A semiotic-discursive insight into short videos on memory and peace

1 Approaches to human socio-communicative reality: signs at the discourse’s core

Contemporary discourses frequently articulate sociocultural-produced fixed or mobile images and use them as a sign fabric where shapes, textures, color, visual-graphic, or even sound language, among other semiotic resources, are merged. This phenomenon, typical of human communication, has made it evident to analysts (since remote times) that the visual-verbal discourse, in its use, is only a “mode” that coexists and materializes meanings in solidarity with other “modes,” linked to the human perceptual system. When this phenomenon takes place in communication, we understand it as multimodal discourse. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) point out that modes are semiotic resources in diverse interrelationships which carry out discourses and types of (inter)action. If its social distribution uses, in addition, different technologies, such as the web’s emergence, then we understand it as a multimedia discourse. This means that we have a monomodal discourse when we observe a single sign system to produce discourse, for example, exclusively using the visual-graphic language level. This investigation addresses short videos in a social network whose structural organization and the production of its meaning come from the established articulation between the use of oral and graphic language, color, fixed and mobile image designs, and musical sounds, among other semiotic resources. Multimodal and multimedia discourses are addressed since videos, in this case, circulate on web pages, tablets, mobile phones, or any other digital media, making them multimedia.

The epistemology and principles of multimodal and multimedia critical discourse analysis (MMCDA) are multidisciplinary standpoints. Their most outstanding contributions come from Kress et al. (2000), Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 2006), Kress (2010), Jewitt (2009, 2013, 2016), Jewitt et al. (2021), Bateman (2014), Bateman et al. (2017), O’Halloran (2011), O’Halloran et al. (2021), Ledin and Machin (2020); and the multimedia approaches can be reflected from Van Dijck (2016), Caple and Knox (2019), Fernández (2016), among others. Following Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) basic approaches, communication is structured and organized in sign or mode systems, so that semiosis, which is created and distributed, has its natural explanation and interpretation in semiotics as the science of signs. In its pragmatic dimension, this implies the sociohistorical concrete uses of sign systems.

The multimedia nature of the discourse is articulated to the set of phenomena that come from the possibility of socializing and distributing meanings in society through mediatization processes that allow disseminating, in the context of socio-economic and political-cultural conditions, symbolic resources of society by gathering available technological devices within the framework of the power exercises of democracies. Multimediality is the capability to integrate technologies into the social distribution of discourses, enabling the recontextualization of traditional techniques and genres. Multimediality implies not only technological deployment but also a modification of the discursive structure. This modification opens a discussion on the forms of interaction, how new communication models are configured from the creation of new hybrid formats, and, therefore, new types of socio-cognitive and discursive relationships with the interlocutor (Hiippala 2017).

Kress (2010) points out that the production and interpretation of meaning is a social device and is always accompanied by the conventional forms granted by a particular culture because of their interests, purposes, and needs to be expressed when social, natural, and other types of reality are represented. Jewitt (2016) formulate three principles that characterize the sense of multimodality: first, meaning is created, materialized, and expressed with different semiotic resources, whereby communicative purposes are achieved, and ideals are visible. Second, creating and producing meaning and sense in society, and within a culture, implies building and articulating different sign systems that, accommodated to each communicative process, enhance their functional and pragmatic role for the community to which the discourse is addressed. Third, addressing the processes of significance requires analysts to recover the meaning in sign materiality, the set of relationships and operations designed and consolidated for the purpose of communication.

MMCDA articulates diverse reflections that come from theoretical positions, whereby the role of semiotics is recognized to understand and explain the coexistent sign systems in the discourse. In this regard, Bateman (2016) identifies three possible analytical levels: the first level refers to the need to understand materiality in each semiotic mode; the second level recovers the mediating character of the sign and establishes the sign potentialities in the structure and composition of the discursive unit, whereby differences and similarities are formulated in the service of meaning’s functional construction. The third level allows the understanding of the semiotic system. This is only possible because it articulates deductive–inductive operations to their semantic-pragmatic value to manage the analytical and interpretative process. This classification makes it possible to recognize the modes within social dynamics in which the discourse, cognition, and society triad appears, typical of discursive studies (van Dijk 2016). It is inevitable to bring Forceville’s (2020) approaches to this context, who, regarding Bateman et al. (2017), discusses the indispensable and inescapable relationship between the various semiotic systems or modes and the technological devices or means.

