"The Crux of Our Solitude": On Violence and Cruelty in Latin America

“Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels,

all the creatures of that unbridled reality have had to ask very little of the imagination,

because the greatest challenge for us has been the insufficiency of conventional resources to make our lives credible.

This, my friends, the crux of our solitude.”

- Gabriel García Márquez

I refuse to lie, when Narcos came out in 2016 I binged watched the entirety of the show. Is it an entertaining television series? Yes. Is it realistic? Now, that is up for debate.

A few weeks ago, I ran across a sneak peek of the new season for Narcos México. Let me set the scene for you, a young man in a closet filled with expensive clothes and lavish jewelry, unsure of which outfit to pick. We watch him go through more shirts, watches, sunglasses, only to later find out that this is the outfit he is picking out to go shoot a man at a local restaurant.

This actor who plays this young man is extremely well-known back in Latin America, as a matter of fact, he's not even an actor. His name is Benito Martinez Ocasio, otherwise known as Bad Bunny; possibly the top reggaeton artist of this generation.

The snippet itself is interesting, what are we to make of the way Ocasio’s character is portrayed? Most importantly, what are we to make of Ocasio’s presence in the show? What has the figure of the narco turned to? Is it merely a prop in a bigger tale of self-serving “white saviorism” by the United States in their infamous “War on Drugs”? Has it lost all its meaning and weight outside of Latin America? Is it so far removed to westerners - whose only exposure to the cruelty and violence is shows like Narcos with “actors” like Ocasio - that they no longer respect nor recognize the violent ramifications and ripple effects that come from the existence of such a figure?

Greatly inspired by Maggie Nelson’s “Art of Cruelty”, Roland Barthes “Camera Lucida”, and Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others'' almost confessionary narration, this project is dedicated to the exploration of this particular violence and figure so deeply connected and interrelated with Latin America and Latin identity. I was mostly inspired by Sontag’s quote “Violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing” (Sontag, 11). What I was trying to convey is not simple cruelty itself, but the more abstract cruelty, arguably a more insidious form of cruelty, that one finds in Latin America. Cruelty that comes from the inability to escape cruelty.

“Violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing” (Sontag, 11).

El Narco - with a capital “N”. A figure so deeply objectified in our age. I was interested in this aspect. Objectified simply by being, existing - once again, this cruelty which is impossible to escape. It is this inescapable and ubiquitous nature of narcotrafico that allows for such objectification. Going from Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalinarianism” and her exploration on Nazi extermination camps. “While Nazi power erects facilities to house its work of violence and locates its servants in clearly locatable coordinates, the narco de-localizes itself. The figure is in itself a placeless ubiquity, which enables it to act in a silent but efficacious manner. Its presence is phantasmagoric. The narco is a phantom.” (Reguillo). With a subject matter such as narcotrafico the lines are blurred. Call it what you will, the matter of fact is that this “phantom”, as Reguillo calls it, is a mechanism which further allows for the objectification of the figure due its ever-present, evasive, and uncapturable nature.

The bodies (both dead or alive) that comprise the machine of narcotrafico lose singularity and humanity; not unlike the prisoners in the extermination camps. “It is no longer a case of Maria, Pedro, or Juan, but rather of anonymous bodies that are then layered by an ontological dimension in three senses: they are converted into units of common sense (broken bodies, disarticulated bodies); they are transformed into universals (those executed by narcos, war casualties, collateral damage); they are bodies transformed—by the work of violence—into abstract entities (“encajuelados,” “decapitados,” “encojibados”). The dissolution of the person is narcotrafico’s first victory.” (Reguillo).

THE PROJECT

My pictures show a body contorting into an object - but the object itself isn’t quite obvious, and I don't necessarily want it to be. What is on display here is the pain behind the process of being turned into an object by the media and the drug trade itself.

In her extremely illuminating and groundbreaking thesis, Karina García Reyes interviewed ex-members of several cartels in Mexico. She states that “the interviewees also do not see themselves as bloodthirsty criminals, as they are portrayed in the movies. Participants define themselves as free agents who decided to work in an illegal industry, but they also define themselves as “disposable” people”.

I guess, my project is concerned with not only questions of cruelty and violence, but also of victimhood. Who is the real victim here? Who is to blame? Can you really blame someone for submitting to the cruelty of their objectification? Can you blame someone for being born into cruelty? This is the reason why I chose to keep the subject anonymous - to blur the lines. To me it's not about who exerts the violence, but on who or what the violence is exerted upon. A violence that turns you into a disposable object.

I chose cyanotypes, firstly, because I thoroughly enjoyed doing them and I wanted to challenge myself in terms of production of artwork. I wanted to use a medium that was new to me and be able to experiment with it. I also liked that this medium is unused in my subject area, because it allows for less of a “bias” when it comes to the relationship between the viewer and the work. What I mean by that is my subject is - unbeknown to me - never been represented with such a medium, allowing for new meanings and interpretations to shine through.
Nevertheless, I had a bit of a bump on the road when I wasn’t fully sure if cyanotypes would be the best medium to portray my ideas. However, I happened to stumble upon the concept of “architectural cyanotypes' '. The resemblance of these cyanotypes to blueprints in architecture seemed to only strengthen this form/medium in my project.
After all, I am talking about the creation - or rather - MANIPULATION of someone into an object. It could almost resemble the usage and manipulation of materials during construction, to turn them into a part of a bigger whole.
In this case, my subject is manipulated by their cruel environment to become a part of the bigger whole of narco trade - which is later on glorified. Not unlike the taxidermied animals in H.G. Wells short story “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist”.

THE PROCESS

I started by taking pictures of my housemate, Claúdia, on my phone. Even though my subject and the subject matter that I was tackling is more typically male, I was not concerned with the sex of my model, as I wanted to concentrate on (arguably) asexual body parts (hands, foot, shoulders).

I wanted to maintain a sort of anonymity to my subject, omitting the face and defining features of my model. Those hands and bitten nails could belong to anyone. I also decided to use flash photography because I felt like it added a sense of shock, it made the pictures less aesthetically pleasing; and the flash also accentuated certain details which I hoped would later translate onto the cyanotype (shadows otherwise invisible, the arm hairs, the redness of the skin).

I produced negatives of these pictures on my computer and printed them onto a transparent, plastic paper. These would later on be placed on the surface of my coated paper and exposed to sunlight.

I proceeded by mixing my solutions, coating my papers and leaving them to dry in the absolute darkness of my closet (the only place in my house guarded from windows and natural light).

Miraculously, the sun came out just right when my papers finished drying. Thus, I began to expose my negatives onto the solution soaked papers.

Exposition time took longer than it normally would, as there was sunlight but it was quite weak; hence, I decided that over exposure seemed a better choice than under exposure and risking the image not processing onto the paper. After 45 minutes, I revealed my pictures.