I Watched Her until She Disappeared

PAUL+A

Devised and performed by Maria Sanchez Portillo, Paul Jeff, and Emanuela Contini.

Made as a response to the continuing abduction and murder of young women in N.Mexico “I Watched Her Until She Disappeared” is a work of political art/theatre, which draws a moving performance of resistance by one Mexican woman from the durational act of having an identical portrait taken every hour, day and night for a week – whilst incarcerated in a prison cell with a white male photographer.

Doubly trapped, first in the pose and then in the cell, the woman is the object of 168 ostensibly identical portraits. Her voice reduced to the mute testimony of scratching words and pictures on the cell wall. The man attempts to make her into pure image by subjecting her to a harsh regime of scrutiny and representation. A pure image, (as inscribed in pornography) where everything is taken away from the woman, except her image. The woman resists from the retreat of a feminine space.

Touching on issues from physical violence to psychological terror, and the subjugation of women by the visual, this work examines the fragile relationship between the genders that can explode, like it has in Mexico, into what can only be described as a gender holocaust.

Advertisement