Daily communication on social networks is an essential field of study in contemporary life that encompasses the analysis of technological resources or discourse distribution devices in connection with the research on sign systems addressed by semiotics. This approach deals with reflecting on the interweaving of communication, the means through which it is distributed, and everyday life immersed in its sociohistorical and cultural determinations. For this analytical and interpretive approach proposed for studying short videos published on the web, particularly on TikTok, the symbolic nature of discourse, the Internet, and, specifically, social networks are recognized as the resource and spatiality of the social distribution of discourses, as pragmatic–semantic relationships that allow the social construction of meaning and the processes to explain its individual and collective character, whereby the identity sense of the interlocutors is formulated. Therefore, the multimodal and multimedia articulation explicitly states how the process of discursive creation and the articulation of its social use in a technological device occurs to recognize its sociocultural value (Van Dijck 2016).

In the context of multimodal and multimedia studies, a conceptual unit is analyzed that is themed on one of the crimes against humanity committed against women in Colombia’s internal armed conflict. The Truth Commission socializes the conceptual unit through an audiovisual unit composed of two short videos on TikTok. Short videos are understood as a format whereby social interest content is constructed. These videos are brief. Their average duration is between 3 and 60 s. Their production and distribution involve web, intelligent, convergent, and mobile technologies, both in terms of their production, recording, and editing and their efficient socialization and distribution on web platforms or social networks. These shorts videos are sequences of visual image, verbal graphics, or sound, pictorial, musical units articulated to represent in-motion events. These videos are discursive units, which are proposed with an interactive intention.

Byte Dance’s TikTok is a social network that aims to creatively and playfully distribute short videos produced by institutions – in our study, The Truth Commission. It meets all the accessibility criteria of social networks and creates spaces for the hybridization, resignification, or recontextualization of visual and mobile discursive units. The Truth Commission manages its communications on TikTok based on the social network’s proposal to distribute and redistribute videos, in this case, individual and collective narratives, to recover the memory of the Colombian armed conflict. The properties of short videos enable an interactive process with Colombian society and global communities, which involves millions of users who accept social interest content. TikTok was created in 2017 and links young generations. TikTok sets a space to reflect on how content is created and distributed, as well as how and in what way the orientation processes of individual and collective action are affected, as it is mass media (Yang 2020). The object of inquiry is a typically multimodal and multimedia communicative expression insofar as it articulates multisign materiality with the technological resources whereby communicative practice is concretized (Wang 2021).

A short video circulating on a social network is a discursive unit with a mobile nature. The inherent movement of the multimodal and multimedia visual expressions is explained as a dimension that correlates space and time to demonstrate actors and objects that move dynamically. In the semiotic perspective, the movement allows recovery of constituting actions of social events in the narrative, whereby attitudes, values, ideas, properties, and identities are recognized. Movement is a vital experience of the human being. Recovering its meaning in a discursive unit allows the collection of individual and collective experiences, through which knowledge is formulated on occurrences in a culture. It also allows recognition of its rhetorical value, recovery of conceptual vectors, and verification of the proposed trajectories, all of which make possible the evidentiality of the ideological processes that determine the discursive act. Movement is also a semiotic marker that contributes to the multimodal construction of discourse to the extent that it articulates modes and means of interpretation in the experience of interaction and the proposed meanings. Therefore, the mobile semiotic-discursive unit recovers directionality, expansion, speed, strength, and regularity in constructing persuasive and emotional processes, determinants of the semantic-pragmatic function of movement (van Leeuwen 2021).

