The Installation Portrait
of Silvia Elena (2008) by Swoon as a Vehicle for Denouncing
Violence and Feminicide in Mexico
You mean you think that Kelly is dead? I yelled. More
or less, he said without losing an ounce of his composure. What do you mean
more or less? I shouted, Either someones dead or they arent dead, damn it! In
Mexico, one can be more or less dead, he answered very seriously.[1]
Roberto
Bolaño, 2666
The phrase kind of dead is drawn
from the novel 2666 by the Chilean
writer Roberto Bolaño. In The Part About
The Crimes[2] (La parte de
los crímenes), it relates the murders of women that take place in the fictional
city of Santa Teresa, as well as the investigations carried out there but that
usually do not lead to any results. The narrative is based
on the feminicides of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in the
early 1990s. In this essay, I aim to document and analyze how an installation
can create multisensorial spaces that allow English-speaking spectators to reflect
on the issue of feminicide in this
border city.
In
Mexico you can be kind of dead -suspended
between fiction and reality-, because often the bodies of victims are not found
or properly identified, leaving their families in a state of prolonged grief
and uncertainty that can last a lifetime. It is common for people to disappear
and that their bodies be thrown into vacant lots or abandoned in the desert and,
currently in the city, many of these bodies belong to women. In resistance to
the neglect of this social situation, works of art have emerged with the
intention of making this violence visible from different perspectives. One
example is Portrait of Silvia Elena
(2008) by the U.S. artist Caledonia Curry, whose pseudonym is Swoon. The piece
is based on the feminicide
of Silvia Elena Rivera Morales, perpetrated in 1995 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
The installation Portrait of Silvia Elena was exhibited
from May 30th to June 5th, 2008 at Honey Space Gallery,
located on the West Side Highway between 21st and 22nd Streets
in New York City. This was an old warehouse that was recovered to establish an
independent exhibition space dedicated to presenting artistic work in a
non-commercial environment.[3]
The site was left intentionally in its existing state and the condition for the
exhibition was that the artist's proposal had to be adapted to its spatial
characteristics. The gallery functioned without staff, during the day the space
was open to the public, the entrance was free, and there was no surveillance or
restriction for the spectators.
The installation was designed in
such a way that the audience had active participation and absolute liberty to appropriate
the piece and intervene the space. We should bear in mind that the word public has its origin in belonging to the people[4] and in this
sense, the group of people who visited the exhibition stopped being mere
spectators and became active subjects who formed a part of the democratic
politics of the place.
An important aspect was that,
although the installation was mounted in an alternative space without rules or
curatorial protocols, the artist included texts and indications in English that
guided the viewer with instructions that she herself determined. In the entrance
hall of the gallery the title Portrait of
Silvia Elena (Fig.1) was presented with black letters on a turquoise
background combined with white tones, and on its side was a woodblock engraved
with the face of the young woman, flowers and candles. There were also
photographs of Silvia Elena and other women who had been murdered or had
disappeared, and photocopies of flyers regarding the search for these women
issued by the Procuraduría General de la República, the Mexican government office that coordinates
the investigation of crimes.
1 Swoon, Portrait of Silvia Elena, 2008,
installation, details, Honey Space Gallery, NY, (photography by Swoon).
On the left side of
the entrance hall, there was a small frame (Fig. 2) that included the following
text:
In order to
view the Portrait of Sylvia Elena, it is necessary to descend into the hole.
By entering,
you assume all risk of injury to yourself.
2 Swoon, Portrait of Silvia Elena,
2008, installation, details, Honey Space Gallery, NY, (photography by Swoon).
In the installation space, it
was necessary to descend through a hole and a staircase to visit the work. The
proposal was a guided tour with an evident quality of a symbolic ritual that augmented
as one went down and slowly entered the installation environment. The public saw,
felt and breathed a considerable amount of debris and dust. As the days passed,
a putrid smell from the flowers and water became increasingly notable, as they were
not changed during the time the installation lasted. It was a dim area where
only a few candles located in different parts of the space served as
illumination, and there were days when the candles were out and the lighting
came only from the entrance hole. On one of the walls of this basement area the
mural Portrait of Silvia Elena
(Fig.3) was located.
