Una Película de Dios

In February of this year, I started to collaborate with eight under-age victims of abuse and sexual exploitation in Mexico. The idea consisted of making, in cooperation with them, a curatorship of religious paintings belonging, for the most part, to the colonial period. By using their own experiences, the girls revisited and interpreted christian scenes exhibited in DF’s museums in order to find inside them the reflection of the unequal power and violence relationships between women and men, as well as the origin of these roles and sexual identities derived from the cultural construction of the concept of family in our patriarchal societies.

After drug trafficking, human trafficking is the most lucrative crime in Mexico. During my second stay in the country, I contacted a family of former pimps -the mother and two of her sons- who “found God” while in jail. Now, they would describe themselves as “Christian pastors”. I talked to them and invited them to complement the girls’ commentaries on the paintings from their experience as pimps.

A selection of all of those comments will serve as an audio guide for the display, which comprises the paintings -made between the XV and XIX centuries- selected by the victims. The MUAC was responsible for dealing with the owner institutions of the paintings so as to be able to have the original works in our exhibition. The title that I decided for the exhibition -together with a sound installation- is “A film of God”.