In its most basic sense, femicide is the murder of women because they are women, committed by men. It is a political concept that indicates the position of subordination, inequality, marginality, and risk in which women find themselves for the simple fact of being women. According to Sayak Valencia, women, along with those understood as subordinates or dissidents of the heteropatriarchal categories, have lived in extreme physical and psychological violence, and more recently, media violence. These have been part of our daily lives, of our education. Violence as a core element in the construction of discourse that presupposes that the condition of vulnerability and violence are inherent to the destiny of women, something like an inverse privilege.

So I ask, what’s behind the need to destroy a female body and display the remains? What happens when violence is not only the product of certain conditions, pathologies or subjects, but of a social fact that is constructed and transmitted collectively, both in its exercise and in its reproduction and consumption?

The bodily victim of violence will always be irreversibly a dislocated body. The images produced in these circumstances constitute the most powerful emblem for the exercise of fear. The cuts that transform the body, from the fragmentation of the parts and the redistribution of them, function as a dislocation of the natural ordering of the body, creating a kind of anomaly on which a new system of meanings is constituted.

This other body implies an alteration of conventional body grammar. It is a disassembled body that brings an annihilation of all corporal order. It is just a pile of pieces, vestiges, ruins of what a body once was.

In the performance “In / Finita,” ten women positioned separately in a field write the word “morta” (dead) on their faces, for three hours, with a black pen, until their faces turn completely black. A performance, as aesthetic strategy, as a space of resistance. The bodies that appear make other bodies appear. An orphic ritual of bereavement mourning the death of the other and presenting the death of oneself.