The MAPI museum inaugurated on Saturday, May 18 at 12 noon the installation “En ella estamos todas” (We are all in her) by Uruguayan artist Manuela Aldabe Toribio, as part of the Month of Memory, in a work that used soil from the grave of the first disappeared woman found in Uruguay and that preceded the “March of Memory” held on May 20.

Making art could have been linked to transplanting, to translating, to interpreting, to embodying, to ontological implantation, to bringing something new into reality: an artistic project as a laboratory where disciplines interconnected to offer symbiosis and generate a hypothesis. A symbiogenesis of botany, art, anthropology, technology, community work, and everything involved in deconstructing the episteme of the colonialist matrix.

Unjust deaths prowled through our imaginary, and that is where the artist switched on a spotlight that pointed to systematic violence. The repression of the military dictatorship (1973-1984) was riddled with persecution, torture, death and disappearance, which in the case of women was, in the great majority of cases, aggravated by the violence of sexual torture.

The remains of the woman found at the 14th Infantry Battalion, in Toledo, on June 6, 2023, unlike the five disappeared detainees found previously, appeared without clothing, on their back, destroyed. Aldabe made visible the systemic violence against the bodies of the women who were victims of State terrorism; art took up the case.

Aldabe’s works embodied an obsession with everything related to memory, but did not abandon the idea of the future. The artist captured the energy of objects and, above all, the energy of the objects that had been in contact with the disappeared woman, which she brought to this exhibition. In this way she generated constellations of signs that imagined the future.

If we think of Uruguay, this reconnection seemed a utopia.