Los Muertos

November 2, 2007 (All Souls Day)

Thanks to all my family that has come before me. I couldn’t have gotten here without you.

Last night was the reception for my ofrenda and a celebration for Dia de los Muertos at the Snite Museum of Art. The talk I gave about my ofrenda was well received though I sometimes felt like I was talking in circles. I’m glad I was able to use some powerpoint slides to emphasize my points.

Many thanks to all the friends that came out to show their support. And once again, many thanks to all that helped me out in constructing this ofrenda to my family.



What follows is the statement written up to explain this year’s ofrenda:



DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
DAY OF THE DEAD

CUENTOS Y MEMORIA
STORIES AND MEMORY


A family’s history suffers when an individual dies and his/her life stories are forgotten. If the deceased’s life is like a collection of stories within a book, then a family’s history is a great library containing these collections. If the family members pass on without conveying their stories to a younger generation, then it is as if a great library has burned to the ground.

Ramiro Rodriguez’s Dia de los Muertos installation, Cuentos y Memoria, honors the lives of family members from the Martinez-Rodriguez family that have passed on. The ofrenda’s (offering/altar) arrangement of traditional elements, such as pictures, flowers, and food is supplemented with contemporary elements in an attempt to document the stories of those relatives.

The title Cuentos y Memoria (Stories and Memory) refers to the stories family members recount about those loved ones. The telling of these stories adds to the collective memory of the family and keeps alive, in minds and hearts, those who are gone. The narrating recalls anecdotes of the departed’s life to family who knew him/her, as well as to younger children who may not have known him/her at all.

A portion of the installation features a loop of video interviews that are part of an on-going family oral history documentation by Rodriguez. Various members of the Martinez-Rodriguez family (parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces…) relay memories about their departed loved ones. In this instance, the video replaces the conversations, remembrances and storytellings, which traditionally occur at a graveside during the Dia de los Muertos celebration.

In the gallery a book-filled coffin represents the lives of ancestors long-since buried and forgotten. When viewed in sections, the sides of the box present a snapshot of various aspects of a life. However, when viewed as a succession of prints pulled from the individual side sections, a life’s journey is exposed as a continuous circular image that repeats infinitely–as the body of an Olmec dragon carved into a stone sarcophagus.