3. Swoon, Portrait of Silvia Elena, 2008, installation,
detail of the interior view, Honey Space Gallery, NY, (photography of Swoon).
Inside, the visitors
could hear an ambient audio of Silvia Elenas mothers voice:
Well, theres
my daughter, her remains. We came and took the dirt off of her. But when we came
back, it was all filled up again. Well, who knows how this happened to my
daughter. I cant understand how this has happened to so many girls. When they came
to tell me that they had found her, well I went and identified my daughter. The
authorities took me to identify her, but my daughter was, there was only the,
just the skeleton. My daughter didnt have flesh anymore. She was just a skeleton.
She was whole, but they must have put something on her face, because all her
flesh was stuck to the bone. It was just the face that didnt have any flesh. I
found her naked, my daughter had no clothes on. Its very sad, and I tell you,
ever since she left, we talk about her all the time at home. All the time. A
day never goes by when we dont mention Elena. We think about her all the time and
we talk about her.[5]
The narration was
recorded at Silvia Elenas graveside while her mother removed the plants that
had grown over it with a metal spoon, sounds that are recorded in the audio.
From the perspective of Swoon and her collaborator Tennessee Watson, the need
to include the audio was based on the search for different narrative layers:
affect, memory, and the testimony that tells a truth from an intimate-personal
viewpoint. As an aesthetic strategy, the elements that are included in the
installation can be associated with the Freudian concept of the sinister, also
understood as "the disquieting strangeness" or "the
ominous". Sigmund Freud defines the sinister as "that uncanny element
that subtly transforms known and familiar things".[6]
That is, what is familiar, in certain scenarios, can become sinister.
This category functions as a
device that brings to the present something reminiscent of the traumatic past.
When experiencing the work, the viewer comes to know a social situation through
a particular case that produces discomfort. The observer, upon entering the
basement with the installation and hearing the words of Ramona, becomes a
witness to the finding of the body of the young woman, and the repetition of
the audio intensifies this feeling of anguish that is produced by the
contemplation of the aesthetic forms of the sinister. This unsettling experience
is interrelated with various dimensions of memory: the testimonial dimension of
the mother who witnessed the tragedy; the dimension of the artist whomakes aesthetic and political use of that testimony and the dimension of the
collective memory of those who know the work and the motive for its creation.
In general, the spectators had a disquieting experience that at the same
time awoke their sympathy with the victim represented; the reactions varied in
relation to the different nationalities of the audience. The Mexicans related
the flowers, the photographs and the candles with an altar for the Day of the Dead.
On the other hand, the New York public interpreted the work through the
translations, and carried out actions that confirmed their identification with
the people portrayed. Some of them returned to place more candles, money, and texts
in Spanish. One of these says, "I had nothing else to leave, so I left this." (Fig.4) Therefore, the work
was transformed with the passage of time. The sensorial elements of the
installation facilitated its aesthetic activation by the viewers. Firstly, they
came to know Silvias case and the situation regarding feminicides
in Mexico, and secondly, through the objects that they placed in the
installation, they showed solidarity with the problems occuring
on the border with Mexico that also involve the United States.
4. Swoon, Portrait of Silvia Elena, 2008, installation,
interior detail, messages and candles left by the visitors, Honey Space
Gallery, NY, (photography by Swoon).
