Poetics of listening

Summary

For me, research-creation does not consist in representing a reality that already exists, but in creating the conditions for listening through which other forms of knowledge can emerge, circulate and transform our understanding of territory.

For me, research-creation does not consist in representing a reality that already exists, but in creating the conditions for listening through which other forms of knowledge can emerge, circulate and transform our understanding of territory. My academic and literary research is unconventional. I am interested in studying what words can do when life has been wounded: how they can preserve memory, transform an experience of pain, restore ties with a territory and open possibilities for the future. I therefore answer these questions drawing on the research article by Hoyos Guzmán et al., "Escuchar el mar herido: mujeres, memoria ambiental e investigación-creación en el Magdalena" [Listening to the wounded sea: women, environmental memory and research-creation in Magdalena], in Revista de Estudios Colombianos (REC), volume 67, 2026, published by the Asociación de Colombianistas. The article has been reviewed and accepted through blind peer review and is already being typeset for forthcoming publication on the journal's official website.

In that article, I systematise my experience as a researcher on Cartas al Mar: Niñas, adolescentes y mujeres escriben sobre la vida en el mar [Letters to the Sea: girls, adolescents and women write about life at sea], a 2024 research-creation project at the Universidad del Magdalena funded by CEIMAR through its 2023 call for support to young PhD holders. I bring it into dialogue with Professor Judith del Socorro Ballesteros López's project Mujeres lideresas en Santa Marta. Participación política de las mujeres en el Caribe (1960-2025) [Women leaders in Santa Marta: women's political participation in the Caribbean, 1960-2025], a 2024 audiovisual research-creation project at the Universidad del Magdalena. My answers here draw on reflections from that publication and on my literary and social scientific experience and understanding as a researcher-creator.

What do literature and research-creation help us understand about women's intimate and sensory relationships with the sea in the Colombian Caribbean, and which dimensions of this experience tend to escape institutional or strictly scientific approaches?

Literature and research-creation help us understand that women's relationship with the sea in the Colombian Caribbean cannot be reduced to a functional relationship with a natural resource, landscape or productive space. In the work carried out in Magdalena, the sea emerges as a lived territory, memory, interlocutor, refuge, space of subsistence and emotional presence. This is why I have used the concept of maritorio: not simply to name a geographical portion of the coast, but to understand a web of material, symbolic, emotional and community relationships in which land and sea form part of a single lived experience. In Cartas al Mar, for example, participants do not only write about the sea: they write to the sea. This shift is methodologically very important because it makes the sea an interlocutor and allows it to emerge as a living entity within the narrative experience.

Literature thus gives access to dimensions of experience that rarely appear when territory is observed exclusively through technical categories. A letter can record a childhood memory, a family relationship with fishing, a bodily sensation, concern about declining fish stocks or a promise of care. These elements may seem secondary from a strictly scientific perspective, but they are fundamental to understanding how a community experiences environmental change. The letters analysed contain, for example, memories associated with artisanal fishing, lessons passed down by mothers and grandmothers, recollections of the beach and references to environmental deterioration. Ecological damage is not necessarily expressed through technical indicators: it is experienced as loss, concern, grief or changes in everyday living conditions.

This is particularly important because institutional archives and official narratives of conflict memory have historically privileged harm inflicted on human bodies: massacres, displacement, disappearances and persecution. That perspective is indispensable, but insufficient for understanding what happens in territories where violence also transforms ecosystems, local economies and community relationships. In the Colombian Caribbean, environmental harms intertwine with territorial inequality, growing economic insecurity and transformations of coastal spaces. Women provide access to this dimension because many sustain everyday practices associated with water, food, raising children and community life.

Research-creation extends this possibility further because it does not regard artistic creation solely as a product that follows research. In this work, writing and audiovisual production are simultaneously forms of inquiry, archives and means of listening. A letter, a conversation in front of a camera, a silence, a pause or a gesture can therefore become material for understanding how memory takes shape. Audiovisual work records performative dimensions of embodied memory, including silences, gestures and emotions, that are not always captured in verbal transcription.

