Matamoros, 2009
HD video, colour and b/w, sound. 22’
Edgardo Aragón. Matamoros, 2009
Matamoros is a performance taking the format of a road movie, built around a self-referential narrative framework. The work is a re-enactment of a journey Pedro Vásquez Reyes had taken many times from Oaxaca, in the south of Mexico, to Tamaulipas on the country’s northern border, a route Vásquez used for drug trafficking to the USA at the end of the 1980s. The work follows an audio recording the artist made of his father, which acts both as the voiceover for the video, as well as a logbook of the trip and a working guide. The audio compiles a series of impressions on the Mexican landscape, the problems affecting it and the desires it arouses in terms of the possibility of a better life, while he recalls anecdotes of the trip, his arrest and imprisonment. Aragón’s subjectivity recovers his father’s memory as he stops to film a place every time it is mentioned in the audio. The video is the result of the confrontation of different projections and evocations of specific places, a work where, visually speaking, the landscape takes on a central role, acting as a masking memory on which to project the fissures of the family experience with collective echoes of the contemporary situation in Mexico.
