Missing Traces Violence Against the Vulnerable in Mexico
 Robin Laurence - Straight.com
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| | Deborah Koenker drew on family connections to the Mexican village of Tapalpa for embroidered images of fingerprints that speak of crime and lost identity. | | |
Artist Deborah Koenker is looking through computer files in her Dunbar studio. She is also recounting her first awareness of the subject of her community-based installation project Missing/Las Desaparecidas. In the summer of 2003, while waiting to board a plane to northern British Columbia, she picked up a copy of O magazine. In it, she came across a short article on the hundreds of murdered and missing women and girls of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
“When I got back, I went on-line, and that’s what really did it,” she says. The faces of victims, some as young as 12, and the testimonials by grieving family members were deeply disturbing. Koenker researched the crimes, contacted activists in Mexico, and examined the world-wide human-rights issue of violence against women. She also initiated the ambitious photo-and-textile installation that is on exhibit at the Richmond Art Gallery from Saturday (April 26) to June 1.
Three long rolls of thin cotton, embroidered with 84 highly enlarged images of fingerprints, will be hung from the ceiling. On an adjacent wall, a grid of names and photos of the victims will be mounted. As well, a suite of Koenker’s silkscreen prints that grew out of Missing, will be on view at the McGill Library in Burnaby until May 20, along with an earlier series of her Mexican-inspired prints.
Ciudad Juárez, located in the state of Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, is home to hundreds of foreign-owned factories and assembly plants. Known as maquiladoras, most have sprung up since the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect in early 1994. In the same period, Ciudad Juárez has also been the site of the more than 400 horrific unsolved crimes against women and girls.
Koenker briefly summarizes reports she has read: abduction, torture, rape, and murder; bodies mutilated, burned, and dumped in the desert or near the city’s shantytowns where factory workers live. Inaction by police and higher authorities. No one brought to justice. The crimes, although vastly different in scale, reminded her of the murdered women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the eventual arrest of a suspect, after years of disappearances. The parallels between the DTES and Ciudad Juárez crimes were striking. It looked as if the victims—poor, female, often indigenous—were regarded as disposable by the criminal justice system. “Racism, sexism, and poverty are fundamental factors,” Koenker states.
She calls up photographs of a few of the Ciudad Juárez victims—“14 years old, this one,” she says grimly—then lists the theories that have been floated about who or what is behind the crimes. “Politicians, police, gangs, drug cartels, organ trafficking, porn rings…” Some of the women are victims of domestic violence, but many fall into a pattern of serial killings. “There is impunity,” Koenker says, “and the killers know it.”
Through marriage, Koenker has a large Mexican family and strong connections to Tapalpa, a village in the mountains of Jalisco. Working in Tapalpa with three social activists—Cuca Flores, Guadalupe Ahumada, and Rebeca Rosas—she initiated the textile project and engaged 74 women and 11 men in its production. Each participant hand-embroidered a much-enlarged image of her or his fingerprint on one of the three rolls of cotton. The fingerprints function as a multifaceted symbol. “They represent the criminal investigation that isn’t happening in Ciudad Juárez,” Koenker says, “but they also talk metaphorically about loss of identity.”
Many of the murdered and missing women came to Ciudad Juárez from impoverished villages all over Mexico, searching for employment. “You’re going from someplace where you’re known and valued to a place where you’re literally on the periphery,” Koenker explains. The fingerprints also allude to the contrast between traditional handmade crafts and textiles in Mexican villages and the anonymous machine work performed in the maquiladoras. In the case of the Tapalpa women and men who took part in the Missing project, their fingerprints represent their protest against the crimes and their solidarity with the victims’ families. “The embroidery sessions also provided an opportunity to discuss violence in their own community,” Koenker adds.
During the Richmond Art Gallery’s showing of Missing/Las Desaparecidas, similar dialogues may be provoked. So may our understanding of our complicity, as consumers of goods produced in places where human rights are grossly violated. “It’s the most vulnerable who fall under the steamroller of globalization,” says Koenker. “It happens because it can happen.” |
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Vallarta Living | Art Talk | April 2008 
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