Efectos de familia

2007 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
Various dimensions

Efectos de familia (Family Effects, 2007–9) is a series of 13 videos that dramatize an array of abusive events derived from Edgardo Aragón’s family’s history—specifically its involvement with organized crime. Each episode is an action performed by some combination of his two young cousins, nephew, and younger brother. In one, a boy is shot to death inside a pickup truck. In another, two of them endure a brick-carrying competition. In another, a boy digs his grave. The work is about a collective social condition of survival and endurance, and it is inextricable from the broader context of contemporary Mexico, especially its skyrocketing crime rates and the disaster of its national economy. By using reenactment as an artistic medium, Aragón attempts to educate his young family members to avoid criminal entanglements.

Edgardo Aragón’s works employ reenactment to reflect the everyday reality of rural Mexico. Using narratives inspired by the particularities of their respective local contexts, Aragón evokes events—some with very violent undertones—and shapes them into scenes molded by landscapes. His work also addresses points of familial and social inheritance that are conditioned by the local environment, creating a personal body of work recounted through poetic narratives. Each piece is a story slowly told—a description of a memory or a reconstruction of a personal experience—that shows some of the darker sides of Mexico’s social and economic realities.

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