Vis.[un]necessary force. The Sound of Postnational Mexico.

Transdisciplinary artistic research project. [Ongoing]
Funding entity: National Council for Culture and the
Arts / National System of Art Creators (2015–2018).
Culture Ministry of the Government of Mexico.
Grant reference: Transdisciplinary art-research project. Digital ethnographies, forensic archaeology, social practice, digital communities, custom made software, community involvement, collaborative cyber-cartographies.

Introductory text written on the occasion of the solo exhibition In the Absence of the State, curated by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński. On view at Municipal Gallery Arsenal, Poznan, Poland. Dates: 24.05 – 7.07.2024.

Mexico has faced a crisis of criminal violence especially since 2006 when the government began waging a war against narcotics trafficking in the country, unleashing an epidemic of deadly violence. Since 2018, more than thirty thousand people have been found dead each year, and by 2023, in addition, more than 110,000 people have disappeared. Cartels’ hitmen are behind many of the disappearances, but Mexico’s military, police and security forces have also been implicated in hundreds of cases. A 2023 report states more than 5,698 clandestine graves have been found across the country.* ** This is the context of the long-term transdisciplinary art-research project Vis.[un]necessary force. The Sound of Post-National Mexico that explores how the civil population survives extreme violence performed by legitimate and non-legitimate groups of power in a scenario in which the absence of the state prevails.

The title of the project makes a direct reference to the fact that the violence in contemporary Mexico is extreme and excessive. Vis, from its Latin root and in a 'positive' sense, can be understood as a force linked to energy, virtue, or power, and in a 'negative' sense, as violence or hostile force. The territory is controlled through terror and force: mutilated bodies and their display or, contrarily, through the disappearance of these bodies in clandestine graves. To this day, the violence that is systematically exercised against the civilian population is presented by the groups that hold the symbolic and real power of the territory, as necessary, something that inevitably must happen. These groups have attempted to establish this violence as the result of a war in which it is necessary to impose dominance over individuals and their bodies and to display this dominance.

The results of this artistic project are grouped under the generic title Vis.[un]necessary force (V.[u]nf) and accompanied by a numeral. These works result from the artist's explorations of the different aspects of violence and its imbrication in everyday life. Examples of how Vis.[un]necessary force—as an art research project—has been used as a grassroots tool for addressing political violence and human rights abuses and for advancing peacebuilding, transitional justice, and prevention efforts at the local, national, or international level can be found in the different outcomes of the project. There are five complex, multi-layered artworks—V.[u]nf_1 and V.[u]nf_1.01, V.[u]nf_2, V.[u]nf_3 and V.[u]nf_4—addressing citizen journalism, complex childhood trauma, digital tools for the trackers Rastreadoras de El Fuerte, and interaction and community construction on the search for victims of enforced disappearance.

Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, curator

• Introductory text written on the occasion of the solo exhibition *In the Absence of the State, curated by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński. On view at Municipal Gallery Arsenal, Poznan, Poland. Dates: 24.05 – 7.07.2024

** Ferri, Pablo. “Mapping Mexico’s 5,698 clandestine graves.” El País. October 10, 2023. URL: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-10-10/mapping-mexicos-5698-clandestine-graves.html#

In Mexico, crimes against humanity are committed daily, with more than 300,000 casualties, 4,000 clandestine graves, 110,000 disappeared civilians, an inestimable number of displaced individuals, and an increasing number of active death camps with their crematoriums. The women and men I have been working with have experienced first-hand the necro-machine, a double-headed organism that fuses Giorgio Agamben's concept of 'power-machine'—governmentality and sovereignty operating together [1]—and Achille Mbembe's 'war machine'—"made up of segments of armed men that split up or merge depending on the tasks to be carried out and the circumstances" [2]. The imposed narratives around the horror have contributed to masking the situation's depth. "[F]ear shrinks bodily space," writes Sara Ahmed [3], and proof of this is found in these individuals' complex relationships with public and private spaces. What we see is a necro-mechanism created with the collusion of police and military forces and the participation of government members, which makes it impossible for civilians to trust their surroundings. Understanding the necro-machine will allow us to see it as the complex and unsafe territory contemporary Mexico is.

Luz María Sánchez. Poznan, May 24, 2024.

[1] De Boever (2011). The Agamben Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. P. 182.

[2] Mbembe, Achille. (2003). “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(1): 11-40. Duke University Press. p. 32.

[3] Ahmed, Sara. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. P. 64.