During the 2019 protests in Chile, various efforts were made to register manifestations of discontent expressed by the citizenry. One of them is La Ciudad Como Texto (The City as Text) by Carola Ureta Marin. The project documents 2.4 kilometers of street art after 36 days of protests in Santiago, Chile’s capital. The project follows the route between Dignity Square – one of the focal points during the protests – and Palacio de la Moneda, the national house of government. With the hashtag #noseborra (#itwillnotbeerased) constantly accompanying the path of the viewer, the project fixates all these visual manifestations of political struggle in the history of this momentous revolt.

Antes del Olvido (Before Oblivion) was also born during the Chilean protests of 2019. This project employed photogrammetry techniques to create 3D models of interventions made in monuments, sculptures, and emblematic buildings during the protests. These models were later geolocalized in a map, so any viewer could remember the manifestations of political discontent in these specific locations. The project included a series of workshops through which these techniques of capture and modeling were shared, making the efforts of memory preservation effectively collective.

4 Ríos is a multiplatform project about the Colombian internal conflict. Its first story – El Naya – narrates a fictionalized version of the Naya Massacre, a tragic episode in which dozens of farmers, indigenous persons, and Afro-Colombian people lost their lives at the hands of paramilitary forces. In Elder Manuel Tobar’s story, the Naya river takes a particular relevance. The river after which the incident was named and where some of the bodies of the victims were found is a place portrayed as the container of their voices – voices that do not stay quiet and ask the viewers to not forget them.

Pepe Rovano’s project takes on the difficult task of recreating a place that no longer exists. Originally built as a vacation resort for working-class people during Salvador Allende’s government, Rocas de Santo Domingo was transformed into a torture center by Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. After the return to democracy, the facilities used by the military remained under their control and later on were dismantled. Through the use of 3D modeling, VR, and AR technologies, Rovano digitally rebuilds these facilities so the acts committed there are not erased from the collective memory.

On occasion, the multisitedness of a phenomenon complicates the possibility of representing it visually. In their collaborative project, Anne Huffschmid and Pablo Martinez-Zarate approach the efforts of recovering the remains of disappeared persons across Latin America. The authors reimagine the spaces as virtual environments where these political, legal, and scientific practices take place in order to represent how different actors are involved in the delicate process of recovering and mourning a missing person.

In his 360 VR documentary, João Inada offers a snapshot of Complexo do Alemão, a favela in Rio de Janeiro that regularly experiences episodes of armed violence. By employing tools of interactive storytelling, the author crafts a narrative that involves the viewer in one of these episodes – a police raid. Through the engagement with different characters, the story evokes these past episodes, and provides the viewer-turned-participant with an enhanced understanding of the complexities of living in a favela.

Volver a Casa (Going Back Home) by Catalina Alarcón seeks to close distances between places. Through 360 degrees videos and VR technology, the project offers incarcerated persons and their families the possibility of sharing glimpses of their lives. Their asynchronous interactions allow them to remember their times together while they are apart. The project is actively concerned with raising awareness about the conditions of confinement that inmates have to go through, particularly in cases that involve the separation of parents and their children.