V-Day Protest in Ciudad Juarez, 2004. Photo of Pink Square project by Rigo Maldonado and Shakina Nayfack. The Squares which totaled 370 representing the women who had disappeared in Chihuahua, Mexico at that time, were related to over 10 years of femicides in southern Mexico with impunity.
(Above) Arena y Sangre, 2004 was filmed by Rigo Maldonado & Shakina Nayfack on the weekend of the V-Day protest. In the film, Shakina Nayfack performs a Butoh Dance in El Lote Bravo, Ciudad Juarez. The pink squares held by V-Day protesters became part of this space/body healing performance. The soundtrack is of the V-Day protesters yelling “Ni Una Mas,” (Not One More).
Just south of Ciudad Juarez, near Juarez’ International Airport, El Lote Bravo, was an ad-hoc cemetery for victims in the area’s lethal drug wars. This desert irrigation ditch is also the place where the bodies of 8 murdered and mutilated women were discovered in 2001. The murders became known as “the cotton field murders” of Ciudad Juarez.
Shakina J. Nayfack, Ph.D. wrote in 2009: “. . . Butoh Ritual Mexicano reshapes and reconstitutes the site of its teaching and the bodies of its students, how these transformations confront and complicate the reality of US imperialism and global capitalism on a bodily and societal level, and what, if anything, can be gained from this dance form as an alternate mode of survival and renewal.”
After V-Day the pink squares were used as part of various Juarez Femicide workshops led by Rigo Maldonado and Victoria Delgadillo in 2004 and after. Materials and images of the women of Juarez (collected by Rigo and Victoria) were provided to participants to create protest art. Art is an excellent way to discuss and strategize for difficult social issues.
In 2010, Victoria Delgadillo co-organized an international month of femicide art activism events in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Fort Worth, Quebec, Mexico City, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque with collaborator, filmmaker/poet Pilar Rodriguez Aranda in Mexico City and by solely communicating via the internet.
The pink square project moved to Mexico City in 2010 with Pilar Rodriguez Aranda, who organized several months of femicide art activism events in Mexico, encouraged many to create public art installations as a form of protest by using the model from the US.
(Below) Bordamos Por la Paz (We Embroider for Peace) having seen the pink square project in Mexico, began a protest sewing circle in public places throughout Mexico (now expanding all over the world). The attendees discuss violence in their communities and make embroidered statements about it to create a protest display.