2 Approaches to the use of short videos on TikTok

The selected visual material is part of the reflections that derive from the need to build a process of peace and coexistence in Colombia. In spatiotemporal terms, 60 short videos published on TikTok between February 2020 and March 2021 were reviewed. Two videos^[1] were selected for closer analysis using the following criteria: thematic (sexual violence in the internal armed conflict); location (Turbo, Department of Antioquia, a northwestern area in Colombia, in the Gulf of Urabá); ethnicity (Afro-descendant community); and gender (women). These short videos were designed, produced, and institutionally socialized by the Truth Commission as a communicative environment of a visual-sound nature to generate a daily local-global interaction. Their purpose is to promote the reflection on the victims’ testimonies about current Colombian sociopolitical problems within the framework of the armed conflict and the human rights violations derived from it. Their design, production, and distribution are formulated as a memory device, recovering the principles of Foucault (2000) and Agamben (2014). The memory device is a network of symbolic and material discourses functionally put at the service of a communicative interaction process. Subjectivities are installed, meanings are created, opinions, points of view, and ways of understanding social realities are distributed. In the process of victimization, these ideas pragmatically work as a means for updating and contributing to remembering, narrating, silencing, and managing healing processes that have to do with the traumas caused by violence and wars. The analysis includes the proposals by Pardo Abril (2017, 2021) and Pardo Abril and Moreno Bermeo (2022) from a qualitative perspective.

In the first phase, the material under study is transcribed, and the composition of the sign fabric in coexistence is verified. Semiotic-discursive relationships are established, categories are identified, and space temporality mainstreamed sequences are defined in conceptual and semantic-pragmatic terms. This procedure is articulated from the principles of semiotics and MMCDA. Once the semiotic resources and their sequentiality are verified, beings, objects, and actions are described, and points of view, axiologies, emotional, and rhetorical markers are recognized. Phase two deals with analyzing each mode and their articulation with the modes in coexistence. An inferential process to acknowledge the contributions of each sign system to the conceptual organization – by using them in short videos – is developed. Derived from this, it is possible to understand how the videos are interwoven to infer communicative purposes and recognize the interests that define the interaction. The third phase defines the proposed representations, their connections with the sociohistorical and cultural reality; the use of diverse and interconnected discursive semiotic resources in the construction of the proposed meaning from the involved modes to explain and interpret from the epistemology of the MMCDA, the multimodal and multimedial practice of communication; and its relationship with the sociopolitical and cultural factors that determine the meaning unity. Finally, it is possible to establish how digital representations are constructed on sociopolitical and cultural realities through multimodal use in digital technological devices to recognize the social and affective-emotional value. The value of addressing these digital representations is related to the social search for transformation and the subjective and intersubjective healing of the victims. This process establishes exploratory ways to give meaning to the analyzed short videos.

Table 1 synthetically recovers the epistemic and methodological relationships that guide the interpretative, analytical procedure, whose core axis is the semiotic categories whereby the multi-symbolic character of the discourse is explicitly stated.

3 Ritual and resistance

The case studies are multimodal and multimedia units that, in the form of a short video, coherently structure visual-graphic sign systems (colors, images, movements); verbal and sound-visual graphics; and musical sounds. These units are socialized in mobile and convergent technologies. The testimonial narrative embodied in the videos is spatiotemporally located in the Colombian northwest (Gulf Coast of Urabá-Turbo, a region historically inhabited by black and Indigenous people. Lack of State presence and its natural wealth attract all forms of violence). This determines the transversal nature of the discourse, showing the multiple violations of human rights suffered by its inhabitants, which remain in force in the context of the internal conflict. Narrative testimony is understood as a discursive genre that, in this case, fulfills the semantic-pragmatic function of creating a sense of justice and integral reparation for the victims. Therefore, it affects people’s emotionality and critical conditions of life. Following Castillejo Cuéllar (2007), it is in the testimonial narratives where the individual and collective demands, the claims for justice, and the dignity of the victims are made visible. In addition, it constitutes a space for healing (Figures 1 –3).

Figure 1:

Mujeres lavanderas (The washerwomen): Part one, sequence 1. Source: Truth Commission’s official TikTok account. 2021-5-21 URL: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1. Afro-Colombian Day annually commemorates the abolition of slavery in Colombia on May 21, 1851. It is also a day to remember the first free town in the Americas, Palenque de San Basilio, in the department of Bolivar, Colombia.

Figure 2:

Mujeres lavanderas (The washerwomen): Part one, sequence 2.

Source: Truth Commission’s official TikTok account. 2021-5-21 URL: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1.

Figure 3:

Mujeres lavanderas (The washerwomen): Part one, sequence 3.

Source: Truth Commission’s official TikTok account. 2021-5-21 URL: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1.

The theme of the analyzed memory device is sexual violence against women. Turbo is a systematically threatened territory, condemned to violence exerted by all armed actors involved in the conflict, either legal or illegal, with the consequent violation of the right to life. This includes the stripping of human dignity, territories, and natural resources.

