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State of Disappearance exhibition audio guide transcripts

Transcripts of the audio guides from the State of Disappearance exhibition.


Factsheet

Find out more about the State of Disappearance exhibition and access audio guides

Exhibition overview (Vice-Chancellor, Professor Phil Taylor)

I am Professor Phil Taylor, Vice Chancellor and President of the University of Bath, and it is an honour to welcome you to the state of disappearance exhibition here at the Chancellors Building, which features the artwork of the Mexican painter Chantal Meza.

As part of our ambition to bring art onto campus in order to improve the educational experience and cultural life of our learning environments, this exhibition features a collection of 75 works that are both evocative and sensitive to one of the most pressing and difficult challenges humanity faces.

This collection represents a very human response to a very real problem, which causes unimaginable suffering. Chantal was driven to respond to the problem of enforced disappearance in her home country, which many human rights organisations have referred to as an epidemic.

Like many countries around the world, enforced disappearance remains an acute problem that devastates communities and families who are forced to live with its reality.

Moreover, as news stories from places such as Ukraine and Syria continue to remind us, it is a problem that remains ever-present and in need of our attention and deep ethical concern.

And yet as this exhibition encourages, not only is there a need to rethink what disappearance means historically, dealing for example with its associations with the history of slavery and events such as the Holocaust, so the artist also invites us to reflect on the multiple forms disappearance takes today.

We could invariably think here of the disappearance of languages and cultures, the disappearance of memory and truth, and also the disappearance of ecologies and our shared biosphere.

As a poignant and sobering reminder, this exhibition was launched on the 26th September 2024. That date marked the 10th anniversary of the disappeared 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico.

Students should feel safe and free wherever they are in the world. They should also have the ability to learn, to see and be educated about the world in innovative and inspiring ways. Making art part of this learning experience is essential. We are proud therefore to have installed some of the collection here in our teaching rooms, which we believe is an innovative and bold move.

I am thankful to Chantal for allowing us to exhibit this collection, which as she has conveyed to me, belong in a university setting, for it is through education and the union between words and images that better worlds are imagined and created. Worlds that are more welcoming, peaceful, and respectful of our fundamental rights and shared differences.

Realm of Words

If I was to say the truth; I am sure this wouldn’t be the full truth for others. And so, I find it senseless to bare my experiences on paper. And just because the people that need to know, know it, so to the rest I only give my creations, it is I think the less egotistical part of me.

The truth of my experience is in there, whether easy or difficult to translate, there is not much more I would like to paint about my personal closeness to enforced disappearance.

I don’t exist in the realm of words when it comes to express what my life lives, words are another tool for me. The words of Jose Luis Borges resonate in my memory when I think of this, he says: “Language is an efficient ordering of the world’s enigmatic abundance, we invent nouns to fit reality. The mathematical sciences, metaphysics, the natural sciences, the arts, have all considerably increased our general store of words. Only poetry begs and borrows language from everywhere.

My preferred language is abstract, and it is strongly visual, and I have long learned not to battle nor to question it. How am I meant to express the meaning of my abstract paintings with words if the abstract is beyond the written language?

If I need to write anything about enforced disappearances, I will have to stick to the study of it, not to its poetics, because I don’t consider myself a writer, it would be impossible for me to reach poetry through words, the same way I wouldn’t call a Painter or a master of painting someone that can produce an image. Poetry is something I like observing through colour and shapes. Having clarify this, I will take you now through this journey by telling you my own story.

Disappearance is a state that weaponizes everything and nothing. It bleeds all colour from the earth. It denies both the living and the dead. Why then compose a painting when you are confronted with something so horrific as the practice of enforced disappearance? This is not only a question I asked myself seven years ago, but it’s a question I have been asked in one way or another by people since I walked this path. In my case, I think there is another question that needs adding, why the abstract image? Does abstraction offer anything important in terms of visual testimony? Is it better than a written text? Is art as important as forensics, journalism, activism, institutions, and academic fields?

I learnt people have their own ways of communicating about tragedy, and most of the time it is not through written language. The pieces I created are a mere glimpse into something many will agree has a thousand tentacles. The six sections I created tell of the stories I found along the way and needless to say, they are part of my history as well.

Disappear. Where?

Within the fire

Let my pain, your anger

Their fear and dementia

Burn in the flames that my body is now

Listen…

Become the fire

What does it say?

I am solemn, my tremor is intense

Savage

The sound of my flames, reaches you

You feel it, there, in the heart

The heat of my body penetrates your chest

It burns your eyes

Those eyes that do not forget

I'm there, in your hands

They are burning

Just like your feet

Yes, your feet

You want to run away, you want to burn

Because I

I am already fire

The fire that consumes

And rises with the air

The fire that burns us

Ignited ones that disappear

Obscure Beasts

The official attempts at recording enforced disappearances in México started in 1960, since then there have been more than 114,000. Fundamental questions need to be asked, and although I don’t claim to have an answer, I have observed closely the relations between the different roles we play in this crime. Who is the perpetrator? Who is the victim? And what becomes of the witness? Perpetrators are easier to judge when you are seeking a simplistic answer, even to prosecute without integrating or restructuring the social implications of such characters. Did you pull the trigger? Did you hide the body? Perhaps when looking at the practice of enforced disappearances we realise that embedded in its forms is a widespread shame among individuals, families, communities, and a whole country. Perhaps by dissecting our stories we are able to encounter the shades of our actions and we might even discover the nuance shapes of our character.

