I have always found tattoos, and the people who bear them, to be very intriguing. The concept of desiring, and also on the other hand, that of being forced to have a permanent mark on your skin has always interested me. I have done a lot of traveling in my lifetime so far, and I have come across many different people who have tattoos - and all for different reasons. When I went to New Zealand for a month in 2008, I was able to experience the Maori people - natives to New Zealand - who tattooed large portions of their bodies (their arms, chests, face) for cultural and ritualistic reasons. I have friends who are covered head to toe in tattoos and body piercings because they want to rebel against society and make a statement. I also know people who tattoo the names of beloved friends or family members who have passed away. I have also had the honor and opportunity to meet a Holocaust survivor in person as well, and I can definitely attest to what Mirta was propounding in her presentation - that a tattoo is and becomes a part of one's identity.
I personally have never gotten a tattoo just because of my phobia of needles (I can't even get a shot at the doctor's without crying for hours - before and after the process - and trust me, it is a process - both my brother and father have to hold me down to the chair just so that the doctor can give me a shot). Anyways, back to tattoos, I definitely agree with what Mirta discusses in the presentation of her current exhibition, "The Skin: Space for Repression and Expression", that tattoos give us an exposure to the identity of the person who bears them. Whether the mark is a creative, aesthetic design that was added willingly and intentionally by the bearer, or if it serves more as a brand, a forced identity – a tattoo is still indicative of one's ingrained character and personality.
Mirta’s parents, both of whom are survivors of the Holocaust are the main inspirations for her work. Although both of her parents survived the Holocaust, she only uses her mother’s number because her father passed away a long time ago and no one remembers his exact number. She doesn’t want to disrespect his memory by using an identity that wasn’t actually his. In her work she was working with the ideas of loss and pain and how her parents’ tattoos signify their suffering during and after the Holocaust, as well as how these numbers became now such a huge part of their lives and inner-beings. She connects tattoos and embroidery in a relationship that she conveyed through many different medias – sculptures, videos, photos, paintings, etchings, and embroidery. It was interesting to see how her individual pieces encompassed a combination of these different elements as well. The video portrayed, in a pretty disturbing manner, needles piercing canvas. At one point, it appeared that the needle pierced the canvas and then the canvas started to bleed, but what initially seemed to be real blood turned out to be red thread embroidering the canvas, which could have been representative of blood as well. A lot of her 2D images combined etching and painting with embroidery. And a motif that ran through a lot of her work was that of a winged chair. She talked about how the figures shown in the image were not actually sitting in the chair, and how this symbolized the figures’ fragility because the chair was meant to represent a very stable place. She later talked about how she really enjoys working from broken chairs in some of her other art projects, and how figuring out what kind of life the chair once had helps her create a new life for the chair that incorporates whatever disfigurements that it has now. This is a similar sort of concept with her current project, because in a way, the broken parts of the chairs that she works with are kind of like the tattoos on Holocaust survivors. The chair never intended to become broken, but now that is exists with this alteration, the alteration becomes part of the chair and helps describe the character and story of the chair’s life.
Mirta mentioned that when she was younger, she asked her parents about the significance of the numbers that were tattooed on her parents’ arms, and they replied “not to forget.” I found this to be very powerful. When Mirta’s parents and all other Holocaust victims were receiving these identification numbers, it was because they were being classified into a group that wasn’t important, replaceable, and utterly easy to forget and get rid of because they were not worthy or important enough to be treated as individuals, as people, as humans. But now that they have survived this horror, the numbers remind them of why they were given the numbers in the first place, but mean something different. They signify their survival and their strength through the process of the pain and suffering that they were forced to bear.
Although I found Mirta’s talk to be very interesting, it was in all honesty a bit troublesome to understand some of the points she was trying to get across, especially when she was answering people’s questions at the end. I know some of the meanings probably got lost in translation seeing that her native language is Spanish, but some of her logic and justifications seemed a little befuddled and confusing. And I also found some of her photo montages of hands and embroidery to not really fit in with some of her other imagery. I don’t know what it was about them, but they were just lacking something to me, and I wasn’t a huge fan of them, although the concepts behind them were intriguing.
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