Since time began, mothers have nurtured, loved, taught, protected, cherished and raised their babies, then watched them grow to be killed in war or by war. This inevitable cycle will repeat itself for untold generations unless our mothers’ universal plea to Stop The Killing results in WAR NO MORE!
Category: Violence
In Memoriam
For many years, Guatemala has seen itself drained of its blood. The survivors of the war have become like witnesses who will be able to tell the different violence-ridden anecdotes and facts so that such events may never return to repeat themselves. And the dead, as silent witnesses who will attest to the importance of regenerating the earth and hope. With their ashes they will free our memory.
Specifically, in this little box, I have deposited the ashes of a dear Mexican friend who, with passion and solidarity, lives with us the repressive and depressing situation of the early nineties in our country.
In thinking about the dead that the war left behind, and the friend who shared the hope and hopelessness of the Guatemalan creators, this box comes to be a metaphor of all those situations where tenderness and pain appear with the same intensity.
Radical Profiling
Tajima Box Project. An artist and an extraordinary woman collaborate to create a box.
Joan Takayama-Ogawa (artist) and Elaine Tajima (CEO, founder at Tajima Creative)
We live in times of war, where racial profiling threatens the freedom of Arab Americans. By transforming this wooden box into a shrine representing my family’s internment in Japanese American relocation camps, I hope that racial profiling will not happen again.
Symbols of the highest decorated American 442 Regimental Combat Unit, the luggage tags with family numbers for the Takayama and Ogawas, rotate around the box symbolically, tied with barbed wire. Along the perimeter of the black tray, a plant revered by Japanese Americans, connects with barbed wire symbolizing their incarceration. A gold crane perched on a post, represents the Hiroshima bomb.
Thirty-seven last names along the edge of the tray represent hundreds of my family members who were incarcerated during World War II, remembering freedom is fragile, and racial profiling is intolerable.
Untitled
El Voto
This is a memorial to all in my country, Guatemala, who have never received a proper burial, and were not only insanely murdered by the army of their own country, but then piled up in clandestine cemeteries, so that their loved ones could never come and be with them.
And the epitaph (THE WISH) reads as follows:
Oh! Please give us a tomb!
a tomb for our souls,
for our poor bodies,
so sore
and tough
from that volcanic lime!
We plead you,
we implore you, dear God, dear people,
dear brothers,
little brothers and little sisters,
give us a tomb,
a safe tomb,
with a shroud made of sweetness,
a place to console us,
a nice place,
to erase the infamy,
a beautiful tomb,
for us!
Living Room Violence
Untitled
Green, yellow and blue are the colors of our flag. Rwanda, a nation recovering from the blood shed of man. The red doom is the symbol of Genocide and the white cross with the bleeding heart of Jesus, who sacrificed that Rwanda be made clean, symbolized by the white cross.
Yellow is sunshine, hope for Rwanda. Green is life and growth and blue is reconciliation, possible only though the blood of Jesus.
Untitled
Untitled
Survivors of Genocide.
I have drawn a volcano in eruption and fruits on a tray. I have also drawn a person in a boat. An active volcano is very destructive. Fruits are nutritious. If you take a ride in a boat you take a rest and feel happy when you look at the water.
Untitled
You may read and see,
But you can’t touch her.
You may look and sympathize,
But you can’t feel her pain.
You may think the wound is healed,
But you don’t know it stays forever.
She trusts to be loved and guarded,
And in return she got that.
She isolates herself from you
As her world is dark and lonely.
She is suffering behind that smile,
You don’t even realize it.
She is unable to accept the truth,
As it hurts to talk about it.
Listen now… “Why me!
I trusted him and this is the time when he RAPED me”
For Ritta
USA/Czech Republic
My sister died before I was a little girl.
She was put in a gas chamber in a
concentration camp.
