‘Quién puede borrar las huellas?’ Who Can Remove the Traces by Regina José Galindo.

"A woman in a black dress walks barefoot through the streets of Guatemala carrying a gray basin filled with human blood. She wets her feet with it so she can leave a trail of bloody footprints behind her. Her destination is the Constitutional Court building to the National Palace. This piece is a powerful statement about the role of art in showing human-rights abuses and government atrocities. The footprints represent the hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered by the Army during the long years of war. This is a vigorous protest against the presidential candidacy of Guatemala's former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt. During the first five days of the Venice Biennale, Guatemalan artist and poet Galindo crawled inside the cube and whipped herself 256 times - once for each woman systematically murdered in Guatemala from January 2005 until the day of the performance." from VideoArtWorld.com description
I can barely stand to write about this image.

Ms. Galindo's art, here, is gone. Gone. Gone. Gone Beyond. Gone Way Beyond.

This performance is over. This art will never fade until what it points to, ends. So it is Gone. And so this is only a capturing of a moment from her performance. I did get to view an installation of Galindo's work in a small gallery in Oxford, UK. Watching the video stilled me. In a dark empty room with a few other quiet people, I was finally and gratefully...stilled.

The performance is over but the traces to which she is drawing our attention--those traces (from government building to government building) they are upon us. For eons. They are karmic and inescapable. I admire the howl of her work. And in this case (and most of her work) she is utterly silent in the howl. The eye of the storm.

Some of her work is extraordinarily brutal: I cannot hardly bear even the still images. But she is so honest and brave that they are not sensational--they are wrenching and real and insisting that we not look away from that which we are, like it or not. If someone, somewhere is enduring what she depicts (and as an artist she depicts both metaphorically and literally)--then we are implicated. I am implicated.

I am grateful to Galindo for enabling me not only to be implicated in those scenarios but in her scenarios, as well. For in her insisting we acknowledge her, see her--she allows us in: We, too, dip our feet in the blood and walk silently through the political streets. We too, bravely endure the stares of the populace, the police, the indifferent, the offended, the hungry sympathetic, the powerful, the powerless. The powerless. They are indeed the most powerful. For it is the energy of the transferals of power that leave the trace. And the trace is upon a flesh beneath our flesh. Some might call it soul. (But, using that term vernacularally, that doesn't work for me.)

As both a scholar in the academy and a student of Buddhism (not in the academy) I am wary of terminologies. One must be precise. Precision is elusive.

So, for this post I will avoid wrestling with the notion of where the trace is left but note that I will discuss later that I am heartened by how Mari Ruti is Reinventing the Soul in such a way that I may academically reference this elusive "flesh beneath the flesh". For this post, I want to say simply "Look." Now remember.

The traces are not removed by a "who" but instead by a "how." And that is what I am interested in. Stay tuned.

http://www.videoartworld.com/beta/video_177.html
To see a clip of this work.