The different semiotic modes, materialized in sign systems, recover virtualized signs in the analyzed corpus that, placed in a type of combination, lead to the basic sign classes established by Peirce (1974). In this process, discourse is constituted as semiotic units produced by a community in an interaction process. It is, therefore, a unit in which semiosis exists. In this universe of semiotic relations, the iconic character is verified to the extent that the represented object shares qualities and similarities with beings, objects, and actions that occur in sociocultural life. In this way, the iconic sign helps us understand that the interpretant not only deciphers a form in terms of possibility or existence, but also replaces and updates it by changing the represented idea. In “La Hora de las lavanderas” (The hour of the washerwomen), iconicity is a sign that mainstreams, structures, and organizes the semiotic resources of short videos, facilitating the relationship with the rhetorical resources of the discursive unit through metaphors and metonymy. The aesthetic and emotional experience is formulated in this process of logical organization, connecting the sign organization with the potential to generate possible interpretations. The testimonial narrative embodied by the video as a memory device formulates an interactive process in which the material condition of the sign, its logical-pragmatic organization, and rhetorical-visual character are articulated. In this logical process, “La hora de las lavanderas” is consolidated as a multimodal and multimedia discourse.

Based on the nuclearity of the iconic sign, the testimonial narrative structures the life experiences of victims while connecting them with factual events as part of the social cognition of those represented. The aesthetic-emotional character carried by the iconology structured in the memory device articulates the interpretation of those sociocultural events embodied as testimonial narrative, which unfolds as a metaphor. This procedure enhances the analysis of the semiotic character in multimodal and multimedia discourse (Lee and Cobley 2020).

An approximation to visual indexicality comes from the graphic illustration that includes animated images. It is produced as an aesthetic re-creation of the life experience narrated as a testimony by the victims to the Truth Commission. This becomes a polyphonic, intertextual, and multimedia discourse in convergence. The representation of ritualization does not intend to be a realistic design. Instead, it is artistically and ethically a testimony that activates all the memorialization phases of a traumatic event, grounded in the space temporality and historical reality of the represented area, making victimization, injustice, and actions in the internal conflict visible, while protecting the protagonists’ identities. The visual indexicality is therefore concretized in a subjectivation-intersubjectivity relation. The voices, the memories, the forgetfulness, and even the silence, are crossed by the viewpoints and expressed positions.

The symbolic value of the ritual is expressed in the metaphor, value, strength, and its individual and collective potentiality that are positioned in different ways – points of view – a common front whereby these women connect with water to destroy pain: “they are a sea of tears” in the daily verbal use in Colombia. The reference to water as life-destruction-death is associated in two ways: human rights, on the one hand, and the rights of nature, on the other. In this sense, an axiology regarding the valuation of life itself, understood as a source of the planet’s integrity, is structured. This, in the ritual, implies community action, defense, resistance, and emotional markers, which are formulated from anger to pain itself.

The videos resignify and recontextualize the washerwomen’s ritual in “La hora de las lavanderas.” The memory device operates on the principle that it is a creation that articulates cognitive-practical and cognitive-technical interests based on a structure of action and experiences linked to sociohistorical and political-cultural conditioning, expressed in terms of cognitive-emancipatory interests, resistance, and dignity from the connection of knowledge with lived practice. The ritual is related to the processes that come from actions, experiences, and senses granted by the community. The ritual connects mobility with water, beings, and objects as a condition to start with: black women (victims), washbasins (vessels); manducos (wooden sticks to strike clothes); rays (mythical concept that articulates light and storm and links women with water and divinity). Some Amerindian cultures, such as Mayan culture, are associated with war (García Barros 2009).

