Elina Chauvet

Women and girls of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, have been “disappearing” for decades. The language of vanishing used to describe these events masks the brute violence of their occurrence. In writing, speaking, and memorializing these events as mystic vanishings or bloodless disappearances, the colonial tropes of the magical brown body are conjured in the service of legitimizing murder, a fundamental component of imperial logic. Confronting the language of erasure and its associated myths, artist Elina Chauvet’s Zapatos Rojos (Red shoes) installations act as decolonial gestures of embodiment. This paper argues that in its many transnational iterations, Zapatos Rojos counters the disembodying and, therefore, dehumanizing language of colonial power through an emphatic marking of the corporeality of the vanishing while imaging the invisible workings of what Sergio González Rodríguez has called “the femicide machine.” Signaling the various colonial myths that have long perpetuated and naturalized these deaths, the red shoes denote the bodies of those murdered through their sexed and gendered implications as well as their status as commodities. Contextualized in relation to various activist groups and artists whose work enacts similar gestures, this essay examines the ways that Zapatos Rojos claims space for mourning while calling for accountability. What distinguishes Chauvet’s public art practices from many of her artist and activist contemporaries, I argue, is that they protest feminicide while simultaneously conjuring the colonial myths of promiscuity, disposability, and magic that sustain the “femicide machine.”