Student’s Muralism in Colombia. Political Action and Discourse in the Walls of the National University of Colombia

Abstract

Students in the National University of Colombia (UNAL) use the university walls to make their social protests, tell counter-hegemonic stories of the history and serve as a collective memory means and all this is performed in the form of mural painting. This study aims to identify and systematize the thematic typologies and mural messages at the UNAL in order to examine the existence of an aesthetic coding associated with them and get to know the social context in which they have been produced. Using the Critical Discourse Analysis, with a gender lens and based on the participant observation method, this work has identified the unbreakable match between form and content in these painted walls. Likewise, the approach to the social context has shown that these aesthetic-discursive practices cannot be taken apart from the geography, historic time and resistance stance in which they are enunciated.