I would therefore say that what tends to escape strictly scientific approaches is not necessarily something "less objective", but another form of knowledge. What escapes is the emotional texture of experience, family memories, relationships of care, the ways ecological change is felt in the body and alters everyday life, and the more-than-human relationships communities establish with rivers, trees, fish, beaches and other beings.

Research-creation makes it possible to expand the archive so that these dimensions can be recognised as knowledge. In this sense, my proposal is not to replace scientific knowledge with literature, but to bring different ways of knowing into dialogue. Literature has a particular capacity to bring forth the intimate, metaphorical, emotional and symbolic; research provides tools for analysis and contextualisation; and research-creation allows both dimensions to meet in a situated process of listening.

In the voices, memories and experiences of the women you have worked with, how do environmental and social changes along the coast appear? What specific forms of vulnerability, care, transmission or resistance do they reveal?

These changes appear primarily as embodied and relational experiences, rather than abstract environmental diagnoses. Women describe a territory that has changed because the possibilities for inhabiting it have changed: fish decline, coastal landscapes are transformed, access to certain spaces is lost, economic and community practices are altered and, in some cases, forced displacement breaks historical ties with beaches, rivers and places of subsistence. This is why I argue that environmental harm is a constitutive part of the memory of conflict and cannot be understood as a secondary consequence.

A particularly significant form of environmental perception emerges in the Cartas al Mar letters. One participant states that "there are fewer and fewer fish to satisfy our hunger". Beyond its testimonial value, this expression condenses a relationship between ecology, food, the household economy and inequality. Declining marine resources are not only an environmental problem: they directly affect the material conditions of existence. Ecosystem transformation is experienced through hunger, work and subsistence.

Vulnerability is therefore not solely ecological. It is socio-environmental and differentiated. Territorial changes particularly affect those who depend daily on the territory's resources and community networks. The women we worked with also show how territorial violence intersects with patriarchal structures. Women's resistance does not occur in a vacuum: it develops in response to gender inequality, economic insecurity, displacement, political violence and territorial loss.

But this is precisely where a point I consider central emerges: women do not appear solely as vulnerable subjects.

One of the most important findings is that women are also ecological mediators. This expression allows me to name practices that are not necessarily presented as "environmental activism" but sustain territorial life every day: caring, transmitting knowledge, feeding, educating, remembering, organising, defending community spaces and establishing reciprocal relationships with nature. In the article, I propose understanding women's agency beyond formal political participation, precisely through these practices of care, transmission and collective creation.

Intergenerational transmission is fundamental. In the letters, the sea is linked to family memories, fishing and learning trades. In Francia Carmona's testimony, meanwhile, the relationship with nature is shaped by a relational understanding: river, forest, lagoon and plants possess life and meaning. Knowledge passes between generations of women, especially through mothers and grandmothers. Textile work appears here as a practice of memory: every stitch establishes continuity between generations, territory and life.

I also find a political dimension of care that particularly interests me. Dilma Nieto Barraza's testimony shows how childcare, initially considered a domestic and almost invisible activity, became the foundation of a women's political organisation. Community mothers offered their own homes and resources to sustain care and, from that everyday experience, built collective mobilisation to demand recognition as workers. This shows that care should not be understood as apolitical or exclusively private: it can become a platform for organisation and social transformation.

Resistance also appears in the way women narrate. Narration can recover what has been displaced from the official archive. When a woman remembers a lost territory, describes a transformed landscape or transmits knowledge from her mother or grandmother, she is doing more than recalling something individually: she is producing territorial memory.

I am therefore particularly interested in the relationship between memory and emotion. Grief, indignation, concern, gratitude and hope are not secondary features of these accounts. They are forces that help explain why people become attached to particular places and choose to defend them. In Sara Ahmed's terms, emotions circulate and produce collective bonds. In the experiences analysed, affection for the sea and pain at its deterioration can become forms of responsibility and action.

