Ultra Madre (Ultra Mother)
Performance installation
2009
 

About

At its core Ultra Madre is about mourning as an act of defiance. Mourning is also to be considered a celebration of the process through which we seek understanding about traumatic events. We mourn those we have lost, we mourn the consequences of histories of violence, dispossession and alienation. We mourn as individuals and as members of communities. Through this process we may come to recognize ourselves in others and to seek new ways of moving forward.

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This performance was originally conceived as an exploration of the premature death of the artist’s mother, a deeply traumatic event for him. Believing that the most intimate emotions are also the most universal, the work suggests that grief and loss are as much personal as they are collective experiences.For one hour 57 Bolivian women lay still with their hair cascading down a scaffold built in the central patio of the National Museum of Art.