C H A N T A L M E Z A
The Political Philosopher Brad Evans & Abstract Artist Chantal Meza discuss their State of Disappearance Project.
THE PROJECT
“ Disappearance is marked by a devastating absence.
It constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time.
It offers no viable recovery and no meaningful justice.
It provisions alibis to perpetrators, while denying the victims their very humanity.
And for those who are left to live with its presence, the terror is unending. "
Brad Evans & Chantal Meza
Project Directors
This initial impetus project was conceived back in 2017 as a result of responding to the violence of disappearance, which had become an everyday reality in Chantal's home country of Mexico. As she began her own witnessing to this through art, our subsequent discussions raised a number of crucial questions for us. Not least: - How can we do justice to a shattering absence? How could we bring our own grammatical tools to bare on a problem that took us beyond the threshold of intelligibility? What could political philosophy say when confronting the limits of language and what could art say when all presence is being denied?
Confronting these questions we understood demanded a collaborative response between the arts & philosophy. It also demanded a wider conversation with a community of intellectuals, who could allow us to reimagine the truly unimaginable. Recognising this, we began this journey noting that while disappearance is undoubtedly terrifying for its victims and families, there was a need to reimagine the term disappearance itself within a more considered and intimate frame. It was necessary to account for the terror which lives on in the minds of everybody it touches, not only to focus attention on the absence of bodies, but to also consider broader issues on the roles between perpetrators, victims and witnesses, onto the ways it forces a fundamental rupture in the logics of space and time. Indeed, we felt that it was only by addressing it on these terms that we might be able to ask serious questions about what role art and critical thinking have when confronting this devastating problem, which by its very definition, exceeds the limits of aesthetic and philosophical engagement on account of its very absence and denials.
THE ARTWORK
These 75 Artworks produced between 2017-2020 have sought to bear witness to disappearance by attending to its apparitions, the obscure beasts that are brought into vision, the beginnings of such absence, the fragmented catastrophes they induce, the collapse of consciousness it provokes, along with creation of non-spaces of devastating habitation, we have elected to call the void.
OBSCURE BEASTS
Obscure Beasts I, 2018. Mixed media on paper, 115 x 86cm.
Obscure Beasts II, 2018. Mixed media on paper, 115 x 86cm.
Obscure Beasts XII, 2018. Mixed media on paper, 100 x 76cm.
Obscure Beasts I, 2018. Mixed media on paper, 115 x 86cm.
FRAGMENTS OF A CATASTROPHE
Fragments of a catastrophe I. Mixed media on handmade paper. 25 x 20cm, 2018.
Fragments of a catastrophe II. Mixed media on handmade paper. 25 x 20cm, 2018.
Fragments of a catastrophe XXII. Mixed media on handmade paper. 25 x 20cm, 2018.
Fragments of a catastrophe I. Mixed media on handmade paper. 25 x 20cm, 2018.
SINCE THE BEGINNING
Since the beginning. Pigment, ink, charcoal, acrylic, coal, resin & fibre glass on paper. 200 x 200 cm, 2019.
Detail
Detail
Since the beginning. Pigment, ink, charcoal, acrylic, coal, resin & fibre glass on paper. 200 x 200 cm, 2019.
APPARITIONS
Apparition I. Ink on paper. 35 x 270mm, 2017.
Apparition II. Ink on paper. 35 x 270mm 2017.
Apparition XXVIII. Ink on paper. 35 x 270mm, 2017.
Apparition I. Ink on paper. 35 x 270mm, 2017.
COLLAPSE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Collapse of consciousness. Resin, ink, pastel, acrylic, fiberglass & charcoal on paper. 3.28 meters x 1.10 meters, 2020.
DETAIL. Collapse of consciousness
DETAIL. Collapse of consciousness