Everyday Utopias

This chapter conceptualizes peace-building and activism as ethical practices rehearsed every day. It explores embodied ethics (informed by collaboration and interaction) as a tool to recount the COCOMACIA’s comisionadas’ personal lives and work, and even the limits of storytelling. As other postconflict utopias, ethics is an everyday performance that requires constant repetition, rehearsals, and collaboration, and that contains the potential of failure. This chapter revolves around the trivial details of everyday life that get lost when thinking only about historical events that cause large-scale transformations. It centers and values the transformative daily energy released in spaces otherwise deemed marginal or peripheral, to find value in the banal and ordinary. Building on the concept of showing up, everyday practices are a fragment of the spectrum of postconflict utopias, rehearsals of peace amid violence in the Colombian Pacific.