Saluti & Baci - Graphic Days
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AYOTZINAPA Y NUESTRAS SOMBRAS
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The Story
On the night of 26 September 2014, in Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, 43 students of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers' college were made to disappear. Ten years later, the investigative journalist Federico Mastrogiovanni returns to the case with Ayotzinapa y nuestras sombras. Mitologías de una desaparición forzada.
The book refuses to read it as an isolated episode. It places it within sixty years of state repression and counter-insurgency, and takes apart the "mythologies" that grow when an event is cut off from its political context. Its question is addressed to everyone: what do we do when society itself allows, supports, keeps silent about and covers up more tens of thousands of disappearances?How can absence be represented? The aim was not to illustrate a report: that would have added little to the existing body of research. I wanted the drawings of the 43 students to become part of the stories and testimonies, an essential component of the book.
To go beyond the available photographs, I chose a technique taught in art schools: blind contour drawing, in which you keep your eyes on the subject and never look at the paper.
Blind contour drawing involves a certain emotional distance, close to that of reportage. You forget that you are portraying a particular face and concentrate on the lines and intersections that make it up. The result is distorted and unrealistic, yet it keeps the essential features of the subject.
The portraits of the 43 students thus become possible images of their present existence, however uncertain. On thin paper they turn into paths, roads, maps of unknown places. They try to recreate a form and an appearance, and inevitably collide with the absence of the people portrayed.
Drawing becomes a way of exploring, emotionally and visually, what cannot be fully grasped.DetailsAyotzinapa y nuestras sombras. Mitologías de una desaparición forzada.
Text: Federico Mastrogiovanni
Illustrations: Daniele Catalli
Publisher: Grijalbo (Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial), Mexico City
Published: 14 August 2024
Language: ES
Format: paperback, 328 pages
ISBN: 9786073847520 (print)
9786073848640 (ebook)