images | text

Edgardo Aragón
Born in 1985 in Oaxaca, Mexico /  Lives in Oaxaca and Mexico City, Mexico

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): What was the inspiration for your video series Family Effects (Efectos de Familia, 2007–9)?

Edgardo Aragón (EA): It sprang from a microhistory of my family’s involvement with organized crime, abusive pursuit of land ownership, and involvement in social corruption. It is an insider’s analysis of someone seeking to discover how much a society can be corrupted under the disaster of the national economy. The 13 videos are brief episodes in this history, a sort of choreography with specific rules: long takes to frame the nature of the actions without any editing, a fixed camera for theatricalized actions, and, in the case of reenactments, a close following of the action to show a minor detail, like the killing of a relative. Ultimately the episodes are different rituals, games, and punishments that manifest the conceptual notions of crime and survival.

AP: Who are the actors and what characters do they represent?

EA: The actors are all members of my family: two cousins, one nephew, and my younger brother. All of them were born long after the events depicted and therefore never knew this part of the family’s history, but they still grew up with social stigmas. This made the project into a kind of school, where they learned this history by performing actions derived from it, with the aim of understanding its context and avoiding its repetition in the future.

AP: Tell me about some of the 13 episodes.

EA: Some videos contain the basic characteristics of the project, such as the one where a boy is shot to death inside a pickup truck, which represents the killing of one of my cousins in the 1990s. The reenactment was derived from real events and transformed into more conceptual actions. In the video where the boy has his head covered by a blanket and the other boys throw a handful of dirt at his chest, he is being warned about his inevitable death if he opts to join organized crime. Another fundamental aspect is the idea of effort, as in the video where a boy digs a grave, punches into the ground with his fist, and then symbolically buries that punch, representing aspects of masculinity, work, and future yield. Or the brickcarrying competition, which is an old-school punishment where each boy’s endurance is measured with torture.

AP: The very beautiful high-definition filming is a counterpart to the narrative’s violence.

EA: The aesthetic reflects the times and places in which I filmed the videos. I used to play in these places when I was a child, when these events were taking place. The rules of space and filming gave rise to the lighting in the videos and their certain aesthetic. The boys were completely involved in the game—it was a party for them. Despite the violence there is always a happy atmosphere, which generates a certain anxiety, considering what is taking place in the landscape.