With respect to the
installation, the artist has commented:
In the first two
exhibits in San Francisco and New York, I was simply motivated to share the piece
as widely as possible. These are two of our largest cities, and this is a story
that I believe, as was my case, Americans need to know in order to understand the
problems on our borders that are also a result of our drug trade. This is
something that is also ours, even though we try to leave it "on the other
side of the border". When people hear the story (of Silvia Elena) they are
horrified but dont know what to do. Some ask if the girls were prostitutes, as
if that could explain their deaths. This is another way of trying to keep this
horrible situation "on the other side", so that people continue to
believe that their "normal" lives are safe from such inequality.[7]
The relation Swoon establishes
between feminicides
and the drug trade draws on one of the research
hypotheses that has been raised about these events. It is estimated that
criminal groups in Mexico have complex structures that arise from other
criminal groups. If a group is mainly dedicated to drug trafficking, there may
be members who in turn commit other crimes such as human trafficking,
kidnapping, homicide, and extortion, to name a few.[8]
These convergences and the resulting social problems have been studied by
journalists, academics, international organizations, and artists.
As part of the installation's artistic narrative that sought to make the
events visible, Swoon included photographs related to personal and emotional
aspects of Silvia Elenas life. She was portrayed at her fifteenth birthday celebration,
in her room and with family members. Silvia's personal effects, notes, a mirror
and a comb were also included, objects that referred to her intimate context
and her body, and that--along with the putrid odor of the flowers and water that
referenced the deterioration of organic elements-- established a link between
matter and the event on which the work is based (Fig.5).
5. Swoon, Portrait of Silvia Elena, 2008, installation,
detail, Honey Space Gallery, NY, (photography by Swoon).
The
creative process of Portrait of Silvia
Elena included research through the organization Cuidad Juárez Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, A.C.,
and the artist maintained a close relationship to the families of the victims
of forced disappearances and feminicides. This
artistic practice linked to memory, the absence of justice and the activism of
the families of the victims reveals the different levels of mourning that,
together, highlight the complexity of the issues of feminicide
and intentional homicide. The personal process of mourning experienced by the
victims families is brought into the public sphere through the materiality of
the work, the artistic strategy of its reproduction and exhibition in a shared space,
its visibilization through the image, and the evocation and representation of
the absent person.
With respect to the representation of loss or absence, the wall that supports
the work can be understood as refering to duelo, which
means both mourning and duel in Spanish, in a double sense: mourning as a
connection elaborated through melancholy and a duel as a versus, in which the player turns around and directly observes
their opponent: the conflict alluded to by the elements on the wall and the
tension it constructs with its observer. The relation between presence and
absence through re-presentation is also related to the proposals of the French
philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1940), for whom representation is not a reiteration
but rather than an enhancement of presentation. The work also establishes a
relationship between re-presentation and re-production, in which the former invokes
both presence and absence through the image and the latter refers to the image as
a material, physical trace.[9]
In order to create works that dealt with the memory of social trauma,
Swoon developed creative processes that involved traveling to the scene of the
crime, interviews with the victims families, and direct contact with the
vestiges and personal possessions of the victim. So, as an artist, she also documents and
bears witness to the pain of others.[10]
In keeping with the views of Ileana Diéguez, and
taking into account the notion of afterlife
as conceived by Aby Warburg y taken up by Georges Didi-Huberman, what
shapes the memory of the images are the different densities of experience that
they embody as traces of past lives, of what was and is no longer. Their afterlife refers, as well, to the accumulation
of experience through time, through multiple events in the past, and the vital
residues that are compressed in and communicated through the works.[11]
In the feminicides[12] perpetrated throughout Mexico, the female body has gone through
different violent interventions: sexual torture, mutilations, lacerations,
beatings, or impalements. Some women were even subjected to rituals that utilized
their blood, some had their nipples mutilated by being bitten while they were
still alive, and others had a triangular piece of skin cut out. [13]
In other words, the body was treated as a pile of meat. [14]
These rituals based on suffering, for whatever reason, leave marks or transform
the body: the body is a memory. [15]
In the theories advanced by the Hindu anthropologist Veena Das (1945), the
situations in which the body expresses tension or trauma developed in social
circumstances of excess or abnormality, reveal pain as a socially constructed
reality designed to exert control, and produce a social code: pain as a means
through which society establishes ownership over individuals and through
which it represents the historical
damage that has been done to a person that sometimes takes the form of a
description of individual symptoms, and in other cases that of a memory
inscribed in the body.[16]
In these circumstances, the difficulties for processing pain and mourning
become complicated by the classist-racist-patriarchal regime and the lack of justice. Ramona, Silvias mother,
commented that after looking for her daughter and waiting up for her, the next
day my son and husband went
and filed a report right away. But no, the police
said no right away, that maybe my daughter had left with some boy, that they
were going to wait 72 hours. When her family returned to the authorities, they
again said, no, nothing, that they hadnt found her. Then, my son made a
thousand flyers
and he went out every night, putting up flyers on the roads, in
stores, in restaurants
and she was nowhere to be found, as if the earth had
swallowed her up. Ramona remembers the officials saying, Maam, we have made excellent
investigations. We dont tell you anything because then
you talk, and everything rebounds. [17]
In these commentaries that Silvias mother remembers, it is clear that the
judicial process is subordinated to gender prejudice, to a view that the womens
talk hampers judicial actions. To the date, no one has been accused in Silvias
case.
