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Santiago Sierra Palabra de Fuego (Word of Fire) 2007 Here Sierra carved the Spanish word for ‘submission’ into the ground in four-and-a-half metre trenches, which were then filled with concrete. The words were to be set on fire in May 2007, but this last step was interrupted by local authorities, who censored the action. Ciudad Juárez is a site of profound toxic pollution, infamous for its sweatshops and for the serial murders of women working in them. The bodies of some of these women were found in the hills near Sierra’s site, and those hills, now known as Black Christ Mountain, have become a site of grim pilgrimage. Sumisión is itself part of Proyecto JUAREZ, organized by Mariana David. David enlisted 17 male artists (including Joshua Okon and Miguel Calderón) to explore the dynamics of the various systems (nationalism, capitalism, patriarchy) that bear down on this border town. This is perhaps Sierra’s most open-ended and challenging work. Sumisión is fully over-determined. As the wall text rightfully reminds us, from the position of the radically disenfranchised, the word is unthinkable, even as it appears to describe their condition. Submission is suicidal. Submission is murderous. Unlike the words of Ed Ruscha’s paintings, which hang in empty landscapes, the ground here is filled with corpses, and among them Sierra’s letters become fighting words in spite of themselves. from here
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