Across many countries today, memory has become a contested terrain. Archives, testimonies, and historical narratives are exposed to political pressure, denialism, selective visibility, and erasure. In Colombia, where more than seven decades of internal armed conflict have shaped public life, the preservation of memory is inseparable from questions of truth, justice, and reparation. In this context, when the custody of records is concentrated in a few hands, communities can lose trust in institutions, leaving public memory vulnerable.
The Virtual Museum of Historical Memory is a public digital platform that draws on decentralized, peer-to-peer, and blockchain-inspired logics to imagine a more resilient model for public memory. Grounded in Colombia’s experience but designed with broader relevance, it offers an immersive journey through the country’s Sites of Memory: physical and symbolic places where communities preserve and narrate experiences linked to armed conflict, violence, and resistance. Through a horizontal curatorial process, the Museum hosts the materials that communities choose to share, including videos, photographs, texts, audio, and documents.
At the core of the project is Guardians of Memory, a decentralized archival system combining IPFS, distributed verification, and ethical AI tools. The infrastructure creates unique identifiers, distributed copies of files and a transparent version history, enabling communities to participate in the verification, updating, and shared custodianship of their own narratives.
The platform connects memory sites through interactive mapping, thematic journeys, and navigation layers that relate each site to other georeferenced information about its territory. These layers allow users to explore connections with illicit crops, illegal mining, deforestation, affected communities, territorial conflicts, and other datasets that help contextualize what has happened in each place. AI-supported tools and retrieval-augmented generation assist navigation across large volumes of information, without replacing human judgement or the narrative authority of communities.
The project is anchored in a clear ethical commitment: plurality of memories, priority for victims’ voices and participation, territorial and differential approaches, and an explicit orientation towards truth, justice, and reparation.

A project by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica / National Centre for Historical Memory of Colombia (CNMH)
Project leadership and Conceptual direction: Juan Cortés
General direction, CNMH: María Gaitán
Museum direction, CNMH: Adriana González
Production: Álvaro Rodríguez, Luisa Ramírez, Juan David Moya
Software development: Andrés Vila, Steven Andrés Camacho, Alejandro Villegas, John León
Content management: Daniel Pardo, Natalia Jassai, Carlos Villalba, Diego Moreno, Mariana White, Natalia Dávila
UX design: Paola Murillo
3D development: Faber Gutiérrez

With support from: GIZ Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit

Juan Cortés (CO) is a Colombian multimedia artist, researcher, and creative technologist working at the intersection of art, science, and digital culture. His practice explores historical memory, ecology, technology, and territorial politics through installations, digital media, and experimental research projects. He received the Golden Nica in Sound Art at Ars Electronica 2023 for A Tale of Two Seeds and has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA, CCCB Barcelona, and HEK Basel. Cortés leads the Museo Virtual de la Memoria de Colombia at the National Centre for Historical Memory and is a member of Atractor Estudio, a Bogotá-based collective dedicated to interdisciplinary work between art, science, and technology.

The Virtual Museum of Historical Memory embraces the concept of cultural memory: history is not merely documented, but actively narrated, interpreted, and examined. The project adheres to the fundamental principles of digital humanism and has clear democratic value, as it gives those affected by any form of violence in Colombia the opportunity to actively document their experiences and knowledge. This ensures that the affected communities retain control over the interpretation of their own histories, which would thus be protected from political manipulation. The work can serve a therapeutic purpose, as traumas, painful experiences such as loss and death, or other life-altering events caused by armed conflicts in Colombia are given a place in the virtual space, where they become the subject of shared empathy and collective remembrance.