Mari de Queiroz

infiltration: permeable areas prevent flooding

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Infiltration is an ongoing series about the erasure of a rape, revealed after a hiatus of thirty-five years. The search for fragments of memory led me to establish as a working procedure the retracing of the path to the site of the violation repeatedly, over the course of a pandemic year. My aim was to research some possible materialities for this hidden violence. In the subjective topography of my body-map, the mark remains.

 

Permeable areas prevent flooding is one of the possible translations for this route, one of the material residues of this pilgrimage: it is a set of 3,928 images of moss, mold, and mildew photographed with a cell phone between September 30, 2020 and September 30, 2021. The photographs were taken on this daily, insistent, and restricted route, marking each of my passages through the house where I was raped. After noticing, recording, and accepting the physical reaction of my body to the fact of placing myself back at the crime scene, I continued collecting the green until its porosity absorbed the torrential overflow that hit me with each visit. Each passage through the house was recorded in photos and text, which in their profusion unfolded into various materialities.

 

Mosses are survivors through contagion - absorbing moisture is their way of life. By transforming the green of the damp carpet of memory fragments into moss, mold, mildew and infiltrations, I seek to touch other bodies that are victims of violence. The personal then becomes political (HANISH). The posters are available, via website, so that the work can spread through the action of other bodies. Spreading this infiltration is a way of materializing so much silenced violence.