LAS OLVIDADAS: The Forgotten Women Photographs by Maya

Curator ’s Statement
This exhibition brings together three major bodies of work by Maya Goded—work that is
both reportage and profoundly personal. While critiquing the invisibility of women in contemporary Mexican society, the work also empathizes with its subjects, and even celebrates
them, in these stark non-judgmental portraits. These are women who live their lives beneath
the radar, unacknowledged and unprotected by the dominant culture. They are invisible
women who exist in the shadows in Mexico, but emerge into the light through Goded’s images. The prostitutes of La Merced, whom Goded identifies as being “On the Other Side,” the
disappeared women of Juarez (“Nobody Heard them Scream”) and the curanderas and healers who are the witches of the north in “The Land of the Witches” comprise three bodies of
work that, taken together, form a chronicle from a journey Goded took over a period of a
decade. Beginning in the capital city where Goded has lived all her life, she later fanned out
across the country in her search for her subjects.
In the last year, Goded has shifted her focus from photography to film, and yet the
subject matter remains focused on similar questions of female identity, maternity, sexuality,
age and desire. Though specific to Mexico, these images raise questions beyond all borders.
Trisha Ziff, Guest Curator
Maya Goded was born in Mexico City in 1967. She has won numerous awards and exhibited
in the US, Europe and Mexico. Her awards include the Eugene Smith Award, a Guggenheim
Fellowship and, most recently, the Prince Claus Award.
Trisha Ziff is a Guggenheim Fellow, a curator of photography, and a documentary film maker.
She lives in Mexico City.
Look at Me
a work in progress
LAS OLVIDADAS:
The Forgotten Women
This documentary investigates how we construct identities in our modernity, within the
context of spectacle, codes and value systems imposed on us through the mass media and
dominant culture. These influences define for us what “beauty” is that brings us happiness.
This short film is based on the life of Magdalena who is considered overweight, unattractive
and modest in her village; and yet despite this, she wins the beauty contest and become the
Queen.
The exhibitions Las Olvidadas, and Margarita Cabrera: Pulso y Martillo (Pulse and
Hammer), on view in the Culver Center and the Sweeney Art Gallery, have been generously
supported by grants from UC Mexus.
Photographs this page:
Two frames from Look at Me, 2010
Curator’s Statement page:
Restaurante, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico 2005. From Nobody Heard Them Scream
La Merced, Mexico City, 1998, From The Other Side
Ritual Healing, San Luis Potosi, Altiplano, Mexico, 2005, From Land of the Witches
Photographs by Maya Goded
Trisha Ziff, Guest Curator
Cover:
San Luis Potosi, Altiplano, Mexico, 2007. From Land of the Witches
The text in each section is by Maya Goded. All photographs are courtesy of the artist.
California Museum of Photography
UCR ARTSblock
University of California, Riverside
January 15 – April 16, 2011
Nobody Heard Them Scream
As I am lying on my bed, immersed in a black
silence, I’m naked; all my body is wet, as are
the sheets. Is it my sweat? Or my blood? I
can’t move. Am I dead? Suddenly, the heat
becomes unbearable. With an uncontrollable impulse, I jump from the bed and come
back to my senses. I am in a hotel room in
Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, at the border with
the U.S. surrounded by desert that many refer to as the “Silent Labyrinth.”
I go to the bathroom, I look at my
naked body reflected in the mirror. I hear
the words of the ex-governor of Chihuahua,
Francisco Barrio Terrazas (1992-1998) repeated in my head: “None of this surprised
me at all. The victims had been loitering in
dark places, wearing miniskirts and other
provocative clothes. They asked for it. This
wouldn’t have happened if they had worn a
longer skirt or had stayed home.” These were
the answers the Governor gave to the families
of these girls and young women who were
killed in his state during his term of office.
These disappeared, assassinated
women are known, as “Las Muertas de
Juarez (The Dead of Juarez).” They are the
cases that until now remain unresolved,
mysteries. Nobody heard them scream. They
disappeared, and nobody that saw anything
spoke up, nor will they.
I take a bath; I make my bed. I prepare
my rolls of film. A hard pain starts in my
chest, I feel the oppression—“the damned
impunity”—and it hurts. How can we stand
living with all this pain?
