Buenos -Arez, who silently swirled with white handkerchiefs – symbols of mourning, disobedience and maternal force. Their march was not loud, but it was thunder. They used their bodies as live testimony, a public speech that smashed a carefully built silence of the dictatorship. It was a protest. It was art. It was a memory made visible.

In my home country, Colombia, La-Kaloln 13 in Medellin-One of the most violent and marginal areas of the city-storage symbol of resistance through art, and in the heart-hip-hop. For decades, the Colombian state has neglected people who lived there, offering only militarization and refusal. But the youth of Caper 13 refused their history through the rap, graffiti, break-dans and the diing-four hip hop pillars. They turned pain into poetry, injury into truth. Artists and local groups began to use hip -hip as a tool to demand justice, document state violence and celebrate sustainability in society. Their music and murals turned steep, winding streets of the neighborhood into an open -air resistance archive.

On Sunday, when our shouts responded from the statue of freedom, our bodies stood frozen – rooted at the place of unwavering, veneration and collective force. No one wanted to move. It was felt holy, it is necessary to remain.

Then my dear girlfriend, Yara Glass – Venezueel, February and full of fire – struck silence and said, “Our desire for liberation is stronger than our fear of repression.“

We all repeated it. Mantra. Promise.

Now I have a burden of these words not only as comfort but also in the direction.

Let them also send you – through fear, through doubt – when we fight for the heart and soul of our country.