Collective singing regains hope and pain in the struggle for life amid armed conflict. “Como la remojo yo […] hácele, vamos a remojar, hácele, vamos a enjabonar, hácele […] vamos a restregar […] hácele, ay, hácele, lelelele […] hácele ♫♫♫.” As proposed by Reyes (2020), in the Afro-descendant culture in Colombia, singing is a healing resource that lends a sense of vitality. It decreases the pain rooted in slavery. The force-resistance and hope-life connection is a vital link to confront violence in these territories. The ritual connects sociopolitical struggles to preserve life and dignity. The visual and oral-verbal sign system reiterates in superposition the testimonial narrative so that the reduplicated, simultaneous, and conceptually identical coexistence does not only emphasize and iterate the meaning of what is expressed. It generates complementarity degrees when the oral-verbal system is placed at the service of expressing emotions and connects with identity. This is how it fulfills the semantic-pragmatic relationship of amplification (Martinec and Salway 2005). So in “VOICE 1: Remojá hasta que salga todo el dolor que te causaron,” and in “VOICE 2: Es un dolor que me sale de las entrañas,” the metaphor, on the one hand, creates the need for ritual and how modalization ought to be. On the other hand, the emotional assertion reaches its semantic-pragmatic function of creating the meaning of a healing action while establishing a cause-consequence relationship. There is, therefore, multimodal rhetoric in the videos.

Cohn (2013) accounts for how the juxtaposition of sign systems – as in the case of the graphic and sound-verbal systems in simultaneity and pictorial images and other types of sign systems or modes – creates deliberate sequences whose communicative purpose exceeds the informative function. It also connects it with aesthetics and emotions, materializing in the discursive unit (which is a memory device, in this case) such human behaviors as witness, counting-saying-singing; writing-registering-showing; resisting making-feeling-suffering. Graphic-visual modes that represent body movement, hand gestures, facial expressions, and actions with objects in a space-temporal relationship recover the formulated relationships between the body, objects, and actions.

The memory device materialized throughs signs in a testimonial narrative supported in a multimedia short video genre is introduced with marimba music. The music prepares the way for the presence of voices and graphic-visual narrative as resources to preserve collective memories of pain framed in collective acts and practices. The memories are aimed at demanding justice, recovering dignity, and, in our case study, formulating and socializing, from the Truth Commission, healing spaces from which the required social transformation is possible through their individual and collective agency. Quiceno Toro (2021) analyzes this problem from different perspectives, showing how “the struggles women undertake for truth and justice” testify to how the conflict has affected them from their testimonial narrative.

The graphic sequence of images is articulated to motion comic – an animation technique that creates the sense of movement in the testimonial narrative using sequentiality. Also, in some cases, it is possible for the represented beings to be perceived, for example, walking, in a metonymic relationship, such as the feet representing the whole body. For instance, conceptual unit 1 contextualizes the space and temporality in a coastal zone, at night, and makes way for the metonymic sequence of the body through its parts, such as the torso and feet in transit to the sea, the place of a nuclear action: washing-cleaning. Finally, the sequence is closed with two black women’s shadows in medium planes: one with a washbasin on her head (a marker of a tradition) and the other with long curly hair. This creates the visual sensation of them walking one after the other through a very leafy green area, with palm trees and the full moon connecting the space temporality of the testimonial narrative and identity markers.

The conceptual sequence of ritual and action is created from the material and symbolic culture that sustains it. On the one hand, the symbolic unity that connects knowledge and experience in a natural spatiality, illuminated in four points, is formulated from the objects, the dress, and the accessories. On the other hand, it makes way for water’s essence and fundamental sense. Water is a mirror to look at the environment and ourselves differently. It is, therefore, the space of self-awareness. Water is connected with purification, with life, with knowledge; acts are affirmed and what is hidden from view is understood. Water cleans and heals. It is a space to apply internalized knowledge experientially. The knowledge of water updates the wisdom that nourishes the earth. It releases it, revitalizes it, and heals it when verifying its symbolic cultural value. Ferro Medina (2006, para. 3) notes:

Water has had different meanings in great cultures. For Egyptians, water is intricately linked to the idea of resuscitation. For Greeks, water has the double meaning of life and death. Asian and African peoples include it within their divinities: the fountains are sacred or venerated and are used as a purifying element. One of the best-known goddesses in Afro religions is Iemanja: for believers, the queen, and goddess of waters, expression of the divine presence.

Hands focus on ritual development, consolidating the spiritual value of water by metaphorically creating the sense of cleaning the being’s intimacy. When articulated to the ritual of washing, water connects the emotional senses it carries. As pointed out by Pla-Campas (2005), water lightens the body’s weight and allows movement in the aquatic space, but, at the same time, exerts constant pressure on the submerged body and slows down its actions. Water, “in contact with the skin exerts a constant hydrostatic pressure action and a continuous resistance on the body that takes us to the most primary and affective tactile sensations” (Pla-Campas 2005: 76). Therefore, water activates positive sensations and emotions from the sense of security-protection to love-care: it activates memories, elaborates forgetfulness, and promotes solidarity, friendship, and trust.

