CurAtOr S StAtement

LOOk At me

A wOrk In prOgreSS

LAS OLVIDADAS: The Forgotten Women

This exhibition brings together three major bodies of work by Maya Godedwork 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 Godeds 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

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 Curators 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 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.

Photographs by Maya Goded

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.

California Museum of Photography UCR ARTSblock University of California, Riverside January 15 April 16, 2011

nObODy HeArD tHem SCreAm

tHe OtHer SIDe

LAnD Of tHe wItCHeS

As I am lying on my bed, immersed in a black silence, Im naked; all my body is wet, as are the sheets. Is it my sweat? Or my blood? I cant 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 wouldnt 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 oppressionthe damned impunityand 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 homeeven in the citys 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

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. Its 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 womens 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.

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 chosewho was covering her large belly with an apronled 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 societys dark side, hidden in our forgotten streets. It is a world we are all a part of, whether we want to beor careor 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