Can you imagine the noise that it makes!? Sounds of Urban Demolitions and a History of Violence in Medellín (Colombia)

Abstract

Starting in 2014 in the city of Medellín (Colombia), the demolition by implosion of large residential buildings with structural problems, as well as former narcotrafficking buildings, became increasingly common, inscribing themselves within the landscape of a chapter of history that the city now wishes to turn away from. Although these demolitions are highly sonic urban events, it nevertheless remains difficult to capture and reproduce their sounds in all their magnitude and spectacularity. In this context, interviewees who have never heard a demolition in situ associate these sounds with those of the hundreds of car bombs that exploded throughout the city during the 1980s and 1990s, during what became known as the “cartel wars.”

Building on this observation, I develop an urban ethnography that explores the sonic dimension of demolitions in Medellín by mobilizing two corpora: the sound from audiovisual archives found mainly on YouTube channels belonging to local, national, and international media outlets, which I consider a popular archive of this process of destruction; and a series of memories—lived or imagined—as well as sonic utterances (descriptions, imitations, transcriptions) produced by various actors in relation to these two events. Based on this work, I advance a double hypothesis. First, I argue that the difficulties involved in capturing, reproducing, and articulating these sounds are linked to the broader difficulty of expressing and thinking about the city’s history of violence as part of a shared urban history. Second, I suggest that the sounds of demolitions, by generating an associative resonance with those of bombs, create an acoustic space that exceeds the strictly physical space of the implosion wave and, in doing so, shatter the linear temporality of this shared history, rendering it repetitive.