These women's voices consequently reveal a dual condition: they testify to the wound while also producing possibilities for repair and for the future. This is not about romanticising their resilience or turning them into heroic figures. It is about recognising that, even in contexts of vulnerability, everyday practices enable women to sustain community relationships, transmit knowledge and defend the material and symbolic conditions that make life possible.

What ethical and methodological conditions do you consider necessary for a literary work or research-creation process to go beyond representing women's experiences and genuinely help their knowledge and capacity for action to be heard?

For me, this is probably the most important question, because it requires a shift from an ethics of representation to an ethics of listening.

The first condition is to recognise that women are not simply "sources" of information. In Escuchar el mar herido, I begin from precisely this premise: participants produce memory and knowledge. Research-creation must create conditions in which their knowledge can emerge without becoming entirely subordinate to the researcher's pre-established categories.

This entails an important methodological change. Researchers should not enter a territory solely to extract testimonies and later turn them into academic data. They must build a process of relationship. In our case, this meant working through writing workshops, collective readings, conversations, accompaniment in the field, biographical interviews and processes of sharing results back with participants. In Cartas al Mar, for example, the letter served as a pedagogical and methodological medium, while collective readings transformed individual experiences into spaces of shared listening.

A second condition is reflexivity. Researchers must recognise that they never occupy a neutral position. They also help construct what they later call "data", "testimony", "archive" or "work". In our case, we acknowledged our own embeddedness in the territory and our participation in creative processes. The camera, image selection, editing, an interview question and even the way an exhibition is organised are decisions that produce meaning.

I therefore consider it essential to keep asking: who speaks? Who decides what is recorded? Who interprets? Who appears? Who is left out? Who has the right to modify or question our representation of their experience?

A third condition is giving back. Research should not end when the researcher obtains results and publishes an article. If people have shared experiences, knowledge, images, memories and emotions, forms of return must be considered. In the article, we identify informed consent, recognition of collective authorship and returning results to participants as ethical principles of the process.

A fourth condition is to allow creation to retain something of the complexity of experience. Not everything has to be translated immediately into academic language. Silence can also be knowledge; a gesture can be memory; a metaphor can contain an understanding of territory; and a letter can express a relationship with the world that a technical category cannot register.

This is especially clear in audiovisual work. The camera records not only what a woman says but also pauses, silences, gestures and emotions. In this sense, the sensory and affective archive expands the traditional concept of an archive and incorporates bodily and emotional dimensions of memory.

There is a fifth condition that I consider fundamental: not reducing women to victims.

Working with communities affected by conflict, displacement or environmental deterioration carries a constant risk of creating representations centred on suffering. An ethics of listening must also allow knowledge, humour, creativity, organisation, desire, memory, care and the capacity to imagine futures to emerge.

In our work, this means shifting our gaze from "women victims of conflict" towards women who produce memory, sustain territories, transmit knowledge and build agency. This conceptual transformation is also a political transformation of representation.

Finally, I believe truly ethical research-creation must accept that listening also transforms the researcher. It is not only a matter of making a previously silenced experience audible. Listening also changes our own categories of understanding.

This is why I speak of intergenerational, territorial and emotional listening. Listening means learning from the relationships people establish with their territory, attending to transmission between generations and recognising emotions as forms of knowledge. Ultimately, it means accepting that territory is not merely an object we can study, but a space of life of which we are part.

In this sense, making women's voices heard does not mean speaking for them. It means creating conditions in which their own ways of narrating, remembering, feeling, interpreting and acting can enter into conversation with other forms of knowledge without being erased by institutional or academic language.

Bibliographic information

Type

Article

Date

14 October 2026

Author

Dr Angélica Patricia Hoyos Guzmán

Study Centre

ONS

Original language

English

Original document

PDF, 4 pages

Full text

Transcription of the original document

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