Episode 9: The Displaced and Disappeared: Adriana Corral and “Between Spaces”
Adriana Corral credits both her father and mother for her life as an artist. Her father asked one of his sisters to recreate Goya’s “Third of May,” and the painting, she said, “haunted her.” But her father’s side of the family also produced several physicians who invited Adriana into their lives and work at an early age. With them she learned about the body. On her mother’s side, an uncle who was in the seminary and an aunt who was a nun eventually left their religious callings to work for civil rights.
Latitudes, 2016–2019
Corral’s art finds a space between the two sides of her family—focusing on the bodies of erased or forgotten peoples—immigrants, abused women, unhoused persons—and inviting viewers to see them (even in their absences) perhaps for the first time.
While researching the Campo Algodon case (the Cottonfield Case), in which the bodies of three women who had been raped were found abandoned in a cotton field, Corral had the chance to meet Ariel Dulitzsky, one of the attorneys appointed in 2010 to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and elected as its Chair-Rapporteur from 2013-2015. She attended the meeting of the working group and “the experience was illuminating,” she said, leaving on her a “resounding presence” that will always be with her.
The Trace of a Living Document, 2017
The process she uses to create her stunning work shows it. Like her place between her father’s and mother’s families, Corral sees between spaces as “where vital content exists.” Forgotten histories or erased persons show that the UN Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is itself often forgotten or ignored, sometimes even erased from history. Her work calls the UDHR and human rights into question—in essence, who is it protecting if it isn’t a policy or law; is it serving those who are most vulnerable? She questions these notions and others who may come into these spaces.
She spends enormous amounts of time exploring materiality, how material might respond to spaces, and inviting those who view her installations to do so “bodily.” Looking up, looking down, being aware of where they are in space. The spaces she creates are meditative or contemplative, dealing with heavy subjects that pull her viewers in (like gravity) while still giving them space to experience the work uniquely.
Campo Algodón, Cuidad Juarez, 21 de Febrero del 2007, 2011
Her work with the UN, with forgotten narratives, and erased people allows for critical thinking and is especially apt in contemporary Texas, where Corral lives and works. Unfortunately, she notes, what’s happening in Texas happens across the world, and her work stands as documentation about (and for) the forgotten and erased.
Click on image to visit Adriana’s website.
