Singing Truth to Power : Creative performance as restorative (gender) justice and collective healing in periods of transition from violence

Critical feminist scholars have demonstrated that, despite the increased attention to gender justice, Transitional Justice mechanisms are still leaving structural power relations unchallenged in post-war settings (Fobear & Baines, 2020). In Colombia, while the Commission for the Clarification of Truth Coexistence and Non-Repetition (CEV) has been praised for its efforts to ensure gender mainstreaming and gender balance in its composition and procedure, women's collectives argue that it has failed to focus on everyday forms of structural violence and therefore, to offer a space for collective healing from trauma. This is why through traditional oral music, Afro-Colombian dance, performance, street art, some women's collectives have sought to provide alternative spaces to bureaucracy and institutional TJ mechanisms. The aim of this paper is to trace the convergence between musical performance, testimony and healing. It examines creative efforts to respond to official TJ mechanisms and judicial ambivalence to perpetrators of violence. We collaborate with Enkelé Voces y tambores, a feminist activist and musical group that questions, promotes and disseminates the cultural heritage of bailes cantados and mestizaje of the African diaspora in Latin America in order to foster spaces free of violence. By introducing three distinct musical spatialities – aesthetic, ethical and political space (Veal 2020) – through which official narratives of violence and conflict are upstaged and contested, the paper calls for greater critical conceptual attention to thinking intimate geopolitics through creative performance and examines the creative possibilities afforded by music and choreography to document and testify to an enduring culture of violence and their role in probing the effectiveness of post-peace agreement Colombian restorative justice.