To deepen our understanding of the work of Bruno Varela, who is visiting us from Mexico, we are presenting some fragments below taken from the essay Disappearances of bodies, erasures of the image: archive, violence and memory in the work of Bruno Varela on the Iguala Case (2015‒2016), by Mariana Martínez Bonilla.
From the trenches of art, a great many plastic and literary works, performative and theatrical displays, documentary and fictional films, and even other manifestations of the moving image, have all created complex discourses concerning the violent maelstrom into which Mexico has been plunged in recent years.
[…] I would like to point out that the audiovisual work by the Mexican interdisciplinary artist Bruno Varela (Mexico City, 1971) falls within this context of relationships between artistic practices, violence and politics, understood to be an articulation of what can be sensed in a given time and space. Above all, I intend here to analyse three of his works in which he takes a critical look at the disappearance of 43 rural teaching students from the community of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, during the night of 26th September and the early morning of 27th September, 2014, doing so by reusing materials and images from various archives.
The analysis of the short films Materia oscura (2016), Fauna nociva (2015), and Volatilidad (2015) that I am proposing is based not only on a theoretical-methodological stance similar to the visual studies and conceptual elaborations of the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman and the German artist and essayist Hito Steyerl, but also based on the line of critical thought that uses archival practices as spaces for the construction of “counter-archives” and therefore of “counter-discourses” and “counter-memories”. In other words, there are places and ways of making statements that challenge hegemonic historical narratives by throwing the positivist notions of history, memory and time into crisis, becoming powers for articulating a collective memory not based on the official discourses or “truths” issued by the nation-state.
[…] Such is the case of the photograph of Julio César Mondragón’s corpse, whose face was mutilated and torn off post-mortem, which circulated freely around various media shortly after the autopsy performed by the forensic doctors of the Public Ministry of Iguala. This image was recovered by Bruno Varela to create Fauna nociva (Harmful fauna ,2015), an exercise in datamoshing lasting one minute and fifteen seconds in which the artist based in Oaxaca slyly elaborates on the issue of the public circulation of such an ominous image.
Using deliberate damage to video clips, Varela produced a kind of abstract image containing some figurative remnants, better known as glitches in the sphere of electronic arts. According to Michael Betancourt, by selectively eliminating and altering certain visual information in digital videos in MPEG-1 format, datamoshing results in an image containing visual residue and some colour stains.
These residues are nothing more than the motion data contained in each video. Hence, this technique produces coding errors that do not however affect the stability of the files being worked on. Therefore, the resulting glitch can be considered an aesthetic feature, typical of a flawed image, and not a coding error.
Fauna nociva (2015) is also an exercise that delves into the limits and powers of images, and above all into montage as a political tool. A fragment of the statement by the then Attorney General Murillo Karam accompanies the barely visible image of the student’s torso, the one that appears before our eyes amid countless pixels blurring what the original photograph shows.
[…] According to Hito Steyerl, poor images take on a new discursive dimension when they are subjected to the impoverishing yoke of the most diverse political and commercial interests, which degrade their nature to the point of making them occupy a paradoxical and bastardised position in which they “go far beyond the sphere of representation and reach a world where the order of things and of human beings, of life, death and identity, is suspended” (Steyerl 2016, 163).
At the same time, the violence exerted on them is paradoxically neutralised, because although the poor images “cannot fully account for the situation they supposedly represent” (Steyerl 2016, 163), their paradoxical and spectral nature makes them “vestiges, remnants and traces of what happened, which can be reached through the embers emanating from them” (Didi-Huberman 2012).
In the case of Fauna nociva (2014), the encounter between the fragmentary image of the battered body and its correlated sound creates a space for opening up to the meaning. The imaginary surrounding the violent events that have plagued the nation, brought about by the very figureheads representing the nation-state, is thrown into crisis by displaying the corpse via images that “make the dead speak through their remains” (Diéguez 2016, 214).
[…] Another of the artist’s audiovisual works related to the Iguala Case is Volatilidad (Volatility, 2015). Here, Varela once again recovers the statement of the “official truth”, as declared by Murillo Karam. On this occasion, the account of events is accompanied by a series of sequences that show a family life, apparently taken from one or more home movies whose sources have not been revealed by the artist.
These images were subjected to aggressive chlorine treatment. This was applied directly onto the photosensitive surface on which those memories were once imprinted, and ended up blurring them. The intention is clear: to manipulate the materiality of the images “until the last features are unrecognisable and cease to contain a presence,” as Varela himself explained.
“I ask you [sic] continue watching the images […]. I ask you [sic] keep watching the images… The images… The images,” repeats a man’s voice (Jesús Murillo Karam himself). At the same time, the images occupying the screen show the signs of their decomposition, of the material and figurative erosion to which they were subjected by the artist: a chemical violence that disrupted their representative qualities, that reversed their indexical power as a record of the past, as an imaginary conformation of memory.
As Varela himself has stated on numerous occasions, “forced disappearance is a systematic practice of state terrorism; it is an operation of reduced invisibility.” The images damaged, whether by time, the State, or the video artist himself, become a metaphor for the violence and the wounded bodies that it causes and on which it engraves its injurious imprint, but also for the manipulation of the information given by the Attorney General’s Office via the press conferences that Murillo Karam actively took part in.
[…] The documents that lend shape to Varela’s work invoke a multiplicity of meanings through the disruption of their signifying chains. These meanings are in turn challenged through the texts overlaid on them, as well as the sound recordings accompanying them. In that same vein, I would also like to refer to Materia oscura (Dark matter, 2016), the third work about the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa.
This work deals with the indeterminate state of the documents, witness reports and expert evidence claiming to give a faithful account (but cannot) of what happened. This is an audiovisual exercise based on a review of the “54,000 pages, divided into 85 volumes and 13 annexes, of the ‘Iguala Case’, made public by the Attorney General’s Office in 2015, impacted in the collider by the second and final report from the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts,” according to the artist’s own words.
In Materia oscura (2016), the photographs, formats and documents extracted from the investigation archive from the Attorney General’s Office are juxtaposed and a brief essayistic text is printed on them in which Bruno Varela addresses the conditioning used by the Mexican nation-state on the (il-)legibility of the images that appear throughout the more than eight minutes’ duration of the short film.
The overlaying of the artist’s words in red letters acts as a replica of state strategies for censoring the archive: “There are several strategies of bureaucratic judicial writing: omission, concealment, erasure, blocking, blurring, overlaying, saturation…” (Varela, 2015). As becomes evident through the filmmaker’s re-editing, these strategies make it impossible to read and interpret the documents and images, hurling them into an indeterminate historical space-time. According to Varela himself, these strategies open up a portal to the dimension of dark matter: “that which must occupy space, but which we cannot see” (Varela 2015). […]
Originally published in CONFLUENZE Vol. XIV, No. 1, 2022: V. 14 N. 1 (2022): AMERICA VISUALE. L’uso politico delle immagini in America Latina (XIX–XXI secolo), pp. 282‒298
