SAN BENITO – They spread across a wall bearing the ghost images of people once vibrant and breathing, reduced now to shadows of discarded clothing which seem to float in mid-air.
Headboards hang suspended in Jessie Burciaga’s exhibit “Aqui Descansaba” at the San Benito Cultural Heritage Museum at 250 E. Heywood St. The exhibit uses pillows and bedsheets and ghost prints of discarded clothing to convey the stories that can’t be told of the lost and missing.
A video of a woman quietly making a bed with a flowered blanket while mid-afternoon sun flows through light blue curtains is especially poignant. It’s a moment of eternal peace, a dream shattered by the reality it symbolizes.
“In this body of work, I use the bed, I use the pillows to talk about the disappearance of people, especially caused by the drug violence in Mexico that sometimes overlaps with us being across the border,” said Burciaga, 31, of Brownsville.
When people hear of a person’s “final resting place,” they think of a cemetery plot or an urn with ashes. However, Burciaga’s take on the term is the final bed where people rest as life slips away, where loved ones gather to say their goodbyes.
Sadly, the lost, the missing, the disappeared, don’t get that “final resting place” nor do their loved ones get their chance to say their final goodbyes. And therein lies the point of his purpose: the confused limbo of no last resting place and the feeling of oblivion.
That purpose is further highlighted by the “ghost prints” of clothing without wearers, seemingly devoid of their own “purpose.”
One of his many thought-provoking pieces is a woman’s slipover in scarlet with creases of light and scattered visual riffs and stray folds, the kind of random variation that gives character to a piece of clothing or a face. A pair of floating shorts adorned with the wrinkles of use, a dirty sock, and a dress in dark umber with flowing folds which invoke a sense of movement.
That indication of movement perhaps symbolizes the absence of moment, of the missing and their loved ones caught in a place of nothingness, lives stuck in a perpetual vertigo.
“When I interview people about their loved ones being missing, I think about how people grieve, the different processes of grieving, so I focus on the active searching,” he said. “When they grieve, one thing they do is they actively search.”
And so the loved ones in their loss wonder how they can grieve without a body.
DNA identification is not always possible, and family members generally don’t have any understanding of forensics.
The lack of DNA or forensics further enhances the sense of loss and the resourcefulness of family members seeking to find their loved one.
So, in the absence of a body they use perhaps items of clothing lost ones might have worn.
Perhaps in the presence of that physical piece with all its textured rhythms, imprinted with the vitality and energy of that lost one, they can feel again that person’s strength and vigor.
The exhibit will be displayed until April 17.
