Claudia Joskowicz
Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido)
Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) is a single-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz that features the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman (La Llorona) as its main protagonist. The video begins with the image of a ghost-like female figure, representing La Llorona, slowly walking down a well-known street in Oaxaca, from the main square (el Zócalo) to the Teatro Macedonio Alcalá, with a painful expression on her face.
According to this famous oral myth, the Weeping Woman drowned her two sons in a fit of grief and anger after her husband abandoned her. She was cursed to wander the streets until she finds her children, giving misfortune to the ones who are close enough to hear her. As the Weeping Woman is known to kidnap lonely children wandering the streets at night, mistaking them for her own, parents in Mexico tend to use this tale to scare their children into not leaving the house at night alone. The video ends with a line of text that reads: “hay muertos que no hacen ruido” (some dead don’t make a sound), which has great importance for contemporary life in Mexico as a verse commonly used by people who protest against the government’s actions of killing students or journalists so that their voices cannot be heard. In this way, Joskowicz creates an analogy between the Weeping Woman and the Mexican government and police attacking their own citizens. Joskowicz builds a narrative around a nation in mourning, presenting the hopelessness that pervades everyday life.
Claudia Joskowicz is a video and installation artist working at the intersection of landscape, history, and memory. Her works form unsettling scenes that reimagine public and private histories of Latin American individuals and communities. Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, these works often involve violent images to bring traumas to the present, and to offer a moment of catharsis for the ones who were affected by these incidents in some way.
In her works, Joskowicz intentionally gives a great amount of power and agency to the camera, reminding the viewer of their passive role in the construction of history. In this way, the artist critiques technology as a medium that easily manipulates one’s interpretation of history, controlling what gets to survive in the public collective memory. As Joskowicz’s camera wanders around the landscape, or focuses on one of the protagonists in her stories, the rest of the scene—and with it, other possible perspectives—fall into the dark, constructing yet another subjective historical narrative. It’s easy to focus on the slow movement of the camera more so than the actual event being recorded, which Joskowicz harnesses to remind her viewers that history is man-made. When texts or events are taken out of their context and technology is present to create an imaginary cinematic space, any narrative is possible.