Artist: Marisa Cornejo
Curated by: Valeska Romero Curiqueo & Cecilia Moya Rivera
With the help of: Stéphanie Pfister, Jesssica Vaucher, Valeska Romero Curiqueo & Cecilia Moya Rivera
Venue: EEEEH! La Grenette, Nyon
Date: April 29 2022
In the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality, lands are taken from people who are not considered people while the dispossessed, murdered, raped, and tortured non-people and everything related to them—their creations, habitats, and even self-perceptions—become the targets of endless wars. Fanon concluded that “[c]olonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of torturing, of violating, or of massacring…. Torture is an expression and a means of the occupant-occupied relationship”
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. « Prologue: Decolonial Psychology as a Counter-Catastrophic Science, » in Decoloniality and Epistemic Justice in Contemporary Community Psychology, edited by Garth Stevens and Christopher C. Sonn. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021. Pages vii-xiv.
In 2013 I performed a series of ritualistic performances called La Huella in Santiago de Chile, Geneva, Switzerland and Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where I reactivated objects from the archive of exile I inherited from my childhood. For this project I would like to do a performance called “A counter catastrophic performance : how not to normalize torture”.
For this, I will print in front of the public in a table or the floor, a series of engraving plates my father Eugenio Cornejo made after he survived prison and torture during the regime of Pinochet and was in exile in Bulgaria in the 70’s trying to process the trauma and memorialize the horrors with his art practice.
Once I finish reprinting my father engravings, I will clean the engraving plates with pure water as a ritual. During the cleaning of the engravings plates, I will share some memories that emerge in my memory from the archive.
