Memories of Peru's internal armed conflict will be topic of next talk in the University of Northern British Columbia Anthropology in Our Backyard Series.
Between 1980 and 2000, some 70,000 people were killed in the South American country and the majority were indigenous Quechua speakers.
In 2013, Kirk Walker spent two weeks in the country while doing research in the field for a UNBC Master of Arts degree.
He collaborated with 10 individuals in the Humananquiqua community of Ayacucho who used digital cameras to illustrate their memories of the conflict through participatory photography.
Walker will talk about his research during a special presentation entitled: Landscape and Collective Memory in Post-Conflict Ayacucho, Peru: Narratives and Photography of Survivors this Thursday at Exploration Place at 7 p.m.
The presentation is free and open to the public.
Walker's research explores the pivotal role of memory in reconciliation and transitional justice in Ayacucho, a former epicentre of violence.
The resulting conversations during Walker's fieldwork reveal not only places of violence, hiding and escape, but also of community resilience and empowerment through storytelling.
"For me, the two primary take-aways of this research were the collective memory of traumatic experience is more than a monument on the landscape, it's a transformation of identity and that narrative storytelling through photography has an incredible power to heal," said Walker.
