40 LIVES
November 2022Performance at Hospital Virgen de la Victoria of Malaga
"I'm not accepting the things I can't change, I'm changing the things I can't accept" Angela Davis
International Day for the Elimination of Abuse of Women
November 25 is celebrated every year as the International Day for the Elimination of Abuse against Women. The purpose of this event is to raise awareness of violence against women and promote the implementation of policies to eradicate gender violence, as well as to provide support and raise awareness about the stigma suffered by victims.
The 40 Lives action is a tribute by Jorge Galán and Catalina Vivar to the victims of gender violence so far in 2022 in Spain. On the day this action is being held - November 25, 2022 - 38 female and 2 minor fatalities have been recorded; a total of 40 deaths in less than a year.
This artistic action is included among the commemorative events held at the Virgen de la Victoria Hospital in Malaga by the Gender Violence Commission.
The Numbers
Numbers help us to describe repetition in a synthetic way. However, when we use them with victims, this same functionality and capacity for abstraction produces an emptying of the emotional content and the tragedy associated with these situations. The figures of fatalities usually reach us from the media in a quick sum of cases that is verbalized in seconds. Their short temporal or physical life within the message transmits information quickly, but it gets rid of the true dimension and drama that each case represents for the victims themselves, for their families, their environment and ultimately, for society.
The Action
40 Vidas proposes an exercise in the abstraction of these figures of fatal victims. In contrast to the synthetic sum of cases, an individual count is proposed, and in contrast to the term death, the term life is proposed. The mere 10-12 minutes necessary to count the 40 victims serve to begin this process of abstraction in a superficial but sufficient way, protecting identities, details and circumstances of the victims.
Along with the counting of victims, a feminine or Venus symbol is constructed - using crosses of salt on the ground - surrounding justice, embodied by the figure of my colleague Catalina. The ideogram ends up flooding the entire courtyard and reinforces the de-abstraction and the sense of counting the fatalities.
Hospital environment
The action leaves a scene in the consultation yard where the enormous female symbol made with the 40 crosses of salt predominates, one for each fatal victim. In the circle are left the tools used in the action: bag of salt, shovel, scales and handkerchief. The scene is left enclosed in the yard for a few hours of that commemorative morning.
