Agrandir

Among the sixty million Latinos living in the United States, theatrical proposals focused on reaffirming the identities of their origins and validating memory are generated, while they are articulated with educational processes and investigate the problems that affect them, related to migration, discrimination and violence.
Recently, I had the opportunity to meet again with the performance artist Violeta Luna at the XXVI Festival Mujeres en Escena por la Paz, in Bogotá. Violeta lives and works in the city of San Francisco, where she defends her vision of what to be Latin American is in collaboration with different artists.
Violeta presented an impressive performance which was a statement against femicide entitled For those who are gone. Born in Brazil with the Rubio Obsceno group, the participatory action recalls and pays tribute to many women victims of gender violence. Accompanied by Leticia Olivares, she creates powerful images in the middle of a boxing ring surrounded by the public, and the video is an effective instrument to show dozens of faces identified with their names and ages, women who have died at the hands of men, in many cases their own spouses. The artists search in a pile for pieces of women's clothing and wear a variety of garments. The diversity of shapes, colors and genres stimulate us to evoke the multiple identities of those that could have given them life at some point of time. They hang some of the garments on bars that hang down from the ceiling and imprint them with signs that conjure femicide. The crime is described and typified in its variants in a text that some spectator, previously chosen, will read aloud.
Global and national statistics are articulated with brief testimonies, while the space is transformed into a landscape of pain, in which absences gravitate in an atmosphere of desolate emotion. A ritual of healing will involve us all when the actresses invite us to share the act of lighting and placing candles on some mounds of sand, while we read on the strip of paper that surrounds each candle the full name of one of those murdered women: a beautiful tribute that is also awareness and a commitment.