The representation of victimization in this conceptual sequence transcends the suffered violent event. It articulates the memories that elide the reconstruction but connect with a representation of the past. Jelin (2020) proposed that memory enhances the interrelation of the present with the past and projects the future, implying ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and values. Although forgetfulness is activated, memories influence and are influenced by the victim’s emotions and feelings, so their testimonial narrative can overcome events, modify them, and manage multimodal rhetoric with a persuasive function (Mitchell 2015). This rhetoric focuses on the communicative purpose of healing individually and collectively amid unique and individualized experiences, not replicable by other victims, as inferred from Figure 4’s triptych, where the ritualized action is differentiated (Figures 5 –9).

Figure 4:

Mujeres lavanderas: Part two.

Source: Truth Commission’s official TikTok account. 2021-5-21 URL: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_web.

Figure 5:

Healing ritual.

Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_web.

Figure 6:

Healing ritual: facing realities.

Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_web. Con fuerza contra los rayos restriegan sus tinieblas mientras dejan correr sus sufrimientos a través del agua. Con los manducos golpean una y otra vez con fiereza, como queriendo sacar de adentro un dolor inmenso que huele a guerra. The Truth Commission (2021).

Figure 7:

Water and pain.

Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_web.

Figure 8:

Semiotics of femininity.

Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_web.

Figure 9:

Corporality, construction of solidarity, and pain collectivization.

Source: https://www.tiktok.com/@comisionverdadc/video/6964852973100879109?is_copy_url=1&is_from_web.

This conceptual sequence articulates the ability to face and adapt life within the ritual – water and objects, manducos ‘sticks’ – which, in testimonial narratives cling to the internal armed conflict, allowing the exploration of traumas and pain in events, the overcoming of adversity, and the management of helplessness and all expressions of fear. These acts destroy the physical and mental integrity of the being. Through the ritual, the subjects are able to take control and collectively face the trauma. The sexual assault they have suffered imposes on them a sense of insecurity, fear, inability to self-trust, and social uprooting.

The persistence of the ritual-nature-violence relation is a general visual leitmotiv that gives coherence to “Mujeres lavanderas.” Actors, subjects, reasons, and symbols whereby the diverse material and symbolic resources that constitute the ritual and cleansing ceremony are explored. The events that form the testimonial narrative are framed in a lush tropical setting (Image 1, conceptual sequence 1). This semiotic-discursive resource is proposed in bright and saturated colors that contribute to creating lush atmospheres (typical of coastal areas) and to represent sexual violence. In the first images of the video, the women’s outfits are depicted in desaturated colors. Next, a woman is dressed in white and then in black, associated with death in her culture. Dark and opaque colors are employed in the middle of the washing-cleaning-purifying ritual to create, through color, a sense of transformation. In the end, in healing, the outfits are bright and display diverse colors. There is a persuasive argument that the colors are a resource to represent the violence-death relationship. This resource defines to some degree the customs and traditions of Afro-descendant communities, which are expressed in the ritual as washing-cleaning-purifying, where color is a sign of transformation. In this way, the innate bond between nature and human beings is built. The female figures are presented as calm, sad, resistant, and strong. They are defined from the tradition that women are empowered to resist violence and hold individual and collective power, which allows them to challenge irrational violence, which perceives them as weak and defenseless.

In conceptual unit 2: “Resistance and healing,” solidarity, group work, and collectivization around ritual are the central aspects. The scenes portray the importance of the relationships among victimized women who, united in an inevitable drama, activate memories, forgetfulness, and silence to narrate and make the need to heal visible. The women share achievements, rhythms, and processes to express their essence, dignity, and empowerment capacity. The women’s body postures account for action and movement. They move from one point to another, standing and upright, expressing the decision to participate in the ritual – beginning of the ritual – until their bodies lean over the object to which they apply their force to enact the cleansing. Strength with a sense of resistance – the core of the ritual. The ritual ends with an upright body, hugs, and the ceremonial encounter that consolidates solidarity and affection as a support for healing. The sociocultural sense that derives from the collective embrace achieves a transformation. Then, in their meeting, where cleanliness is already embodied in the multicolored objects in the form of clothing stretched and hung on the lines, the cleanliness implies emotionality and the expression of the achieved purpose. Through togetherness and the corporality of their physical touch, they convey a sense of celebration of life, which completes the ritual. The poses rebuild camaraderie and affective, solidary, intimate, and friendly bonds.

