Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) uses the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman, (La Llorona), as an allegory for a nation in mourning. La Llorona’s myth is present throughout Mexican culture and Latin American folklore at large. According to the story, she is the ghost of a woman who has killed her children and now cries desperately while roaming cities at dawn from rivers to main squares, often causing misfortune to those who are near. In its different versions, the legend preserves elements of its indigenous essence (originating in Oaxaca) and represents time, the road to the underworld, death in the supernatural, and hopelessness in the everyday. La Llorona knows of the fate of her descendants and is impotent to do anything about it. Therefore, she is emblematic of despair- a reference to several violent events of the last decade that have taken place in the Mexican landscape, amongst them, the events of September 26, 2014, when 43 students of the Normal Rural School of Guerrero Raul Isidro Burgos were murdered and the violent protests of June 2006 after the eviction of a teachers’ strike in the city of Oaxaca’s main square. Registering shots of the city’s quotidian life in a slow and powerful journey from Oaxaca’s main square (el Zócalo) to the Teatro Macedonio Alcalá, this video captures the subtleties of pain and struggle present in those moments when the mundane is confused with the mystical.
Single channel digital HD video (2K);
3 minute excerpt of 10:30 minutes total running time; color; sound