Abstract

AGUILLON LOMBANA, ANGÉLICA. Disaster, memory and materiality: the objects and identity of the armeritas 35 years after the avalanche. memorias [online]. 2021, n.45, pp.178-203.  Epub Apr 27, 2022. ISSN 1794-8886.  https://doi.org/10.14482/memor.45.986.1361.

This article reports the relationship of a group of survivors from Armero with some objects that were saved together with them from the socio-natural disaster. By doing so, throughout the text is developed the idea that: if what survives from a disaster of this nature are subjects and objects, the emergent account of the former in relation to the latter can provide information associated to the identity of the survivors long after the disaster. To corroborate this, an ethnographic study was carried out in which accounts of twenty-five survivors were compiled about the objects that they keep together with them and which come from the devastated territory. This work made it possible to identify aspects of the identity of the armeritas, both, in its foundational substrate and in the one that has been built throughout these 35 years of uprooting. The findings indicate that the identity of the objects is transformed due to the disaster, but more importantly, that they supply in a certain way the lost materiality, insofar as they act as symbolic containers that activate memory through a deep connection that their owners establish with them, and the situations of the past daily life that they represent. Those essential aspects can be provided and analyzed through language and memory.

Keywords : memory and disaster; territory and identity; objects and language.

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