Obscure beasts emerge through the violent traces torn into the flesh of the canvas and its mutilated landscapes of historical despair. They dance with raw realities of human misery and its unnecessary deaths. From a distance, the beasts take on many different shapes, upon closer inspection the landscape itself is too close and yet still out of reach, confounding any attempt at forensic certainty. It is full of lines of miscommunication, subtilty revealing tortured bodies and disfigured forms, draw the viewer into the scene like some unwitting accomplice. The shame of being human takes hold. Am I not complicit? Am I still not the animal they said I always were? The most brutal landscapes of devastation always prove easier to view than the murder of a single wretched soul by demons who look all too familiar and all too human in their brutalizing states.

Who is beast?

In the dark, the admixture, the prance

In his violent act

The death in its body explodes, the ash to disappear

An image?

Beast

Bring about, the shape of your image

Beast

Dance, walk, cry

Ask me to find your trace

Your face

The blood falls

You, the one, explodes, splashes

A sea of blood

Dissolved bodies

A beast, embracing you

Lifetime

Leave your wounds exposed

They are necessary

Your memory?

A predisposed abyss

Lapses of memory

Leave a shadow

Apparitions

What is an image? In fact, what is the image in our memories of a face? What are faces? Many philosophers have spoken of faciality, but how does it resonate? When we think of a person, it’s most likely you will see a face in your mind, but why? And why is the image of a face so crucial when we remember a person, those who have now vanished from our sight? I look upon the world as a painter. Portraits are the source of my study, where I learned and observed through facial features an expression of what we are.

The presence of a human individual is hard to deny when a face is present. Across the world, and in my specific context, México, you know when someone is disappeared, since you will see a picture of a face being displayed on the streets, at protests, where families will show them on t-shirts, blankets, posters, leaflets – a face that is multiplied a hundred thousand times. It was these portraits that brought me to enforced disappearances. I was haunted by their presence. Faces behind faces. Layers of absences now present. What do these faces demand? Justice? I prefer to speak of these memories as apparitions. An apparition is human.

It is the trace of a spirit, a ghost, a shadow, a presence in the air. Apparitions live with the air. Bachelard knew this better than anyone. You may not see them, but you can recognise them. I saw all these bodies dancing together, moving in unison, always changing and floating from one side to the other. They occupied fleeting terrains upon which shapes were crossing time and telling their stories. These humans are one with the air, and that is how they remain, they are a reminder that through their faces and bodies that move through the streets of time, the disappeared are always present. The disappeared were always there.

Disappear. Where?

In the air

Be dust in the night

Be dust in the day

Be the pain and then rise

Surround us within

Observe

Be the smoke that permeates and blurs

Become the shadow, in your darkness

In the midst of that darkness

We are here

You are searching

Who are you looking for?

Yes, air

Breathe

Who is it?

It's me

Wind, dance with the wind

Pour yourself into the mountains

Move the trees

Halt in there

Behold

Descend

Feel the ground I walk

Walk

Walk on my feet

The Void

I’ve heard, read, and seen first-hand family members who are living with their loved ones disappeared. In my country we walk among them every day. You can notice them if you look. They hold a deep void. It’s unmistakable. You see it in their eyes. An emptiness prevails. It rises to the surface of the iris like a swirling void of conflicted forces that grey- scales a torturous path. There is a roundness in the circumference of our eyes, like the roundness of a clock. The disappeared belong to the cycles of time, but of a time that is also wounded and unsettled. Some of the greatest depths are found in there. Do we dare to look into those eyes that serve as a compass to traverse the human in despair?

I’m also reminded of the words Hesiod, the Greek poet used to describe Tartarus or what we now describe as Inferno: “[It] is a void beneath the foundations of the cosmos, where earth, sea. and sky all have their roots.”

Within the landscape of a face, we search for the eyes when directing our intentions, when seeking help, or to provoke a smile. There is an intimacy but most of all a recognition. When the eyes are absent, they are lost somewhere in our thoughts, they stare within, perhaps in our memories, searching, searching for answers. They may even be seeking solace in the eyes of others, the life of others to wonder what they are seeing right now. Do they see pain? Or are they resting, peaceful at least. These two circular organs tell us where to wander, they can hold you still, deep in your thoughts and can be voids to enter, but voids from which there might not offer any way back.

Disappear. Where?

