It angers and hurts to acknowledge that the earth we inhabit has become no man’s land. Invalidated, corrupt, full of evils, as I recently read: “more than a country, Mexico has become a graveyard”. It is unavoidable that this ground erodes and dries as an ever expanding desert, a terrain moving towards dehumanization, with such a great ardor and a rapid social breakdown that no one knows when and where it is going to end.

For many, this ground is their everyday concern, night tears, dreamless mornings, not knowing when life became a privilege. The traumas of such a ghostly war, butchering not even beasts would be capable of. Blind governments, fictitious, poisoned and harmful. Hunger and ignorance converted in a “goal by themselves”. Everything said, it is inevitable that the souls won’t suffer and that this calvary doesn’t transmute into the organism, because, the body rarely falls ill when the soul is at peace. In many occasions, the exterior becomes a cancer, a paralysis or so many other sickness originated in this untransformable reality. However, before frustration and weariness, voices and shouts are born everyday trying to save the ground, like flowers blossoming in the desert of indifference, of dread and even of evil to tell that we are alive, that the path must change and that there are endless things to do and work to be done. People that abandon their individual privileges, their comfort zone to act collectively not caring if that means swimming upstream, putting their lives and health in danger and knowing deeply the frustration, anger and pain.

CAs so many other flowers in the desert, Emilia González has been a social activist, from the claim of rights of indigenous people, Tarahumaras, to the homicides in Ciudad Juárez. Representative of the movement: Torture never again!. These actions made her a committed activist and a person to whom cancer threatened twice.

When Emilia Sandoval was asked to intervene the PROYECTO VITRINA, she decided what she wanted to do was keep her mother, Emilia González, in it when cancer seemed to take her. To turn her into a flower made of a speaker and oxygen catheters in order to generate this reflection, as a piece of hope and struggle, like the living being that rises from the sand when everything around it seems to be a desert, an absence of life. But what began as an acknowledgment ended being a healing piece when, thanks to an alternative therapy, Emilia González overcame her illness.

Torture never again! shouts this flower so everyone can hear, so that everyone can get involved and fight for the cause, for the ground, for life.

- Damián Comas

PROYECTO VITRINA works as a showcase of collaborative projects between diverse artists and Arredondo \ Arozarena gallery. It is on view at Praga Street in Colonia Juarez, Mexico City.