Given this situation, art can be a pathway for denunciation and greater social
awareness. The multisensorial images that were a part of the installation and
the artists aesthetic strategy allow us to understand the impact on the
audience of this information about the violent and discriminatory events occurring
in Mexico. The reactions were primarily of empathy, possibly because the work didnt
refer explicitly to violence. In the exhibit in the United States, the artist
sought to raise awareness regarding the issues that involved both nations as a
result of their common border.
Bibliography
Bolaño,
Roberto. 2005. 2666. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz.
Deutsche,
Rosalyn. 2007. Público, en Conferencia
en el curso Ideas recibidas. Un vocabulario para la cultura artística
contemporánea, Museu d' Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 19 de
noviembre.
Diéguez, Ileana. 2016. Cuerpos sin duelo, iconografías y teatralidades del dolor. México:
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León.
Freud, Sigmund. 2007. Obras completas. Tomo 6. (1914-1917). Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca
Nueva.
González, Sergio. 2002. El hombre sin cabeza. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Monraez, Julia Estela. 2009. Trama de una injusticia: feminicidio sexual
sistémico en Ciudad Juárez. México: Porrúa.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2006. La representación prohibida. Seguido de La
Shoah, un sopolo. Madrid: Amorrortu.
[1] Roberto Bolaño, 2666. (New York: Vintage Spanish, 2017). ¿Quiere decir que cree que Kelly está muerta?, le grité. Más o menos, dijo sin perder un ápice de compostura. ¿Cómo que más o menos?, grité. ¡O se está muerto o no se está muerto, chingados! En México uno puede estar más o menos muerto, me contestó muy seriamente.
[2] A second fragment of The Part About The Crimes,
reads: This happened in 1993. January 1993. Beginning with this death, people
began counting the murders of women. But it is likely that there were others
before this one. The first victim went by the name of Esperanza Gómez Saldaña and was thirteen
years old. But its likely that she wasnt the first one. Maybe out of
convenience, since she was the first victim of assassination in 1993, she was
at the top of the list. Even though surely
there were others who had died in 1992. Others who were left off of the list,
or who were never found, buried in mass graves in the desert or whose ashes
were scattered in the middle of the night, when not even those who sow them
know where, in what place they can be found.
[3] The building was demolished
in 2012 and to date the gallery has not been relocated.
[4]Rosalyn Deutsche, Público, (lecture presented in the course Ideas recibidas. Un vocabulario para la cultura artística contemporánea, in the Museu d´Art Contemporani de Barcelona-MACBA).
.
[5] The following video, includes an audio and some photos from the
installation in the Yerbabuena
Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Honey Space Gallery in New York: https://vimeo.com/16091975,
(consulted April 2nd, 2017).
