15 - The Places of Pain: Intermedial Mode and Meaning in Via Corporis by Pura López Colomé and Geografía del dolor by Mónica González

Summary

In his illuminating study, The Work of the Dead, Thomas Laqueur reminds us that the dead come in and out of cultural focus. In the works scrutinized in this chapter, the dead are very much in focus, indeed in close-up, as I place the works of two very distinct artistic practitioners from Mexico into dialogue: the poet, Pura López Colomé and the photographer (primarily photojournalist), Mónica González. López Colomé is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and translator, most notably of the Irish Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney. Her collection of poems, Via Corporis (2016), is a collaborative project with Mexican visual artist, Guillermo Arreola. Based on a series of discarded radiographs from patients, the project transforms and translates this “dead file” into a series of paintings accompanied by poems that excavate the stories of illness, pain, and death behind the abandoned images. In this way, the two forms are enclosed in the same space and form an example of “explicit” intermedial production whereby, “more than one media are present synchronously or within one object” (Bowskill and Lavery 14). In some ways this impulse to write to these dead, and to write about this “dead file”, is a way to rebuff the notion, first expressed by Diogenes but widely sustained in cultural narratives in contemporary Mexico, that the dead do not matter. Through this eloquent paean to their existence, the poet (López Colomé) and the painter (Arreola) together reconstruct these bodies into a community of memory that simultaneously honors them at the same time as it mourns the collective pain occasioned by the explosion in the number of violent deaths in Mexico since 2006. This allegorical impulse is voiced explicitly by the poet when she says, “the reality in Mexico is so horrific, it is inescapable. What we are living at the moment in Mexico is so extreme that it is inside me; it is inside my poems. When I talk about the body's pain, I am also talking about the pain inflicted on the country's body” (Finnegan). Mónica González's award-winning multimedia project, Geografía del dolor (The Geography of Pain) (2011) sees González step beyond her photojournalistic role to engage with a multiplicity of media that co-exist within the one narrative arc: traditional postcard writing, music, photography, interactive web tools, and documentary film in order to narrate the stories of fourteen families affected by “desaparición forzada” (“forced disappearance”) in Mexico since 2007.