My daddy was so sad he couldn’t stop
them so he made another little girl right
away so he could forget about Ritta and
be happy again
Only this was not ok with G-d. G-d
thought that this was too fast so he
played a trick on Daddy. He took
Ritta’s soul, which was still very upset
from being starved and gassed and
burned and sent it back to Earth.
Normally a soul would be allowed to
float around out there for a couple
hundred years or more to calm down
after doing Life. So it was shocking for
Ritta’s soul to come back too quickly
and-this was the mean part-to be
stuck in Janicka’s body.
This was very hard for me. I thought I
was supposed to smile. Everyone
wanted me to be a happy pretty little girl
so they could be happy and forget. But,
too bad looked like a bullfrog and I
could tell they thought that and were
ashamed. So no smiles. They didn’t
know about Ritta’s soul and that it took
up so much space may own little heart
didn’t have room to beat.
So along we went, poor starved gassed
and burned Ritta and what was left of
me and no one knew so I was very sad
and lonely. And poor Daddy couldn’t
forget Ritta because she was inside the
little bullfrog.
The Battlefield of Selfhood/ A Box of Empty Shells to Ponder
Beings killing out of jealousy, rage,
betrayal, revenge, self righteousness.
Some die without a loss of body though —
through abuse and intimidation, disagreement.
Untamed emotions creating a battlefield within.
Un-conquered, raw, heartless.
The primary battlefield.
Led from the mind, from the heat of hatred,
destroying another, destroying the Self.
Hear the names of outer battlefields —
Bosnia, Iraq,
Oklahoma City, Somalia, subways in Japan.
In the home,
Couples turning from lovers to killers.
Children killing children.
Anger looming in the human heart —
on the loose, unpredictable.
Where is the greatest battlefield to conquer,
on the terrain or in the heart?
Where to fight the battle?
A box of empty shells to ponder.
Paradise of Equal Status
Untitled
Before 1994, our country was good. After April ’94, blood was shed. Many people died and the majority of genocide survivors are struggling with life.
So, the telephone you see is calling for help. We believe that God is the first to come.
Inside the box, there is my heart. I will never forget my relatives, my friends, children’s blood…
The blue color means that I hope to live happily. Jesus will take me with him.
Beatrice’s Box – A Coffin
The figures on the top represent her husband and four children who were all murdered during the genocide. She had to (forced) watch, as her husband was hacked into four or five pieces. Overwhelmed with tears, she could not go any further.
Note the small red heart on the side.
Untitled
Posibilidades
What is this piece about? For me, it’s about the danger of sensuality. How we are beckoned by the flesh. How our desire can become our anguish. How a wrong decision can mean death, be it of the spirit or the body. How the need for self-destruction can be initiated in a seemingly healthy person from the hurt and pain of a relationship. Thus — the presence of the sword. Although I also see this sword as positive, perhaps a form of protection or an attribute, like that of Saint Agnes. *
The question of violence enters in here, too. This woman — in all her sensuality — is in a coffin. Why? Was she a victim of violence, of rape? Can our sensual self die under certain circumstances? Is our nudity kept hidden away in a dark, quiet place?
The veil also invokes the mysteriousness of Muslim women, their eyes being their only available sensual feature.
* (Saint Agnes was very beautiful, but she rejected all of her suitors, one of whom became angry and had her condemned to death. Since it was forbidden to execute virgins, she was first sent to a burdel. Nevertheless, no man was able to touch her. After being tortured, she was finally decapitated. She is often portrayed with a sword piercing her breast. She is the patron saint of virginal innocence.)
Basta Ya!
We are living in a society where violence and abuse are everyday words. We read it in the papers, we see it in the news, and in one way or the other we have been victims of it.
On May 9, 1997, a group of mothers “Las Madres Angustiadas” and other people joined in front of the Supreme Court of Justice of Guatemala, where thousands of candles “veladoras” forming the words BASTA YA! (Enough) were lit, asking for a solution to this problem.
My box unifies all those lit candles in the churches, in the small private spaces and those lit in front of the Supreme Court.