Multimodal rhetoric is created from the construction of symbols expressed in the sign fabric with their relationships. The symbols range from exploring the body symbolism to the graphic and oral-verbal expressions, the color, and musical sonority in the healing ritual. The ritual creates symbols in a continuous movement, a negotiation in the public and private sphere adopting multiple forms that articulate Colombia’s cultural and historical environment. Human beings symbolically and rhetorically produce their discourse in a sign environment that regulates their natural, social, and affective predispositions, aesthetically managing experientiality and knowledge. In this sense, ideas, emotions, points of view, and positions in the face of reality acquire symbolic value.

The healing ritual does not just embody the representation of symbolic relationships, but also represents the actions that Afro-descendant women perform – a message that circulates in their discourses as symbols that creatively express reparation and the need for justice to restore their roles in society. “Mujeres lavanderas” is a ritual and an act of participatory interaction that connects interlocutors through highly emotional experiences. The healing sense of the ritual is articulated in the water that carries meanings in metonymic and similar relationships. Firstly, it creates a sense of tension in the relation between the victims and the elements of the rituals, such as the washboards, thus expressing and making their knowledge and experiences visible. This ritual defines the roles and specific actions of black women who have experienced sexual violence. Secondly, the ritual spatiotemporally connects ancestral knowledge and lived experiences. Thirdly, each action occurs in a specific way and with a well-defined goal: to clean and bring the colors back to life. Fourthly, the objects of the ritual, which are irreplaceable (washbasins and manducos), recover their functions of containing and being an instrument used to strike. Still, they are also regulated to give them the meaning of healing instruments. Fifthly, the object–body relationship is established to which the sense of purity and cleanliness is attributed. This sense eliminates infection and dirt, whereby it connects with the community and its identity. The body is a symbol and center that heals-cleanses-purifies. In this way, the ritual, which is the route to move from forced impurity to purification-healing, is produced.

Multimodal rhetoric is consolidated through the iconological symbolic relationship of similarity between destiny and source in the multimodal metaphor. This metaphor is articulated in the semantic-pragmatic relationship of superposition, amplification, and complementarity of oral-graphic language, image-color, and musical sounds. The two short videos above, subject matter of this investigation, communicate and create meanings from sociohistorical events in which black women from Turbo, Colombia, are involved, updating the representation of concrete social actors and real existences. These existences are presented in a context of beings, facts, and plausible and evidential circumstances to formulate and make visible violated lives, war situations, and sociohistorically verifiable represented events. The testimonial narrative materialized in a short video is then posted on a social network to creatively and productively propose a standpoint that gives presence and life to those who design and produce it, making the Internet interlocutors understand the narrated events concretely as a testimony in a sociohistorical and cultural context within a specific space and time.

The rhetorical proposal is elaborated from different places of intertextuality. They are articulated in the form of a short video on TikTok to persuade Colombian and international users about a theme that integrates a well-defined sociohistorical–cultural reality and appropriates symbolic resources clinging to the traditional customs of the Afro-descendant community in the region. In this way, the discourse is designed from ethical-artistic principles to formulate levels of evidentiality and credibility for its interpretant interlocutors. Emotionality is connected in this context as an integral part of the rhetoric. It is articulated in a concrete way using the oral-verbal and graphic-visual system to create an attitude and guide favorable actions in the process of peacebuilding, clinging to truth, justice, and comprehensive reparation to the victims, within the regulations that derive from the Final Agreement for Peace (Government of Colombia 2016). The ritual is a symbolic interaction where beings and objects achieve a coherence to enable the reading and interpretation of its complexity: singing, narrative, actions, and beings are spatiotemporally mainstreamed by territoriality, enabling spaces and times to transit and freely assume voices, presences, and perspectives. This is how a demonstrative action is elaborated, marked by its clear sense.

