In this wide-ranging essay, Bernardi explores personal and artistic responses to state violence. Marking the limits of memory in witnessing the past, she argues for a complex understanding of memory as a mode of reclaiming the disappeared, as the foundation for consciousness building, and, when transmuted into material forms, as a means of witnessing. Bernardi conceptualizes artistic creation as fulfilling multiple roles in witnessing, and as an exchange that demands both speech and recognition. An artistic response to atrocity, she writes, demonstrates an important form of listening to testimonials of atrocity; in turn, that demonstration invites both members and observers into rituals of commemoration. Such rituals, she argues, can provide the foundation for rebuilding trust and understanding in communities that have been damaged by state violence.
La Bestia, La travesía de migrantes centroamericanos en su camino hacia la frontera de México y los Estados Unidos narra la historia de migrantes indocumentados que viajan en La Bestia, un tren de carga en el cual se montan los migrantes Centroamericanos en Arriaga, Ixtepec o Ciudad Hidalgo en el sur de México y que los llevará hasta cerca de Mexicali, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Piedras Negras o Nuevo Laredo. Amarrados precariamente del techo del tren, este camino arriesgado de más de 3.000 km determinará que muchos de quienes emprenden el viaje, nunca lleguen a la frontera. The Beast, The journey of Central American migrants on their way to the border of Mexico and the United States tells the story of undocumented migrants who travel in La Bestia, a freight train in which Central American migrants are assembled in Arriaga, Ixtepec or Ciudad Hidalgo in southern Mexico that will take you to nearby Mexicali, Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, Piedras Negras or Nuevo Laredo. Moored precariously from the roof of the train, …