Pos ahí ta mi hija, sus restos, así venimos y le quitamos la tierra. No, ya cuando venimos otra vez ya está bien lleno otra vez. Pos quien sabe cómo le pasaría a mi hija eso. No me explico ni a tanta chica que le ha pasado. Cuando me fueron a decir que ya la habían encontrado pos este si fui y la reconocí a mi hija, me llevaron las autoridades a reconocerla, pero ya mi hija ya, ya estaba la, la pura calavera, ya no tenía carne mi hija ya, ya era la pura calavera. Estaba toda enterita, no más, yo digo que le pusieron algo en su cara, porque ella tenía toda su carne pegada en, en el hueso toda, nomás la cara era la que no tenía carne. La encontré desnuda, no tenía nada mi hija, de ropa. Es muy triste, y viera que desde que se fue ella todo el tiempo ahí en la casa hablamos de ella, todo el tiempo nunca la nos dejamos que digamos ora no mencionamos a Helena, todo el tiempo se nos viene a la mente y hablamos de ella.
[6] Sigmund Freud, Lo siniestro, in Obras completas, (Madrid: Biblioteca
Nueva, 1981), 2484.
[7] This interview is a result of my
research residency in New York from June 15 to September 15, 2017.
[8]See Salvador Bernabéu, Carmen Mena coords., El feminicidio de Ciudad Juárez.
Repercusiones legales y culturales de la impunidad, (Andalucía: Universidad
Internacional de Andalucía, 2012).
[9] See Jean Luc-Nancy, La representación prohibida: seguido de La Shoah, un soplo. (Madrid: Amorrortu Editores, 2006.).
[10]
Ileana Diéguez, Cuerpos sin duelo,
iconografías y teatralidades del dolor. (México: Universidad Autónoma de
Nuevo León, 2016.) 353.
[11]
Ileana Diéguez, Cuerpos sin duelo, iconografías
y teatralidades del dolor, 353.
[12] The Federal Criminal Code of
Mexico in its Article 325 specifies that: the crime of feminicide
is considered to be committed when a woman is deprived of life for reasons of
gender. It is considered that there are reasons of gender when any of the
following circumstances occur: I. The victim shows signs of sexual violence of
any kind; II. The victim has been inflicted with unusual or degrading injuries
or mutilations, prior or subsequently to the deprivation of life or acts of
necrophilia; III. There are antecedents or background data of any type registering
violence of the active subject against the victim in the family, work or school
environment; IV. There has been a sentimental, affective or trusting
relationship between the active subject and the victim; V. There are data that
establish that there were threats related to the criminal act, harassment or
injury by the active subject against the victim; VI. The victim has been held
incommunicado, at any time prior to the deprivation of life; VII. The body of
the victim has been exposed or displayed in a public place. The subject who
commits the crime of feminicide will be sentenced to forty
to sixty years in prison and charged with a five hundred to thousand day fine.
In addition to the sanctions described in this article, the active subject will
lose all rights in relation to the victim, including those of succession. If
the feminicide is not proven, the rules of homicide
will apply. In addition: The public servant who maliciously or negligently
delays or hinders the process or administration of justice will be imposed a
prison sentence of three to eight years and a five hundred to fifteen hundred
day fine and will also be dismissed and disqualified for three to ten years for
any public job, position or commission. See: Comisión
Nacional de Derechos
Humanos, available at:
http://www.cndh.org.mx/sites/all/doc/programas/mujer/6_MonitoreoLegislacion/6.0/19_DelitoFeminicidio_2015dic.pdf,
(accessed March 2, 2018 ).
[13] Sergio González. El hombre sin cabeza. (Barcelona: Anagram, 2002), 22.
[14] Ileana Diéguez, Cuerpos sin duelo, iconografías y
teatralidades del dolor, 201.
[15] Ileana Diéguez, Cuerpos sin duelo, iconografías y
teatralidades del dolor, 209.
[16] Veena Das, Sujetos de dolor, agentes de dignidad. (Bogota: Ed. Francisco A. Ortega, 2008) 411.
[17] Interview in: Julia Estela Monárrez. Trama de una injusticia: feminicidio sexual sistémico en Ciudad Juárez, (México: Porrúa, 2009) 157-158.