The poetics in the vestiges led the journalist Adriana López to approach Armero. Guided, at first, by the idea of the “ghost town”, she found the opposite: a city alive and present, and with survivors who want to talk about their city. One of them is Hernán Darío Nova, an artist who has dedicated his life to building the memory of Armero.
Go through the Café Hawaii, the Founders Park, the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán School, the Sajonia Bakery, the San Lorenzo Hospital or the parish that bears the same name. Undertake a journey through the memory of the old Armero and elaborate a path through it from the multiple voices found in the metaphysical construction of the city. Feeling that Armero lives, that the voices of the survivors, although in diaspora for almost 36 years, make the city feel in the present time, not in the past. Encountering a continuous attempt to occupy, even mentally, the territory in which memories of grandparents, parents, children, siblings, uncles, cousins and friends remain; and, as such, know the attempts to maintain that place, where about 25,000 souls rest, as a sacred space.
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“Gunsmith will disappear when the last witness disappears,” says Hernán Darío Nova, an armerita who has dedicated his life to building the memory of the ancient city through art and culture. In his opinion, that is the contemporaneity that Armero has: that it is still alive in the survivors, and it will continue to be until the last of them dies. In his case, art has been his accomplice. Believing that this is the way to make the abstract something visible, and that art can be a meeting point to remember, Metaphysical Spaces, Armeroscopes and the Memorial to the victims of Armero and the visit of John Paul II are some of the interventions you have carried out on behalf of your community. Placing himself among the ruins and finding that in the middle of an empty space the hands and the mind can recreate the description of doors and windows, led him to make the first of them. Projecting a photo that in the background is reflected in an acrylic, which shows what occupied the space more than three decades ago, recreating a before and after ten points in the city, and transposing the two times when trying to imitating the angle of photography that shows what was there before, prompted him to create the second art project. And the need to offer a new perspective on the dialogue about Armero, leaving aside the stigma of the Armeritas as victims, to refer to them as survivors, led him to build the silhouette of the high pontiff with stones from the city. In 2015, on the occasion of the thirty years of the tragedy, this piece was inaugurated with the intention of promoting a discursive change: stop talking about destruction and death to talk about spirituality, solidarity and encouragement.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsThe poetics in the vestiges and the stories behind them led Adriana López to approach Armero. Guided, at first, by the idea of the “ghost town”, the journalist found the opposite: a city alive and present, and with survivors who want to talk about their city to tell from their voices what Armero is. He found that in the Chronicles of the Indies they already spoke of the territory, although not with the name that we now know, and that over time stories and legends have been built that do not coincide with what the Armeritas tell; López compiled, in Los fantasmas de Armero or the fifth element: chronicles from the body (Editorial Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana), a series of stories from popular culture and official documents, as well as legends and memories of the armeritas, with the intention of putting together a cartography of Armero with multiple voices, building what in his words is a “universal memory”.
The challenge when writing the book was precisely that: talking about Armero, but not from the show. It was allowing oneself to inhabit a space that, despite being sacred, has been invaded by stories that on radio and television have been motivated by morbidness, leaving aside the narratives of its inhabitants. That is why it was important to sit down and talk with the Armeritas, who, despite being scattered throughout the world, have made an effort to work on the memory of their city, as well as allowing the Armero itself to permeate, and even overcome, their five senses. , in order to be able to go through it from photos, poems and chronicles. “It’s not nice to think that those you loved were reduced to a circus attraction,” says Nova. And it is that people like Ana Cecilia Santos, vice president of the Colonia de Armero Association, who remembers how she built with her companions La Sagrada Familia, the school where she studied, and Sandra Bolaños, who every year returns to Armero to leave flowers for her parents, they travel the city from their memories and, through them, they still live in it.
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Nova recognizes that there is a dispute around the construction of the memory of the city, and this associates it with the fact that the people who live there today are not armeritas. Part of his work, from the Armero Visitors Center, has focused on finding ways to generate consensus and agreements in the construction of that common goal, for example, with the creation of scripts and established routes for the tourist guides of the place, that within their informality they receive people in the territory and disseminate uncertain information. However, the lack of coordination has made work difficult; That is the great challenge behind Armero’s attempts to build memory: putting communication processes into practice, reaching consensus and moving from words to the consolidation of testimonies, since everyone remembers Armero according to the way in which lived it.
And it is that remembering Armero is also a responsibility with history. Part of the magnitude of the tragedy is explained by the fact that its inhabitants were not told about the danger that Nevado del Ruiz represented for them, they were never told about the latent threat that living near the “sleeping lion” brought. as the volcano is known. “They all failed there,” says López. Hence it is understood that Nova also works from the culture of risk, because, according to he confesses, one of his greatest fears is that history will deviate and that humanity will not learn from what happened: that his city was physically destroyed by a disaster natural. Meanwhile, and while the Memory Route project is stalled due to lack of resources, it has not found a strong and constant institutional support to execute it in its entirety, and after collecting some testimonies in the Armeritas Narratives , thanks to the exchange of information between survivors in social networks, his work for the construction of the memory of Armero continues.