Description
This paper examines Las Cuchas Tienen la Razón (The Cuchas Are Right) as a living site of feminist resistance and memory artivism. Painted in Medellín in 2025 by youth artists, activists, and cuchas (an affectionate Colombian term for elder women, often mothers or kin of the disappeared), the graffiti emerged after the first human remains were found at La Escombrera, a landfill and a territory that speaks truth long identified by the women buscadoras (those who search for the disappeared) despite state denial and public disregard. Its erasure by local authorities sparked solidarity actions across South and North America, and Europe, revealing how territorial memory moves through the land, walls, bodies, and digital space, forming feminist ecologies of memory and care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper engages with collective aesthetic and affective practices that sustain truth-making and make visible relational, intergenerational political agency between women buscadoras and youth artivists in Colombia’s post-accord context marked by persistent violence. It argues that feminist artivism enacts and weaves decolonial ecologies of memory and care, where mourning and remembrance become collective practices of relational care toward bodies, land, and community. These practices offer new ways of imagining justice, repair, and truth and stand as a living insistence that remembrance, when rooted in embodied territories of care, refuses erasure.
