“We teach girls and boys to speak the truth, which means, to speak from their heart”. These now legendary words pronounced by Sub-commander Marcos, perhaps the most important Mexican poet of his generation, underlie the political vision on which the 1994 Zapatista revolt was founded: the guerrilla movement started in Chiapas exactly thirty years ago, that soon spread as a contagion of political passion throughout the world. The Zapatista movement has made words and music, dance and celebration, integral parts of the arsenal of a fight that does not aim to impose a specific shape to the world, but to affirm that another world is possible: a world that contains all worlds.

In a certain sense, this is the desire of the Rumbos de vida exhibition: to bring together works that reflect and take a position on issues that are crucial to the political and social history of contemporary Mexico. Among these: forced disappearances, migrations, gender violence, but also political resistance. Taken together, both the works portrayed in the exhibition and the performative interventions that make up Rumbos de Vida, form a sort of song, always painful, but at the same time hopeful: it is the microcosm of the imagination in power, in which these wounds are only a part of the shameful global history of infamy and oppression, which characterises all eras and all nations.

Invited artists: Monica Mayer, Francisco Toledo, Rosa Maria Robles, Francis Alys, Anton Turok, Teatro Ojo (in collaboration with Gisela Cortes and Juan Ernesto Dìaz) , Sara Leghissa (working on a text by Valeria Luiselli), Francisco Mata Rosas.

Projects:

Francisco Toledo, Papalotes Normalistas Ayotzinapa (2014)

On September 26th 2014, 43 students from the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa disappeared on their way to a political demonstration. Exactly how this happened has never been ascertained: what is certain it was an action orchestrated by the local government and drug traffickers.

For years, many have been taking to the streets and demanded that these students be found alive. Various artists and intellectuals have created works to accompany this call for justice.

These kites are a work by Francisco Toledo, who created them as yet another way to search for these students, as he put it, “not only underground but in the sky, close to God or to someone who may help us find them”. The idea is inspired by the custom of the Day of the Dead, in which “souls descend from the thread (of kites), arrive on earth to eat offerings and then fly away again”.

The montage in the exhibition RUMBOS DE VIDA’ is a tribute to the students of Ayotzinapa, as if they were finally marching together in the demonstration they were going to before the police arrested them and handed them over to a group of drug traffickers.

courtesy: Amigos del IAGO

Rosa María Robles, La Piedad; El Ángel de la Independencia

from the series: La rebelión de los iconos (2010-2012)

In recent decades, Sinaloa has been one of Mexico’s most complex regions, mainly due to the violence caused by the presence of drug trafficking. Born in the region, artist Rosa María Robles has developed a series of performances, sculptures and graphic works on violence and life in Sinaloa. In the series ‘La rebelión de los íconos’, Rosa María reinterpretes some classics of art history, introducing violence into the context in which they were originally made and thus transmuting part of their meaning.

In La Piedad, the body of Christ is replaced with a blanket like those used by drug traffickers to wrap

corpses, before abandoning them in the streets. The blanket Rosa Maria used here is real: one day has wrapped the body of a person and was part of the expert evidence of a murder.

The operation is repeated in ‘El Ángel de la Independencia’, a symbol of Mexico City: here the same blanket appears, and the original iconography is intervened: the wings of a stuffed ostrich replace the torch and the book is replaced by a gun and a packet of marijuana.

Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #15: Espejos. Ciudad Juarez, México (2013)

The video ‘Espejos’ is part of Children’s Games series, in which Francis Alÿs investigates playful activity, documenting children’s games alone or in groups, in public space in various parts of the world. This video was filmed in Ciudad Juárez, at the border between Mexico and the United States, in an abandoned public apartment building, which local children use as a stage set to play shooting at each other using lights and mirrors.

Alÿs represented Belgium in the Venice Biennale 2022, with the project ‘The Nature of the Game’ (curated by Hilde Teerlinck), including the series Children’s Games.

Mónica Mayer: El Tendedero’(1978)/ Lo stendino: device reactivated in Pescara, with questions elaborated by a group of wonen at Centro Antiviolenza Ananke, June 2024

El Tendedero is a participatory installation realized by Mexican artist Mónica Mayer for the first time in 1978, in the exhibition ‘Salón 77-78. Nuevas tendencias’ at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City. The artist asked women of different classes, ages and professions to answer questions about their experience of gender violence in everyday life: how they had been hurt, humiliated, abused, harassed. The questions and answers, later printed on pink slips of paper, were placed in the museum on a three-metre long by two-metre high clothesline of the same colour.

Over time, this work has become a symbol of feminist conceptual art and activism, and it had many subsequent reactivations, both in museums and in the social and political spheres: for example, in universities, anti-violence centres, demos. In fact, Mayer decided to make this device available to women all over the world, so that ‘El Tendedero could be reactivated in different contexts, starting from ever new and specific questions, collectively elaborated by the women of a given territory.

