[van-announce] Remebering Our Sisters - Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

[Eric Doherty]

Remembering Our Sisters
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and  Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
Events to mark International Women’s Day, 2006

In March 2006, to mark International Women’s Day, the Pacific Centre 
for Alternative Journalism and Vancouver’s Gallery Gachet, with 
financial support from labour, non-governmental organizations, 
individuals and government, are collaborating with a number of women’s 
organizations located on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to shed light on 
the many cases of missing women around the world.
The collaboration includes an exhibit, talks and performance by Claudia 
Bernal, a Colombian-born, Montreal-based Canadian artist. Monument to 
Ciudad Juarez is a video-installation and performance inspired by the 
violent assassinations, since 1993, of more than 300 women in the city 
of Juarez, Mexico—a maquiladora city in the heart of the free trade 
zone between the U.S. and Mexico.  The exhibit opens March 3, 2006 at 
Gallery Gachet.

Artist, Claudia Berrnal says, “With the video installation, I pretend 
to ‘raise and bury’ in a symbolic way 300 murdered women in order to 
fix the facts (the murders) in the past and give these a certain 
a-temporality (through the burying),” says Bernal. “Thus, I bring to 
the forefront the real violence against women in general, and the 
brutality of the Ciudad Juarez assassination in particular.”

Located at the border with the United States, a “no ones and everyone’s 
land,” Ciudad Juarez is a city of transit where thousands of women 
survive [by]dreaming of “paradise.” This impressive artwork combines 
ceramics, wood, ropes, fabrics, stones, corn tortillas, and a video 
projection where the desert, haunted by feminine silhouettes, is a 
metaphor of isolation, solitude, and uprooted identity.


Actions and activities:

1.	March 3, 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.– Monument to Ciudad Juarez  opening 
and performance by Claudia Bernal. Gallery Gachet, 88 East Cordova 
Street

2.	March 4-April 2 – Exhibit runs at Gallery Gachet

3.	March 6—an artist’s talk by Claudia Bernal with students and faculty 
at Emily Carr College of Art and Design.

4.	March 8—4 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. a pre-VDLC social in celebration of 
International Women’s Day, aimed at making connections between trade 
union women and others with women who work in the Downtown East Side as 
activists in the arts, in the sex trade, in shelters and in other 
social agencies. This event is endorsed and sponsored by the B.C. 
Federation of Labour Women’s Committee, CUPE B.C. CUPE Metro District, 
CUPE Local 389, City of North Vancouver, Federation of Post Secondary 
Educators, B.C.G.E.U. Megan Ellis & Company.