San José de Urama

In 2019, the EPI team began working in the municipality of Dabeiba in northeastern Antioquia under the Everyday Justice project. EPI selected Dabeiba for its history of armed conflict and the presence of many of Colombia’s main peace and justice institutions. In the mountains surrounding Dabeiba’s urban center sits the village of San José de Urama, where EPI began its photovoice work in 2020.  Like the rest of Dabeiba, Urama was hit hard by Colombia’s internal armed conflict and remains confronted by a powerful paramilitary presence. Yet, Urama also revitalized since Colombia’s 2006 paramilitary demobilization and 2016 Peace Agreement between the Government of Colombia and the FARC.

In Urama, the photovoice facilitators worked in collaboration with 25 community members, running workshops from April-June 2020.  The photovoice participants selected their preferred indicators from among Urama’s 112 most popular indicators of justice and coexistence to create individual and collective Indicator Photo-Stories.  The workshops culminated in an exhibition that transformed Urama into an open air peace museum with over 70 large scale images hung all on walls and buildings all over the village.  See more about the photovoice process in our Urama project process gallery.