Art Is How We Remember What Power Wants Us to Forget

In 2019, I spoke to a group of asylum seeking women who told me the month they were trapped in a detention center in southern Texas after trying to seek asylum at the US-Mexico border. They were denied showers for weeks and were forced to bleed on their clothes during the period, allowing them to eat rotten food. These women endured a condition intended to destroy them. But instead of staying silent, they organized Llanto de Libertad– Crying for freedom.

One night, more than 1,000 women all cried out in unison. It was a collective act of lament, protest, resistance, a demand for it to be heard and released.

Imagine an act of rebellion. 1,000 women scream for freedom as armed guards watch over them.

They believed that if our people outside heard them we would care. But we refused to hear them, so no one came.

Their Llanto de Libertad It has been bothering me for years. An unprecedented cry. An untold story. I understand now: they didn’t just demand their freedom. They were trying to warn us. If we were paying attention.

In March, our government acted in our name and forced 238 Venezuelan men to the infamous Mega Prisons in El Salvador, known as CECOT. Some were removed under the alien enemy law of the 18th century. Many of these men had legal reasons to be asylum seekers or to be in the United States. However, they were rounded up in the middle of the night, branded as criminals, and disappeared into prisons in a third country.

The US government claims that these men are “dangerous”, but there is no evidence to support such claims. Government officials have consistently misinterpreted the courts And the masses. These total human rights violations are built on government lies. The government must manipulate memories to collect us into their false narratives and justify the erosion of our most fundamental values. You need to clear the history. We must overwhelm us with misinformation and fear.

This is an authoritarian machine. And this is exactly where art becomes essential. Not decorative, not symbolic, and urgently necessary. Faced with institutionalized gaslights, art becomes a ship to tell the truth. It resists silence. Art claims: We were here, we saw, we remember.

On June 1st, I turned my grief into a protest.

I became pregnant, overseen and organized the more than 50 people who gathered on the stairs of the statue of freedom to reclaim our public space as a place of memory and condemnation. We gathered to show that our country, a place that once welcomed immigrants, is now disappearing. We have argued for the truth in a country that is now built on silence.

As the cold wind blew around us, beams of sunlight plunged through the clouds, just as I began to disappear from the 238 men. One at a time. Each name is breath. Each name is a wound. Warning for each name.

It was a ritual to their existence. Calculation. I refuse to forget.

And from the silence we cried out.

We ourselves Llanto de Libertad.

Collective cries, demand: freedom of 238 men who illegally disappeared into CECOT.

Art has always been our memory. It is acquired in the walls of a cave, woven into fabric and depicted on the sides of the building. It is the way we remembered ourselves through centuries of violence, silence and elimination. You need to look at just a handful of years to find a roadmap for resistance through art.

Around the world, movements use art to carry memories of governments trying to erase it. In Chile, Brigada Ramona Para (BRP) reminds us that the walls are never neutral. They are the battlefield for memory and truth. Under Pinochet’s dictatorship, public expression was crushed, and the memories of those who committed crimes and disappeared were severely suppressed. However, for the next few years, BRP reclaimed the city with a bold, collective mural, a composition of rebellion in colour and form. They portrayed what official history was trying to erase. They showed that art is not a passive reflection of the moment. It showed it to be a tool for confronting power, carrying memories, and igniting action.

In Argentina, Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo transformed grief into a form of performance art. When the military dictatorship disappeared with thousands of sons and daughters, the government insisted that they never existed. However, Madres refused to erase it. They gathered every Thursday at Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and quietly swirled with white scarves, symbols of mourning, rebellion and motherly forces. Their march was not loud, but it was intense. They used their bodies as living testimony. This is a public performance that shattered the carefully constructed silence of a dictatorship. It was a protest. It was art. It has become visible in memory.

In my home country of Colombia, La Cormuna 13 of Medellin is one of the most violent and marginalized regions of the city, and through the art it becomes a symbol of resistance, with hip-hop at its heart. For decades, Columbia ignored the people who lived there, offering only militarization and abandonment. However, the youngsters of Korumuna 13 regained the story through four pillars of hip hop, through rap, graffiti, breakdance and DJ. They turned pain into poetry and trauma into truth. Artists and local groups began using hip-hop as a tool to demand justice, document national violence and celebrate community resilience. Their music and murals transformed the steep, winding streets of the neighborhood into an outdoor archive of resistance.

On Sunday, our bodies stood frozen as our screams echoed through the Statue of Liberty. No one wanted to move. It felt sacred and necessary to stay.

Then my beloved friend, Yara Traviso – Venezuela, violently, and full of fire, I smoked silence and said, “.”Our desire for liberation is stronger than our fear of oppression.”

We all repeated that. Mantra. A pledge.

I’m carrying those words with me now, but not just in direction.

May they guide you, as we fight for the heart and soul of our nation, and may they guide you, through fear, through doubt – through doubt.