2016, 00:08:27, Two-channel video.

43+ (26 September)

In 2014 in the city of Iguala in the southern state of Guerrero in Mexico; forty-three students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural School went missing while in alleged police custody. After exhaustive official and independent investigations only the remains of two of the students were found. In consequence leaving both the students' families and the country at large in an unresolved limbo state.

This piece is an investigation on the possibility of denouncement through aesthetics by counterbalancing violence with visual and sound poetics. And in doing so, thoroughly repudiating such a tragic state of affairs.

The two-channel video was conceptualised as a visualisation of dematerialisation, by reversing the pictorial process from complete portrait to raw pencil drawing. In this process the students' vanished condition is emphasised, as well as, mediating its physicality and significance on an emotional level. It is a reminder that these are human beings, individuals with ties and personal histories not only names and photographs.

The sound piece knits a dark and somewhat mysterious narrative that alludes to the general sentiment that authorities were reticent and dismissive regarding this case. In employing abstract sound and samples from the first official press conference given by the Attorney-General. The objective was to construct a factual monologue that would bring peace of mind.

This event has carved a void in the country's social knit, evidencing the rampant wave of violence it finds itself under. Nevertheless, the number of people touched, shattered, disappeared and killed by this enveloping brutality is on a constant rise, therefore, 43+.