A talk by Spanish Professor William Stark rounded off the final discussion of this semester’s Brown Bag Seminar. Photo from uri.edu.
The final installment of this semester’s Brown Bag Series evaluated how Violeta Luna, through performance art, explores the fatal effects of the War on Drugs and its influence on the relationship between the United States and Mexico.
The discussion, titled “A Performance to Re-member: Violeta Luna’s ‘Réquiem Para una Terra Perdida,” a Tribute to the Victims of the U.S.-Mexico War on Drugs,” led by Spanish professor William Stark, focused on the symbolic aspects of performance artist Violeta Luna’s pieces.
According to Britannica, performance art is a time-based art form that typically features a live presentation to an audience or onlookers, and draws on such art as acting, poetry, music, dance or, in Luna’s case, painting.
“I just feel she needs to have more exposure,” said Stark. “More people need to hear about her and learn about performance art.”
Stark’s presentation focused on this one performance, which translates to “Requiem for a Lost Land.” He became passionate about Luna’s performances after meeting and speaking with her about them in 2016.
The performance tells the story of the disproportionate effects the War on Drugs has had on the United States and Mexico, according to Stark. Since 2010, he said that drug-related crimes in Mexico have greatly increased and over 50 percent of homicides in Mexico since then have been determined to be drug-related.
He also pointed out the clear divide between the U.S. and Mexico that Luna portrays in her performances, such as the divide between English and Spanish, with English always coming first, and north and south.
“Drug cartels have been responsible for the mass deaths of Mexican citizens,” Stark said. “The streets have become battlefields and people have been buried in mass graves. [This performance] is in order to reclaim the identities of the people buried in the mass graves in order to ‘re-member’ them (with a hyphen) in the sense that something is being put back together.”
Stark showed photos and explained how Luna does this through her performance. She dresses in a white smock and draws a line on stage with a white, powdery substance, which represents the divide between the U.S. and Mexico. Then, she paints her arms and hands white, sits with her nose to the floor and flips her hair over. At this point, she cannot see and begins to place headshots of victims from the War on Drugs on her head.
This action is symbolic of how citizens are often murdered and decapitated by drug cartels, which is Luna’s way of reconnecting the bodies with their heads, according to Stark. She ends the performance by putting fake blood on herself and removes the white smock, leaving it on the floor, representing a crime scene.
The topics that Stark talked about in this discussion tie in with the curriculum for GWS 350: Gender and Sexuality in Latin America, run by professor Kathleen McIntyre, the associate director of the University of Rhode Island’s Honors Program and a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for the Humanities.
McIntyre said that the Brown Bag Series had a very special quality different from other seminars at the University.
“It’s important for the community at URI, but also Americans to know that all the violence is not solely Mexico’s fault,” McIntyre said. “For example, there are many guns in Mexico, but these guns came from America. And yes, there are a lot of drugs in Mexico but that is because of the great demand for drugs in America.”
As Americans, McIntyre said it is important to look into why this demand is so high and how we can reduce it, to reduce the amount of damage and deaths from the War on Drugs.