Can we, artists, work on a phenomenon that is active?

The Monster Series I have been developing for a couple of years now are artworks that speak of catastrophes that are ongoing, in the sense that war and ecological disaster has been ongoing for centuries, if not to reach their culminating force in the last 100 or so years. 

 

I use photo reportage of press correspondents, drones, satellites, and other sources of images to develop my collages. The title Monster Series of the ensemble talks of the need to give shape to a monster that is eating and crashing humanity, in the image of Goya’s painting of Saturn Devouring His Son. The cover, the blanket collage defining the monster’s shape is made of fabrics from everywhere in the world. I started collecting fabrics in 2008 when I worked in Liberia, a country completely devastated by civil war, where my students would take me around to show me their favorite fabrics in the slums. The fabrics became a huge collection in which I add every year items and patterns from everywhere in the world, sheets, fabrics, blankets, and traditional embroideries. They are reminders of a very strong memory of me being carried around by my mother completely wrapped in ’70s flower-patterned sheets. And, like an alternative collection of all those embroideries families used to pass on to their daughters, the “trousseau”. 

 

Roland Barthes says, in A Lover’s Discourse,  that “historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman” when he talks about war, “It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction (...) she weaves and she sings;” 

This artist's “trousseau collection” comes in to give shape and hide these avoidable man-made monsters that are rising in the world to devour us.