Sex facing death in Mexico
Hanging up the phone, it seemed to me that he had given me a good argument. “Every morning one can see the head of six newspapers with photos of destroyed corpses on the newsstands, but curiously a nude scandalizes more. We have lost sensitivity ", Edgar Olguín explained to me, the Mexican artist I interviewed by phone, creator of a series of snapshots of naked bodies with which he intended to denounce the Iguala massacre.
He, with a @ s Models voluntari @ s, was on the front pages of all the newspapers for participating in a provocative nude photoshoot made in public spaces with messages written on the actors' skin denouncing the disappearance of the 43 students and all the garbage cart dragging this event in which good intentions were resolved between burning young people alive or dead. In any case, the effect called naked bodies was achieved and when I approached the meeting I did so with a certain skepticism for the, in my judgement, current abuse of the nude when you want to provoke. There is nothing less provocative than wanting to be provocative.
There is nothing less provocative than wanting to be provocative
When I finished my interview with the artist, I repeated to my partner the coherence of the message he had transmitted to me: “Every morning one can see the headlines of six newspapers with photos of destroyed corpses on the newsstands., but curiously a nude scandalizes more. We have lost sensitivity ". To which she replied: "There are fewer photos in the newspapers with photos of corpses than of naked women".
The next morning, for work reasons, I walked almost entirely through the famous Reforma Avenue in Mexico City. I remembered the words of my partner and began to stop to see the covers of newspapers and magazines on the newsstands. Effectively, they won, not for long, the living with little clothing to the dead.
I guess a country becomes immune to everything, because routine immunizes above all. I learned that especially in my life in Africa where death is accepted with just pain so as not to alter life. We, Westerners, I think we know little about that and that is why it seems to me that we are so vulnerable.
In Africa, death is accepted with the right pain so as not to alter life
In Mexico, what Olguín said may be true and there is a cruel and sickly coexistence with charred bodies and massacres that are narrated with such precision that the weatherman seems to be going to explain after the newscast if it will be necessary to carry an umbrella, coat or balaclava to upcoming funerals.
Mexico is violent because its history was made under a constant revolution in which blood was trivialized. The Mexican presidents of their first century of independence should have sworn in office and signed their will at the same time when they accepted their sentence of mandate.. The other, it seems that they sometimes preferred to lead the union that distributed death certificates.
Yesterday I sent El Mundo news that 800 federal and state police, I repeat the number, 800, they faced bullets against each other in the attempt to take over a police station by the former, in which the latter were mutinied. There were five gunshot wounds and the taking of several hostages by the two groups of paid or unpaid security forces is supposed to defend the citizens.
800 federal and state police, I repeat the number, 800, they faced gunshots
In case you misunderstood how surreal this fact is, can you please start again reading the previous paragraph. When they have done it, carry it over into their lives and think about what kind of news and what media hype would cause local and national police officers to shoot each other over the seizure of a police station.. Here was one of the important news of the day, like others, no special bragging.
Then perhaps it is true that it takes nudes to denounce Iguala or perhaps, which seems more likely to me, sex is the only argument that is kept in a forbidden corner, everyone's pleasure, that breaks the routine laws, of their stumbles and their reunions.
It did not matter if it was Iguala what was narrated in the skin of the young women, it was enough to have a topical excuse for those photos to be universal. Just sex, I think, has a morbidity greater than death. And it goes up to here, in Mexico, where death is the cult of taverns and the mourners wear tank tops.
