Suffering Bodies and Scenes of Confrontation: The Art and Politics of Representing Structural Violence

BASTA!: An Exhibition About Art And Violence in Latin America at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, John Jay College, New York, 2016.

Qualitative Sociology, 2011

2019

Livia K. Stone's Atenco Lives! Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico is an ethnography of activist film making production and distribution. Stone argues that filmmaking is a tool to advance social change, but not in the ways mainstream technophilic fantasies prime us to expect. Activists use the process of media production, exchange, and distribution as a means to practice the kinds of ethical and nonhierarchical social relations they want to enact more broadly. Forgoing efforts to change or upend state structures, which they experience as hopelessly unjust, these activists instead aim to transform themselves and their communities into ethical collective political subjects. In documenting and analyzing how people use and understand media production as a political tool, Atenco Lives! uncovers how popular activists in Mexico in the first decade of the twentieth century imagined, negotiated, and sought to build nonhierarchical collective power.

2025

Mexico faces a situation of generalized violence, expressed in diverse forms of violence that facilitate and intensify the exploitation of productive and reproductive labor. The government of the “Fourth Transformation” (4T) has made insufficient efforts to deliver justice to sectors of Mexican society made most vulnerable by this situation. In this sense, the 4T does not represent a radical change in the situation of generalized violence that Mexico has experienced since 2006 with the PAN and PRI administrations. Indeed, 4T officials preside over an ongoing production of geographical forms, including “landscapes of disappearance,” that facilitate impunity. Highly visible proponents of the 4T simultaneously seek to delegitimize the justice claims of communities and collectives identified as environmentalist, feminist, Indigenous, or all of the above, which, from a position of exclusion, seek to shape what Luis Tapia would call the “political subsoil”—relations of sociality that exceed the totalizing logic of capitalist and state-territorial projects, reproduced through autonomous forms of solidarity and communication. We argue that aesthetic interventions produced from this position, including “anti-monuments,” express a spatial politics by which activists and community representatives engage in place-making in response to experiences that otherwise are insufficiently recognized by institutionalized power. We focus on the Mexico City megalopolis, in geographies where generalized violence is acutely and variably felt. We understand these aesthetic interventions as signposts that guide—without a pre-established route—a transversal struggle in defense of life.

Porto Arte. Revista de Artes Visuais, 2019

In Mexico, memory has become a battlefield. The Ayotzinapa case (2014) -a still unresolved State-level human rights violation, including the disappearance of 43 students- transformed the public space into a permanent struggle between governmental amnesia and the politics of truth. With the emergence of various massive clandestine graves all across the country, a new form of violence emerged, characterized by the spectral materiality of the absent body. In this article, I elaborate on the relation between disappearance, social memory, and creative activism in recent Mexican art. Using the investigations of Forensic Architecture in Mexico as a case study, the text discusses the role of visual culture in the articulation of what I call the performativity of human rights.

This article explores how Mariana Rondón's award-winning Venezuelan film Pelo malo (2013) reveals the inner workings of private relationships and language, representing what Bourdieu termed " symbolic violence ". Pelo malo challenges the exponential celebratory boom in Venezuelan state-supported filmmaking as the Chávez administration turned to cinema to narrate the nation. Despite the excitement and increase in state-sponsored filmmaking and the Chávez era's nation-building discourse, Pelo malo exposes the limits of Chávez' imagined community in both the film's plot and its post-production trajectory.

2018

Neoliberalism is more than an economic system, it’s a cultural frame for the production of heterogeneous signs, it is a semiotic operator whose semiotics are both signifying and a-signifying (Deleuze & Guattari; Lazzarato); for that reason it is necessary to explore and analyze the ways in which art objects work with several languages and concepts to produce sensitive records of exclusions and negotiations within the economic territories created by globalization. Taking as starting point the proposal by Alexander R. Galloway to think the interface as a mediation space and an autonomous zone of activity, I propose the critical reading of texts that have been written as an aesthetic response to the horrorism of financial economy, specially those that work with the materiality of the text that can be seen as a work with the «submedial space» of the Archive (Groys): Hugo Garcia Manriquez's Anti-Humboldt (Aldus/Litmus Press, 2015); Eugenio Tisselli’s The 27th / 27th (motorhueso.net, 2014), Mónica Nepote’s Hechos diversos (Acapulco, 2010; some of the poems of the book have been translated by John Pluecker and published in some reviews) and Sara Uribe's Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016). The paper focus in the work with critical forms that articulate the violence of capital and its relationship with the media ecology of contemporary literature through the use of two main concepts: body and the writing. The main aim is to theorize their multiplicity as modes of reterritorialization of violence in the neoliberal age.

Transforming Anthropology, 2020

This article addresses the ways in which Afro-Colombians in the region of María la Baja, Colombia, re-signify their contentious bodies amidst parallel peace and war efforts. After over sixty years of war, the government and armed paramilitary forces continue to frame Afro-Colombian campesinos (rural farmers) as both innocent victims and guerrilla combatants. Given the legacies of racialized marginalization, how do Afro-Colombian communities stake claims to lost land and violent pasts when their very bodies are presumed to challenge their innocence? I illustrate how individuals use their contentious bodies to resist militant and bureaucratic attempts to label them as perpetrators of violence. Afro-Colombian farmers enact embodied evidence, such as calloused farming hands, to assert their dignity and victimization. Through these corporeal and visual self-assertions, I examine the ways in which intersectional signifiers—including territory, ethnicity, gender, and class—are simultaneously read and performed within the context of war and peacetime violence.

2001

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2015

This article examines the politics of gender in armed guerrilla organizations during Mexico's Dirty War (1960 and the role of visual culture in documenting histories of state violence and revolutionary struggle. By centering specifically on Mexican film-maker Luisa Riley's documentary Flor en Otomí (2012), this article explores the possibilities and limitations of visual culture in representing gendered histories of trauma in recent Mexican history. As one of the few cultural texts that documents women's participation in the history of Mexico's armed socialist organizations, the film alludes to the difficulty of audiovisually portraying violence and the tensions that emerge when representing the gendered ghosts of Mexico's Dirty War. Ultimately, this article argues that the eradication of thousands of (gendered) subjectivities from Mexico's national consciousness has created a gendered haunting that holds contemporary neoliberal Mexico accountable to its recent violent past.