In “Mujeres lavanderas,” concepts and emotional states are evoked, and non-expressible phenomena are integrated into everyday life or the proposed ritual for the representative process. In this case, the evocation flows in the movement of the body in the water and unfolds as a multimodal metaphor. The human body’s signals create symbolic meaning, mainly when they occur by the being’s will. The cleansing and purifying sense of water is embodied, restoring a sense of worth. This relationship from social cognition to the perception of subjective corporeality is what disestablishes the classic subject–object dichotomy. The ritual is symbolically constructed through the body as a uniqueness that belongs to us, that is transformed and ritualized by connecting the nature–society integrality.

The expression of emotion in the video can be as simple as a single facial expression or as complex as that recovered through each conceptual unit. Sound and verbal expressions are accompanied by other sign systems, such as facial expressions or gestures, which are also involved in the representation. The video includes consecutive expressions that articulate different semiotic systems to represent a corporal and a facial expression that triggers aesthetic and emotional actions in coherence with sound-verbal or musical expressions. In addition, the interaction proposed by the video involves collectives and individualities synthesized in a dialogical structure. This structure focuses on cleansing-healing, involving corporeality to visually focus the video on the process of cleansing-healing through the use of medium and short shots. This game of interactive expressions represents complex expressions of emotionality that involve ideological positions, proposals, and persuasive ideologies. They guide ways of knowing and perceiving through the sign fabric, convening the interlocutors in their different interaction planes.

4 Conclusions

The viewer is presented with a reflection and analysis that comes from the levels of description, whereby they recognize basic semiotic patterns. These patterns are the producers’ first source for the design and production of a visual discourse embodying a narrative and supported by a short video with the aim of circulating it through a social network. This analysis verifies that the visual aspects such as lighting, sound, color, images, and visual narrative structures that formulate relationships with the dynamic cognitive and sociocultural representations are determined by historical-sociocultural factors. From a semantic-pragmatic perspective, this short video was developed as a multimodal and multimedia unit that functions as a memory device with the potential to adopt and reconfigure the concepts, ideas, and expectations of those who have been victimized in the context of an internal armed conflict. The memory device distributes knowledge and experiences that contribute, in this case, to building truth and reparation, and to managing peace using the testimonial voice of the victims through the media. The analysis proposed here prepares the way for the inferential elaboration of broader interpretations involving social patterns.

Addressing the two short videos on TikTok that make up “Mujeres lavanderas” verifies the multimodal and multimedia character of a discursive unit, whereby the nuclear nature of semiotics is recognized, while the approaches to the meanings that come from the represented ritual are traced through the sign fabric involved in their design and production. The articulation of the different signs in the video are recovered by applying semiotics to analyze and interpret the process of creating meaning through visual elements in social networks within a specific social context. Some of the ideas have been explored on the principles, assumptions, and fundamental questions of semiotics, visual semiotics, and their impact on the explanation and articulation of MMCDA. Aspects and issues related to the distribution of discourses in social networks have been analyzed recognizing that social networks are a technologically supported environment. This environment promotes forms of communicative interaction with multimodal content that are capable of interweaving multiple forms of intertextuality and genres to convene and orient specific population sectors – in this case, young people. The tripartite analysis of the signs in icon, index, and symbol mainstreams the gaze on the ritual and the rhetoric that it embodies for the socialization of knowledge, experiences, and historical-mythical-fictional expectations. Beings, processes, actions, and events create a perspective on the being and detailed knowledge, structured on a form of gender-violence within the context of a country’s internal armed conflict.

The unraveling of the embodied representations in the multimodal and multimedia discourse allows recognition of the aesthetics and emotionality in the testimonial narrative, which is distributed through digital technology, integrating cognitive and semiotic factors that allow the recovery of how emotions are evoked. A short video is functionally a memory device where the signs in relation manage discursive semiotic resources, making it possible to recognize that the use of color is a factor that associates pain and hope of transformation. Vocal and musical sounds make the interlocutor feel the need to share and activate emotions, which promotes individual and collective action within the framework of feeling-knowing. Finally, the sign fabric that accounts for identity-territorial, gender, and space-temporal factors has the enormous persuasive rhetorical potential to generate moods and emotions in interlocutors, promoting an amplified and resignified interaction through technological devices, which encourage reparation and non-repetition.