As an artist, I never know where my work will end up, if it will endure, who it will influence or if it will end up abandoned. It is a great joy that during my time working in an open studio at the Torpedo Factory, many of you return and tell me how and why my work has resonated in your lives.
Recently a mother and daughter came in to see me in my studio. The mother is a collector of my work and the daughter is a social anthropologist and author. The daughter, Alexa Hagerty, shared with me that she recently wrote a book that referenced my print, Sins of the Fathers. The book is called Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. It takes the reader with her on her journey working with forensic teams and victims’ families investigating crimes against humanity in Argentina and Guatemala. It is beautifully written, combining anthropology, history and personal narrative .This subject resonates with me because of my own experience working as an artist. One of my first major exhibitions was in a central gallery in Buenos Aires in 1980. I stayed in the city for a month and while I was there, I heard terrible stories told to me by the local artists, about students, intellectuals and artists who disappeared. I have drawn upon these stories, my own family history and my imagination to create many of my art pieces. Sins of the Fathers is one of them. It means so much that Alexa remembered my work and included it in her book.
Artists and writers connect through our images, stories and research. This chain can double back. I am inspired by Alexa’s book. Undoubtedly it will influence my internal imagery and future work.
CLICK HERE to see my print Sins of the Fathers referenced in Alexa’s book.
CLICK HERE to buy the book Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains.
Rosemary
ALEXA HAGERTY is an anthropologist. Her research has been covered by the New York Times, The Guardian, and other international news outlets. She has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, and academic journals such as Social Anthropology, among others. Her work has also been featured in museums including Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden. Learn more at www.alexahagerty.com and follow her on twitter @alexahagerty
Below is an excerpt from the book Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains by Alexa Hagerty
From Chapter 6, Ghosts of Buenos Aires
Despite this history, Buenos Aires feels carefree. Tourists drink café cortados at sidewalk tables in Recoleta, and families meander Palermo Soho at midnight eating ice cream cones. I am a world away from Guatemala City with its barred windows and cautious streets. It is hard to believe that a few weeks ago, I was standing in the mud of an excavation site. Walking through leafy Parque Centenario, I watch students in an outdoor yoga class simultaneously fold themselves into downward dog. When I stumble across sidewalk plaques called baldosas commemorating the locations where people were kidnapped (in front of an apartment block, outside a school, next to a hospital), I am sometimes startled. In Guatemala, I never forgot about violence and death but here I sometimes do.
The city blooms with summer pleasures, but I mostly stay home alone. In Guatemala, I was always with other people. We dug together and ate lunch together. We shared rooms, clothes, mosquito spray, water bottles, and colds. In Argentina, I am on my own. My newly rented studio apartment is clinically bare and white: white-tiled floor, white walls, white curtains. It’s like living inside an eggshell. In this luminous box, I feel as weak and awkward as a hatchling, with its blind and lolling oversize head. My head, too, seems too big and unbalanced. When do I realize I am not well? When I hear people laughing as they pass on the street and rush to close the curtains? When I skip dinner and sit hungry on the edge of my bed rather than go outside? Odd things enter my mind: A woodcut print at my mother’s house of children in a garden. Above them, puffy summer clouds. Below them, roots of trees and plants sinking into the earth—and tangled among the roots, skeletons.
I constantly think of the bones crisscrossed in the dirt, their precise pattern. Why this grave and not one of the others? I don’t know, but the exhumation with the three men is always there, like a radio playing in the background. The strata of copper-tinged soil. The women from the community, arms folded, waiting at the edge of the excavation. The smell of earth. The bones. I think of them all the time, but especially at night, lying awake, listening to the hum of the air conditioner pumping out a lukewarm breeze.