In the work of the Guanajuato artist and designer Gastón Ortiz, forty-eight blurred faces, representing more than one hundred and thirty thousand missing people in Mexico, hang from uncertain, elusive threads, and question the visitor by projecting a bundle of absent glances. In Guanajuato there are almost five thousand five hundred people that we are missing to date. From time to time, on some highway or truck terminal, or on social networks, they reappear to the passerby, the motorist and the digital navigator within files and search alerts, cold, like photographs encapsulated in a frame, serialized, and now, due to the terrible frequency of the absences themselves in the state, they go almost unnoticed, between billboards and signs.
The two polyptychs that make up Ortiz’s work, exhibited at the Ibero León last year, are fragmented into dozens of pieces and presented like a clothesline, the oscillating leaves of a suspended tree, indifferent to time and full of expectation for the reunion. It seems to me to be a graphic metaphorization of the rupture, the social and community breakdown of disappearance, the truncated life project of those who were disappeared, and the idea that the network of family and all kinds of relationships are also being destroyed in the environment and within those who stay and search.
There are echoes here of the double mirror of disappearance, a concept worked on by the Colombian anthropologist and historian María Victoria Uribe, it is also the suspension of time and space, its bifurcation, rather, into two distant and suffering paths: that of the one who searches, that of the one who finds himself missing. But fragmentation is also what, on many occasions, the authorities responsible for the investigation and search themselves generate in the survivors of violence and in the files and proceedings that they poorly integrate.
The set of these portraits of Ortiz, emanating from the traces that the author remembers from files and publications of missing people, resonates and appears like a “tree of memory.” This is a device of hope that search groups have incorporated into their repertoire of struggle and that they usually install in public squares in cities to make visible the absence of their loved ones, while reaffirming that they are there, although others wanted to erase them. Just like the embroidery, the fruit of many hands that, as if they were one, weave the memory and names of their loved ones into resistant warps that become shields against indifference and banners for marches and the exhibition of absent lives, but made present in the public space.
The search alerts, consecutive and standardized, disseminated by the authorities, there become, against the grain, subjective and humanized images, memorial and experiential artifacts, such as ribbons and plaques, epigraphs and messages, letters and memories, smiles and presences printed on photographs. People, permanent passers-by in urban space, notice them or try to avoid them, cultivate their empathy or learn to repress it, but they can hardly ignore them.
Also Guanajuato, where about twenty-seven groups of searchers were formed in 6 years, especially since 2019, has entered the painful national map of violence, so urgency and importance come together in the emergence of initiatives of activism, art, memory, denunciation, research, organization and solidarity to make visible the phenomenon and the demands, as well as the hundreds of clandestine graves and the atrocities in the region and the country.
The mark left by Gastón Ortiz’s composition is substantiated by the vision of blurred otherness that refuses to be cancelled, that challenges the entire society, because everyone is the person who was disappeared and that the authorities, often omitted or complicit, must look for by law, but above all by ethical and political mandate.
Uncertainty and suffering emanate from the multiple facets of disappearance, portrayed in uncertain faces that invite us to silence and reflect on the anonymity to which thousands of people who are wanted are condemned and who, under institutional and state logic, are reduced to figures, posts and statistics that blur their life story and identity. Some sensationalist and sensational journalism also dilutes them in the magma of indifference and normalization of the violence we experience. Like figures, or like red notes that assimilates every crime and every grievance to the so-called “narco.”
In the midst of political diatribes and toxic narratives about the missing, the figures, the technical terminology and public policy, finally thousands of families are left, the indirect and potential victims, the public opinion numb or confused, and the indolence-impotence of the state, factual, in the field, in the face of an already structural and everyday situation that we cannot simply call “crisis”, as if it were something exceptional and conjunctural.
The face precariousness of the panels mounted in an exhibition takes us back to the precariousness of lives, considered sacrificial, and to the liminal state, between life and death, between search and discovery, in which tens of thousands of people find themselves in our present, Mexican and Guanajuato, marked by a bleak forensic panorama and an unresolved history of sequential and overwhelming violence.
According to the dictionary, the face is the face, the front part of the head, and it is also the countenance, that is, the representation of some state of mind in the face itself. The uncertainty and immediacy of the image we see and remember is transfigured into the emotional dimension that prints discordant memories in our experience of artistic production. The uncertain is what is not certain, what is doubtful, what is unknown, what is confusing, what is false, even.
The public at the exhibition observes individual faces that concretize the semblance of the facethe characteristic or ability to become a face, definitely human, through emotions.
The communicator and sociologist Rossana Reguillo, returning to Deleuze and Guattari in a thousand plateaus (1980), has made explicit the political function of the face and the act of undoing it, which can mean denial and annihilation of identity-alterity. This is the interruption of the vital project and social relations of those who were disappeared and their communities, affected in concentric and expansive circles. From “Ayotzinapa event”, Reguillo interpreted the scene of the skinned face of the normal student Julio César Mondragón, found lifeless in Iguala after the mass disappearance and massacre against students and residents, in the context of a state crime that is still unpunished:
It is important to understand that in the case of Ayotzinapa, very strong face mechanisms are triggered. […] Faces in scenes. Ayotzinapa has been devastating because its images cannot be reduced. The face of Julio César and the 43 normalistas constitutes irreducible pain. As Susan Sontag wanted, “we must allow atrocious images to haunt us,” not close our eyes, neither our affections nor our conscience to what Ayotzinapa tells us about ourselves.
On the other hand, the face as a face and as a semblance, with its features and tones, with its facial and communicative expressions, is also produced and reproduced, returning as grammar and symbolic reference. This is how it creates new frameworks and meanings, both thanks to art and through the action of visual reappearance that families in search externalize, publicly and politically, when they embroider, paint, carry, print, paste and design the faces of their loved ones, semblance of pain and hope at the same time.
The Indian anthropologist Veena Das warns us in her book Subjects of pain, agents of dignity (2008) that the cancellation of human subjectivity, such as that which occurs in disappearance and is combated by the art and action of the victims, supposes that there are people who would not be “worthy of being treated as an other who had a face.” The heart of subjectivity resides precisely in the face.
Los Uncertain facess of Gastón Ortiz remind us that too often state opacity, the dance of official figures, media superficiality and criminal action dangerously intertwine to produce invisibility and confusion, to disappear two, three and infinite times to absent people, so its undefined lines and contours are a call from aesthetics and image to open paths of collective coping, transformation and dialogue.