Taco
de Sesos
Digital
animation, 2002
Taco
De Sesos, a digitally animated photonovella,
borrows from the aesthetic language of comic
books, crime magazines, and telenovelas
(crude graphics, repulsive yet fascinating
imagery, dramatically staged events) to
explore the archetype of ‘the Maria’.
Prominent in Mexican popular culture the
familiar figure of colorful skirts, and
long indigenous trensas wanders through
a contemporary Los Angeles landscape.
In
studying the representation of ‘La
Maria’, the classic narrative, that
of the heroic figure who quietly suffers
a myriad of physical and symbolic violences,
is interrogated. I use
an "over the top" strategy to
unmask the social and political underpinnings
of this myth. In order to free the self
from reductive and confining roles, La Maria
becomes a bloody knife-wielding agent slaughtering
her way out of stereotypical representations.
For
the native, life can only spring up again
out of the rotting corpse of the settler.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth
|
