Maya Watanabe

Liminal

through 5 September 2021

In the 2019 video work Liminal, by the Peruvian artist Maya Watanabe (Lima, 1983), the camera slowly feels its way across a piece of land: loose soil, rocks, roots – alternately in and out of focus . These abstract-looking close-ups sometimes bring to mind minerals glistening in the sunlight. That image flips, however, when a measuring stick suddenly comes into view and the camera stops at fragments of bone, teeth and clothing... From that point on the out-of-focus images are much-needed breathing intervals that offer time for us to contemplate the painful truth.

Watanabe’s video has its roots in the historical and political reality of Peru, as it literally zooms in on a national trauma: the Peruvian civil war (1980-2000), in which the armed Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) was responsible for the most abhorrent violations of human rights. Both in the country's highlands and its major cities, they used terror in an attempt to overthrow the corrupt military regime. The government, in turn, had no reservations about directing violence at its own people. A total of 20,000 people disappeared.

Watanabe followed the investigation of two mass graves from 1984, in Ayacucho and Huánuco. Lying in one are victims of Shining Path, and in the other are people killed by the military. Liminal is a brave balancing act that relates to an issue which continues to afflict Peruvians to this day. There are still hundreds of mass graves that have yet to be dealt with; only now are these being investigated by the government. The title Liminal refers to the interim stage, of grief and uncertainty, in which families of missing people find themselves. That situation also applies to the ambiguous state of those who are between ‘being missing’ and being identified as victims.

As such Watanabe contributes to the process of healing the national trauma in a way that, most likely, can only be done by art. Via her work she raises the question as to how this violence can be represented, and how one can adopt an ethical and honest standpoint toward it. Watanabe: ‘This work is about the present, about the spirits of the present. Moving back and forth between focus and blur, between the visible and the veiled, Liminal tries to show cruelty without mitigation or leniency.’

_{Liminal was produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation with support from the Mondriaan Fund and can be seen in the WOOL project space at De Pont, in an installation specially designed by the artist. Liminal has previously been shown at MALI, Lima, at Casa Encendida, Madrid, and at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham (Mass.).}