'They Were Taken Alive, We Want Them Back Alive!': Artists for Empathy Jen Graves - The Stranger
go to original October 20, 2016

Abel Garcia Hernández and I can't be a match in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's 2015 installation Level of Confidence, but I want us to be. (The Stranger)

I'm standing in front of a large monitor where my face is being projected live, and compared to a set of other faces. The computer is searching for a match.

As I tilt my head or move my lips, the facial recognition software keeps trying. It lines up faces next to mine, pulled from a grid of black-and-white headshots. Why do you keep trying? I think. I am not Abel Garcia Hernández. Except that the longer my eyes, nose, and lips are modeled on the screen next to the soft features of the boyish teenager, I wonder whether I do look something like Abel Garcia Hernández. Am I imagining it, or are his lips and my lips almost congruent? Are we joined in a geometry kiss?

He disappears, and another face follows his. Another face where I will find faint echoes, but no positive match.

This is not just an exercise in interactive art. All of the 43 teenagers whose faces appear in the grid are actual sons and brothers whose families are still holding out hope that they are alive.

These are The 43, the students whose disappearance one night in September 2014 set off revolts across Mexico against not only the drug cartels and the local police - which the national government blamed for the attacks in an "investigation" whose conclusions are full of holes - but the national military and all the way up to President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Nobody has been able to find them, or to figure out the circumstances of their deaths, if they did die.

And the Mexican government is calling it over.

Read the rest at The Stranger

Related: Mexico Arrests Ex-Police Chief in 43 Students Case (Agence France-Presse)

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