Mouth Filled Ash, 2014, multiple channel video, ORT: 21:12 min. Excerpt, No sound.
My recent work is an ongoing investigation of the politics of mourning in Colombia, using multiple mediums such as video, text, sound, and installation. I analyze how accounts of forced disappearances, mass graves, and terror tactics are obtained and framed by the politics that surround mourning processes. Through my work, I wish to reflect upon how these constructed and mediated narratives cease to be uncontested accounts and shift into fictions. These fictions re-constitute a reality that, even as narrations, can be difficult for people to confront. For example, the rewritten fictions in my video Mouth Filled Ash are presented as a series of movie subtitles on a black frame, subtitles of a nonexistent voice from a nonexistent recording; these fragmented fictions will forever be incomplete, narrations that will not and cannot account for a violent event. Furthermore, the viewer is also presented with images of landscapes pointing to places in which other sets of dormant fictions develop. These two antithetical structures act as narrations that develop parallel to each other, in the first case the texts serve as the voices that perpetuate a horrible crime while the landscapes delineate the proximate sites where the event occurred.
Exhibition Before. The Kitchen, New York, NY.