A blind contour series based off Juan Manuel Echavarría’s piece Bocas de Ceniza (mouths of ashes). His piece is a series of videos; the people featured have been subject to the massacres of the Colombian paramilitary and/or guerrillas and as a result many are displaced. The individual videos show footage of each person singing canciones they wrote as solace during or after displacement. Bocas de Ceniza is what la conquistadores named the mouth of the Magdalena River—-they ‘discovered’ it on Ash Wednesday. In the footage, the singers’ features were so tender, their skin glistened. Their mouths were often prominent, which, because these were drawn during the footage, is probably reflected in the drawings.
![An eighteenth-century sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Napoleon’s wife Josephine spent her childhood here, where slaves worked to produce the ‘white gold’ used in European desserts like the ones pictured above. “We need always to be investigating the power relationships that arise in various practices and to give them proper ethical evaluation; that is to say, to ask whether they are acceptable or not. […] Since we never know in advance how power works, we need always to keep investigating its operation, in order to see where it’s leading and what it’s creating; and we need always to ask the ethical question of whether we find that acceptable.” (Todd May)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m03blvPytK1qzsr4so1_500.jpg)