A few days earlier, when I arrived in
a taxi at the home of one of the victims, a
woman came out running. When I saw her
close up, her face changed; she became older
in front of me. Her eyes were hollow, as if I
could pass through them. She appeared lifeless. She told me, “I have always hoped that
one day my daughter might return well,
without warning, arriving in a taxi.” I asked,
“How long have you been looking for your
daughter?” She answered me, “Ten years.”
Girls and women between the ages of
10 and 25, most of them dark, “morena”, and
thin, with long hair, have disappeared while
going to work or returning home—even
in the city’s busy downtown, even in broad
daylight.
Excerpt from the text Silent Labyrinth.
7 women were killed in this location. Ciudad Juarez,
Mexico, 2004
Restaurante, Ciudad Juarez, 2005
Mother of disappeared daughter, Chihuahua,
Mexico, 2004
The Other Side
These photographs emerged from my need
to find answers to questions that unconsciously had driven me to wander through
streets and squares in Mexico City. There
Christian morality decrees what a “good
woman” should be, making a myth of maternity and virginity, as if our bodies decided
our worth and determined our destiny.
In my wanderings, I ended up sitting
on a bench in the heart of downtown Mexico
City, in a neighborhood called La Merced. Life
in the tenements, hotels and legitimate
businesses coexists with thieves, homeless
children and drug-traffickers as well as religious devotion that manifests itself in the
temples and churches. It’s a neighborhood
that, for more than four centuries, has been
a privileged space for prostitution.
I wanted to engage in a work that
would allow me to go deep into the roots
of inequality, the transgression of women’s
bodies, desire, sexuality, virginity, maternity, childhood and old age. I wanted to talk
about love and the lack of love. I wanted to
know about the women there.
One day I decided to live out a fantasy;
I approached a sex worker who had the most
motherly look in the square, paid her, and
went into one of the hotels there with her.
Land of the Witches
The owner, an elderly Basque man with a
blond hairpiece who knew the women in the
area well, gave me a judgmental look and
received us reluctantly, throwing the room
keys at us.
The woman I chose—who was covering her large belly with an apron—led me
into the room, leaving behind her motherly image as she transformed into a whore.
I photographed her.
Thanks to that impulse, I started what
would become a long journey, both within
myself and through that down-to-earth reality I was now entering. That was the door
which allowed me to see what it was like—
that world that our parents hide away from
us from the time we are small, that authorities and society in general prefer not to mention, or which they classify as an underworld
of violence and “lost” women, the helplessly
corrupted gutter, our society’s dark side, hidden in our forgotten streets. It is a world we
are all a part of, whether we want to be—or
care—or not.
Hotel, La Merced, Mexico City, 1998
La Merced, Mexico City, 1999
Bar, La Merced, Mexico City, 1999
After completing my work, Nobody Heard
Them Scream, on the “disappeared” women
of Juarez, I was left with the need to change
destiny, to replace impunity with justice and
work where my own fear was born. I decided
to make a few trips to the north of Mexico, to
look for my own healing, and restore my love
for photography. From these series of trips,
this photographic series called Land of the
Witches evolved.
In the Americas, the conquest went
beyond the desire for land, riches, persecution and imposed religious conversions to
include the savagery of the witch-hunt. The
victims, mainly women, were learned, their
knowledge passed down through centuries
within their indigenous communities. These
people, called “shamans” or “curanderas”,
healers and witch-doctors were in balance
with their environment and had a great
knowledge of herbal medicine as well as the
science of astrology.
Despite the witch-hunts, the culture
of traditional medicine survives. Today these
ancient rituals of healing and the secrets of
herbs have evolved into their own, unique
hybrid, mixed with European tradition and
Catholic rituals. This is the phenomenon of
witchcraft and shamanism today that many
people throughout Latin America used to
practice long before the arrival of the Spaniards and “civilization.”
The witch-hunt meant the extermination of a self-knowledge for women. The
witchcraft I looked for in the most traditional
states of Mexico are today a blend of European and indigenous ritual. In these villages
everybody seeks these women out, yet simultaneously fears their power. In the end
they are outcasts because they are different
from the majority of women, and yet their
traditions are passed down. Despite everything, they survive.
Home of the healer, San Luis Potosi, Altiplano,
Mexico, 2008
With the knife the witch traces the body of the boy
and then creates a fire within the outline. The fire is
read exposing the areas which must be healed,
Huasteca, San Luis Potosi, Mexico, 2007
Bruja, Huasteca, San Luis Potosi, Mexico, 2007