Connecting people through art 

During ARCOmadrid 2018, Maya Watanabe was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation – ARCOmadrid Award to support the production of her latest upcoming video artwork Liminal, which will be premiered at La Casa Encendida, coinciding with ARCOmadrid 2019. The work will be presented following this at MALI, Lima Art Museum, in August 2019.

Liminal

Video installation, 2019

20min

Liminal responds to the 6,000 un-exhumed mass graves and 16,000 missing persons of the Peruvian internal conflict and that today, almost 20 years after the official end of the genocide, are still awaiting recognition.

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During an exhumation, the remains found enter a limbo between the status of “missing” and the forensic analysis that restores the identity, determines the legal death and confers the possibility of grieving. Liminal is situated on the threshold of the recognisable and the representable, between being a non-subject and being a recognised subject. Grieving is both a personal experience of loss and sorrow, and a political act. It is a way of making political – as well as an act against – the suffering and oppression of others. Grief acknowledges that the life, suffering, and death of a body matters.

Liminal proposes cinema as a suturing space where it is possible to recognise, or at least glimpse at, ungrievable deaths by politically reframing the representation of violence.

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The video has been produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation and supported by Mondriaan Fonds. With the collaboration of EFE – Peruvian Specialised Forensic Team – and the Peruvian General Directorate for the Search of Missing Persons.