This version of El Tendedero (Lo stendino) was realised in dialogue with Mayer, through a workshop addressed to women from Abruzzo and hosted in Pescara. Four questions were elaborated collectively, using the methodology proposed by Mayer, in June 2023. Visitors to the Rumbos de vida exhibition contributed to the project with their answers during the exhibition.

Francisco Mata Rosas: videos and installation from the series La Línea (2011)

In Rumbos de vida, we present a selection of Francisco Mata’s works from the series ‘La Línea’: a photographic investigation realized at the border between Mexico and the US, dedicated to migrations, migrants and spaces of transit.

The installation was proposed and curated by the artist specifically for the space of the Roman Cisterns in Atri. It features Mata’s photographic work in multiple dimensions: photographs depicting objects lost by migrants through the woods, on the way to the border, hang from the ceiling printed on long sheets; an object reproduces a box of concrete similar to those marking the border between MX and the US, full of sand and pictures; a video reproduces the endless moving of the ocean across the wall, another one features a white shirt flying over it.

Teatro Ojo, Gisela Cortes and Juan Ernesto Diaz, Hipogeo: un justo retorno de las cosas (site-specific, 20224)

In Rumbos de Vida, we had the enormous pleasure to accompany and host a very special site-specific project: Hipogeo: un justo retorno de las cosas, by Teatro Ojo, Gisela Cortes and Juan Ernesto Diaz. This work (an installation in the Cisterne di Palazzo d’Acquaviva, a theatre piece and 3 sound activations) was the result of a creative research dedicated to Atri’s subterranean history, and sonic memory.

The starting point of Hipogeo is a story and a speculative proposal: during the night, between midnight and 03:00 in the morning, microphones captures the singing of at least two dolphins imitating human voices. The voices come from the depths of the hypogeum connecting the Ducal Palace of Aquaviva with the Cathedral Basilica of Santa María Assunta. The chants apparently come from the three dolphins depicted in the ancient Roman mosaics (2nd century B.C.), which appeared during archaeological excavations under the high altar of the Cathedral. Spectrograms reveal the existence of sound frequencies impossible to perceive for the human ear, but that can be captured by the recording system. Thanks to digital synthesis processes, sounds can be reconstructed. Some have suggested the possibility of psychophonies.

Dolphins in captivity are known to speak the language of humpback whales in their sleep. It is believed that, while asleep, dolphins review the moments that impressed them most during the day when they were awake.
Although the extraordinary mimetic faculty of dolphins has long been known, the recordings made in the Atri Hypogeum are the first in which dolphins can be heard talking while they sleep, uttering long somniloquies in which they imitate human voices heard during the day: voices from Atri.

Antonio Turok, photos from the series Chiapas and Levantamiento Zapatista (1994)

On 1 January 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had long planned, came into force. With this agreement, Mexico crowned an already long period of neo-liberal administration and formally ceased to be a Latin American country to become a North American country and, perhaps one day, a 'first world country'. One event, however, stole the spotlight from the announcement of this long-awaited agreement: in the early hours of the morning, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) made its first public appearance, taking over the city of San Cristobal and declaring war on the Mexican state.

Then, the whole world learnt not only of the existence of EZLN, but also of the possibility of a different world, a world 'where all worlds are possible', even one in which armed struggle is an expression of a peculiar vital erotics, built with words, poetry and art. These photos, taken by Antonio Turok, document the early years of the EZLN movement, which celebrates its 40th anniversaryin 2024, keeping up with the same poetry and struggle for liberation.

Sara Leghissa, Dimmi come va a finire /Tell me how it ends (2024)

The installation Dimmi come va a finire’ is part of a performative project realised by the artist Sara Leghissa specifically for Rumbos de Vida, upon the curators’ invitation to work on the text ‘Tell me how it ends’ by Valeria Luiselli (translated into Italian by Monica Pareschi and published by La Nuova Frontiera in 2017). The book is built around the forty questions that Valeria Luiselli posed the unaccompanied minors who would cross alone the border between Mexico and the United States, serving as a translator for the New York courts. Leghissa's installation (which was presented in the form of a performance in public space on 20 July 2024 in Pescara, as part of the Matta Aperto festival) explores a format the artist has been developing since several years in her performative practice, which consists of re- elaborating graphically fragments of text (usually collected through interviews with specific communities and with the intention of making visible a series of political and social issues) and juxtaposing them on the city walls un the form of posters, as a sort of temporary and site-specific performance lecture. The installation in the exhibition extrapolates some fragments of the dramaturgy developed by Leghissa for this project (in collaboration with Giulia Palladini), proposing a political and poetic narration of migration: a narration telling the stories of the children crossing the border between Mexico and the United States but, at the same time, resonating with many other stories of migration and exile, stories that in fact concern us very closely.