The civil association AFADEM, of relatives of victims of forced disappearance during the period known as the Dirty War in the 1970s, is located in the Sierra de Atoyac, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. They all had one request: a place to remember their relatives (not a grave, because if they were taken alive, they must return alive). This place was also to convey a strong message: their willingness to continue the struggle they have maintained for so many years against oblivion and for justice.
In response to this, a multidisciplinary team was convened to produce this memorial as part of a documentary film production entitled Atoyac, el agua que corre. Starting from the premise that, as creatives, we should not make the mistake of indifferently interpreting the reality of these people's lives, we decided that what we wanted to show should be faithful to their subjectivities, to their way of seeing their contexts, their meanings, their culture and their memories.
This is the value of the project: architecture was used to channel specific cultural and historical symbols and signs to create an appropriate and appropriable memorial icon that serves a collective social justice demand and transcends the discipline to create tools for cinematic expression.
Participatory design methods were used to operationalize the integration of various actors, (all older adults of limited resources, many of them illiterate) these methods were developed based primarily on their spatial intuitions and anchored with their memories through determining the materials and shapes to compose, guiding their contributions with their 5 basic senses of perception and how these memories become geometric records that can be built with the resources they can provide and obtain from the immediate environment.
The result was a paraboloid with a bamboo structure woven with organic ropes on a circular base of river rocks surrounded by plants that has in its center an empty chair and a bonfire. It represents how the struggle has been complex and forceful, how a triangle emerges from the ground and shelters them, that the group union is identified as an equal circle, that they as individuals within this group are like the stones of the river, all different, but strong, made of the same material, moreover, the stones of the river represent that border that their loved ones crossed when they were extracted and that they must pass through it to return, thus representing a threshold or door, the plants represent the field as their home, the fire represents pain and hope, the empty chair is the irrefutable proof that they existed and they will not forget, the chair represents the right to be present.
Currently, this space is the center of meetings and activities of the association. On August 30, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance is commemorated, and AFADEM then makes a pilgrimage following the steps where the victims were taken. Throwing flowers along the way, they cross the rivers and arrive at the memorial. Once there, they renew their ties, paint the bamboo, maintain the garden, hang the photographs of their relatives and light the bonfire. They prepare food and everyone stays there until late at night.
This memorial and the participatory design methodological contributions used received the National Design Award in Mexico, and other international organizations have shown their support for the continuation of this project and the production of the aforementioned documentary, which at the time of publication of this article is in the post-production phase.