Be with the water

The water is painted

It has no clarity

Moans wet, with blood

Drowned screams that mutated the voice

Bodies caught

The terror submerges

I don't see the history

I don't see the fright

I discard the body

No ashes, no dust

A flotilla of absence

My voice is silenced

In a chorus that never leaves

But history returns

Cascading waves

Broken on shattered lands

Ghosted by the moment

In the weeping eyes of the world.

Fragments of a Catastrophe

Being aware it was the Mexican mothers who were going into the fields in search for their loved ones did not surprise me. We know our legal system, governmental institutions, police and armed forces are not only mistrusted but dysfunctional. Alongside the endless corruption of a society that sees year on year fails to protect human rights, we also know our politics serves the interests of external and greater powers.

We are a country with 5,696 clandestine graves and counting. There is a major task not only to find the disappeared but to return all these bodies to their families. The case of bodies in the morgue in the city of Chilpancingo is another pertinent case. The UN Committee against Forced Disappearances estimates that under these conditions it would take 120 years to analyse these bodies. Disappeared and yet present. The Disappeared were always there. No wonder all the groups of families searching for their loved ones suffer intimidation and attacks and put their lives in danger when they go out to hills and places that are difficult to access. Violence breathes when bodies are silent.

Observing these mothers walking for miles and miles, digging, talking, crying, yelling, holding the weight of their souls and embracing others with the same pain as theirs, also takes your breath away and makes time stop. I see it as a great force of nature that you can recognise as coming from deep down and embedded in the salt and dust of the earth.

Every fragmented thought is felt with pain. It is a memory, a piece of clothing that is a memory, but in our memory, we also see the bodies, they exist in there; they always will. Just as the earth holds their stories, so our memories have traced them, they return through the roots in the ground that reach up into the soles of our feet. Blood has been spilled, and the soil has embraced it and, just like our hearts, it beats back. There is a force that makes the floor tremble so we can know our disappeared are waiting; they are searching, searching for us to look, to observe life and stare at their gaze.

Disappear. Where?

On earth

Where is my body?

Fragments of Hope

Despair

The shape?

A mixture, of red and black

Touch me

I disappear. Dark mass

Let the earth be

There in the dust, I exist

I breathe us

A wrenched life

Stained ash

Sorrows that walk

Covered in red

Muting the voice

Blood within blood

The liquid you pour

The earth absorbs me

My trail

A crimson wound, that gives life.

Collapse of Consciousness

There was once a cave, with its echoes, coldness, and the sound of water rushing over the stones as I walked in. There was a sense of reclusion and yet I was never at ease – was I being hunted?

Is there a primordial fear, a primordial place? Do you go there to tell stories, secrets, or to forget about them? To have a distance and solitude from any human invention? To begin by destroying the beginning – do you know where it all began? There were always the seconds you could have changed, and the moment you couldn’t see coming. The time you are trying to track down was never yours and it also dies every time the sorrows of your pain are liberated. There is no fire but the warmth of your own body which dissipates as your solitude echoes in this cold cave. You have to trace a line on the stone, to sketch the beginning, since there is nothing else you know at this point but the story of your own life. How can we not feel the weight of this absence? How can our consciousness not collapse when confronting the force of such a tremendous nothing?

Everything ends, like it began, in the mind. The last witness facing the final reckoning. And so, she stands alone, with nothing left except her thoughts. Is she anything without the other? Venturing for one last time into the abyss where everything had been thrown, she sees how the depths of its denials were so monstrous even the most brutal tyrants were willing to be forgotten for fear of confronting the intolerable madness. There is nothing to make sense of within this terrain. Surveying the ruins of her mental landscape, alone she sees how everything meaningful has collapsed. Even notions of past, present and future have been fully obliterated. Can she even call herself a survivor? Surely that would mean bearing witness? Yet how can you be a witness if there is nobody left to tell? And what would she say anyway? Even language has been eviscerated.

A disappearance that refuses to vanish beneath the weight of absence. A subconscious trace of an abstract memory that breathes fire into the ruins of the mind’s blackened eye. Seekers always find a way to a reimagine the world even upon shards of broken glass. She feels. Sensing that there is the glimmer of something. In the shadow at the dark side of consciousness something refuses to die.

I am not wise

My strength, sometimes, trembles

I find it hard to breathe

Because I feel, as if every breath is you

The memory of us vanishes

Maybe I am a stealer

A stealer of air

I remove your only breath

I live and you die

The light hurts my eyes

Eyes closed

You are a dark abyss

Floating in an empty space

I can’t walk to you

I can’t move

I paralyse

With eyes wide open

I see you

The lips don't move

I talk to you

Our childhood

Our voices clear

My body still

Tired

I ask for help

Your fault

Denial

You are dead

They saw everything

I know nothing

Furious turmoil’s

Broken pavements

Humiliating debris

Surrounded by smoke

Our heads burst

Collapsing, Collapse

A wandering mind

Memories attract

They will keep you alive

Forget

Don't Forget

Disappear

I am waiting in here

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