AMA y No Olvida Collectivizing Memory Against Impunity: Transmedia Memory Practices, Modular Visibility, and Activist Participatory Design in Nicaragua

Abstract

In 2018, families of victims of lethal state violence in Nicaragua organized as the Association Mothers of April (AMA) to collectively search for truth, justice, and reparations. This article analyzes the development of the transmedia project AMA y No Olvida, Museum of Memory against Impunity, created for remembering and dignifying the victims by an interdisciplinary team in collaboration with AMA. The digital archive hosts the results of transmedia memory practices engaged by the community: accounts about the deaths via hand-drawn maps, digital maps, video testimonies, and a photographic archive of each victim. In the creation of the archive, the community’s needs were centered, and we proposed “modular visibility” against the revictimization caused by the circulation of media that represented the victims’ violent deaths. The contribution is centered on the use of participatory design methods to create a community digital archive and a temporary exhibition fostering transmedia activist memory practices that turned the private grieving of AMA members into public mourning, building wider mnemonic communities.