EVENT DETAILS

Speaker Series Taking Space/Making Space

The second event of the Speaker Series: Taking Space/Making Space brings together writer Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny and documentary photographer Itzel Aguilera whose work focus some of the pressing issues in the El Paso – Ciudad Juárez region. If “the violence of the letter” consists of naming and settling practices of signification, then narrative itself becomes a violent operation. In attempting to narrate violence, multiple modes have emerged only to prove that despite the innumerable attempts to reproduce the material workings of violence, cultural products have fallen into the entrapment of forms, tropes, and genres that not only fall short in addressing the urgency of this matter, but end up legitimizing and rearticulating structures of violence. The process of translating violence in an ethical narrative form is a pressing and arduous task. Since the 1990s, Ciudad Juárez has experience major levels of violence, which reached a peak in 2010 when the city was considered the most violent of the world after the Mexican state hurled a war on drugs. Through literary and visual lenses this event offers contemporary perspectives on cultural and literary responses to femicide, war on drugs, and militarization. These issues along with the geopolitical impact of this region on migration will be discussed in relation to responses from local artists.