Putting faces on the shocking figures

LAST weekend I visited an art exhibition in Edinburgh titled 400 Women. It was made up of portraits, in various media, of women who have been murdered or disappeared in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez. The City, formerly known as El Paso Del Norte, has an international reputation for violence and was once branded “the most violent zone in the world outside of warzones”.

The exhibition arose in response to the epidemic of violence against women in the city since 1993 when the body of an unknown woman was found. That was the first known case of its kind in the area but marked a terrible starting point. Since that time the numbers of disappeared, murdered and raped women has climbed to horrifying levels.
The numbers involved are so staggering as to almost shield the reality of what they describe from our consciousness. Reading the number 400 on a page, while shocking in itself, fails to convey the actuality of what it describes.
With this in mind, a group of 200 artists came together over a five-year period to create the exhibition, which gave a physical representation to the raped, the disappeared and the murdered. Four hundred names were embodied in 400 portraits on the walls of the crumbling school where the exhibition was housed. The numbers relating to the biographies of the women were not straightforward or easy to find and in some cases neither were the portraits themselves.
The act of searching became an integral part of the immersive experience of the exhibition. Those who attended searched where the Mexican authorities no longer do. Despite the murder of 300 women in 2010 alone, the disappearance of many more and increasing media coverage, in most cases the killers walk free. In 2006, investigations by the Mexican Federal Authorities into murders and disappearances of this nature were closed. They concluded that no federal laws had been violated.
Walking among the portraits fashioned and created as memorials and reading the story of each woman was a deeply affecting experience. The amount of time it took to look at each face and find out a name made real their story, their person and their reality. It brought home with great clarity the enormity of the atrocity that the exhibition sought to highlight.
In humanising these women the artist, Tamsyn Challenger allows us to more clearly understand the true nature of the horror that is unfolding in this Mexican city where the population, along with the violence and social problems, have mushroomed in the years since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Ciudad Juarez, along with a number of other border cities, saw a massive growth in maquiladoras, manufacturing or assembly plants, which came south from the United States to take advantage of the cheap labour in Mexico after the agreement was signed. Along one of the best secured borders in world to prevent the free movement of people, factories mushroomed to take advantage of that border’s allowance of the free movement of capital.
Efforts to make numbers seem real for humans have been a longstanding endeavour. Speak to anyone who has visited the concentration camps run by the Nazi regime in Eastern Europe and they will tell you of the enormity of experience that stems from seeing the cabinets piled high with glasses, shoes and other belongings. So many individual things, each with a life and story of its own, a repository of the experiences and life of its former owner, make real for us the things we cannot fathom or maybe are prevented from fully acknowledging through some primal self-defence mechanism.
In this context it is an unsettling experience to consider the endless stream of statistics being released on a continuous basis regarding the Irish economy, mortgage arrears and increasing poverty levels. While the numbers climb there is a tendency to become inured to the dreadful reality they represent. They are numerical representations of hungry children, marriages pushed to breaking point and devastated lives publically disseminated and discussed but never fully acknowledged.
According to The Guardian, “55,763 mortgage holders – or 7.2% of all private residential mortgages – were in arrears of more than 90 days in the three months to the end of June. Some 40,000 householders are behind on payments by more than six months – more than double the figure in September 2009.” Even if an average of one partner and two children is applied to these figures, we are left with quite an extraordinary number of individual experiences of this trauma and many various consequences.
Similarly, as the Catholic Church continues to bluff and downright evade its responsibilities in the condoning, shielding and perpetuating the rape and torture of Irish children, the numbers of those affected and the actual stories they have to tell have faded into the background.
‘Victims groups’ are quoted in news stories commenting on the latest Roman denial shielding the general public from having to consider what even one of these people suffered at the hands of priests and the organisation they served.
I am not wishing to suggest that this kind of numerical euphemism is somehow a deliberate construct used to hide the reality from the population, though in some cases I don’t doubt it is. Perhaps if the true scale of the world’s horrors, suffering and relentless indignity were shown to us daily it might prove too much for us to bear. If the face of every starving child were present in our field of vision and we were forced to reconcile ourselves with their reality, as we perceived it from our own, then things might be a little different.
The function of art in reminding us to look where we might not think to do so is an important one and if we looked there all the time then that function would be rendered null and void.
Unfortunately, we also know that humanity learns to cope when regularly faced with terrible outrage and distress. In order to protect ourselves we become numb. Perhaps this is true in many more cases than we acknowledge and one of the reasons why so many millions of us can live with ourselves every day in the face of suffering of a scale and nature that is a chimera to our idea of reality.