Extermination landscapes have the capacity to obscure realities of inequality and violence, normalizing a politically complex reality. Forced disappearances and kidnappings in Mexico have transformed rural regions into depopulated, ghostly territories dominated by organized crime and institutional corruption. What is visible is only a small part of the configuration of these landscapes. These are the new geographies of conflict in rural Mexico.
'First Act | Mourning' is an ethnography of violence in central Mexico. Following the pictorial tradition of European Romantic landscape painting with its depiction of nature's uncontrollable power and cataclysmic extremes, the piece appropriates images and motifs from 18th-century European Romantic landscape aesthetics, representing the violent occupation of rural Mexico by criminal groups, cartels, and local guerrillas. The piece investigates the historical layers of violence imposed on the landscape, with evidence gathered through a variety of techniques such as ethnography and in-depth interviews. Through a poignant and brutal testimony from a kidnapping survivor, interwoven with the pastoral landscapes of her captivity, 'First Act | Mourning' documents geographies of conflict and disappearance at the threshold of detection.
Act One | Mourning is the first chapter of the trilogy.