Along a broken border
By Sehba Sarwar


Two voices sear the air in a large art space in mid-town Houston. One voice rises, breaks and falls. The other swells and meets the first. As the cadence changes and fills the space packed with more than 200 visitors, a four-year old boy held up by his father breaks past the women's chants and asks: "Why are they crying? What are they saying?"
Visual artist Lise Bjorne remains stationary as performer Elia Arce approaches her, still expelling her voice. And then, the two women stand face-to-face, one foot apart and their voices rise and fall at different pitches, sometimes meeting each other, other times not. Finally, Elia's tapers off and Lise closes the performance with a louder pitch. Once finished, the artists exit through the crowd that's gathered, leaving us to digest the sounds that are now absorbed into our systems.
We are all gathered on a cool October night at The Station, an alternative artspace in Houston, Texas, to experience a multimedia art show entitled Frontera 450+. The show features the work of more than 13 visual and multimedia artists who are moved by the story of 450 plus young women who have been reported missing and discovered dead in Juarez, Mexico since 1993. The Texas-Mexico border is a rough terrain with its own culture and landscape but the women's unsolved -- and ongoing -- murders and disappearances have sparked off a world-wide cry of outrage by artists and activists. Many see the women's disappearances as a microcosm of the conflict that's arising all along the US-Mexico border.
Lise Bjorne's piece exhibited at the Station is a fusion of women from around the world who participated in her installation by embroidering names of those who were murdered in Juarez. To put up her installation --a grid of the embroidered names of all the Juarez women reported dead -- Lise made packets for more than 20 women in cities such as Lahore, Oslo, Houston, Tehran. In these packets she placed 10 names of women who disappeared along with 10 blank cloth labels, embroidery thread and needles.
To participate in the show, recipients had to host a women's gathering, discuss the Juarez issue, embroider the 10 names, and then send the labels back to Lise in Oslo, Norway, where she is currently based. (One artist who arranged such a gathering in Lahore was Salima Hashmi, who not only sent the embroidered names but also a recorded conversation of women artists in Lahore talking about the Juarez issue and making parallels to similar crimes happening against women all around Pakistan.)
The final installation of Lise's grid -- set up to replicate the musical score of the Mexican national anthem -- contains the labels collected from more than 400 women. By passing out the labels to cities around the world, Lise aimed to increase awareness of the issue particularly among women.
Lise is surprised by the enthusiasm with which her project's been received. "This issue has become bigger than I thought it would," she says. "It's consuming me. The group of women in Bosnia want to do something similar there and I see this as an ongoing show. The issue remains unaddressed and the crime is unsolved. So, this is a work in progress."
Much research has been done around the lives of the disappeared women, many of whom were young factory workers or maquiladoras, as they are called along the border. Not all the bodies of the women have been found and Lise's installation contains more than 500 labels that state 'name unknown' in different languages including Norwegian, Farsi, Urdu and Bosnian. More than 100 of the women's bodies were found seriously mutilated and Amnesty International has reported that these women were victims of sexual homicide.
El Paso investigative reporter Diana Washington has done extensive research to uncover the mysterious deaths of the Juarez women. Washington, who reports for the El Paso Times, the US city on the other side of the border from Juarez, claims that the Mexican government has taken few steps to uncover the deaths. The murders are linked to a drug cartel, which is booming on the US-Mexico border, claims Washington, and this explains why there's been no closure to the issue. In her controversial book 'Harvest of Women: A Mexican Safari', Washington presents a case that connects the Juarez drug cartel to the unsolved murders.
Another artist who's taken on the Juarez murders as her cause is Alicia Gaspar de Alba, author of 'Desert Blood', a research-based novel that delves deep into the issues surrounding the deaths of the women of Juarez. Gaspar teaches Chicano/a Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and in 2003, she organised an international conference, 'The Maquiladora Murders/Or, Who Is Killing the Women of Juarez.'
It is now 2006, almost 15 years since the murders first began being reported. Since then, many groups around the world continue to demand a resolution of the issue. However, even after many investigations, the Juarez murders remain unsolved and women in Juarez are not any safer than they were a decade ago. And just as the exhibit at the Station succeeded in raising awareness, people will continue to make noise and hope that the volume will rise to a pitch so it will be heard and collective action can be taken to end the murders.
"But ultimately until the issue is solved," says Lise, "it's women who will pay the price. And that's why we have to join together to use our voices to do something about the women of Juarez."
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/nov2006-weekly/nos-12-11-2006/dia.htm