Background

About Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Since 1993, more than 2500 women have been brutally murdered, and hundreds have disappeared in the mexican boarder city of Juaréz. Explanations for the murders range from the use of women as prizes for drug cartels, domestic violence, and so-called sexual violence tourism. Many of the victims worked in the numerous sweat shops in Juaréz and the name tags inside their dust coats were often used to identify the decomposed bodies. Over the years, the Mexican Government has not been able to make actions that has solved the cases or prevented new from happening. The problem has instead been expanding and is now recognised all over Mexico. In Juárez, every week new names appear on the list of victims. The art project Desconocida Unkown Ukjent was initiated by Lise Bjørne Linnert in 2006 as a global mass collaboration, protesting continuing murders of these women. Each name tag is 2 × 8 cm and stitched by 5400 individuals in about 500 globally arranged workshops. By April 2022 the project have reached more than 8700 tags.

Initiating

Lise Bjørne Linnert heard about the situation in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico for the first time in 2000 when she was living in Houston, Texas. At the end of 2005, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, a museum that is dedicated to a political and social agenda, invited her to create a work dedicated to the women in Juárez, for the exhibition, Frontera 450.

At the time, Lise was living in Norway again and her immediate thought was to use the physical distance as a starting point for the work. She wanted to find a way to spread awareness about the horror happening in Juárez, and simultaneously enable a feeling of connection. In essence, abuse and murder of women are about us. It is something that has happened and continues to happen in every global society.

Since the beginning of the art project in 2006, women murdered in Juárez have been continually remembered through workshops arranged in galleries, universities, schools, libraries, cafés and private homes globally.

5400 people have, by April 2022, embroidered close to 8700 labels in the countries of:

Exhibitions

Desconocida Unknown Ukjent has been exhibited widely. It is never shown without inviting the local community to participate embroidering labels and helping to install the work. The installation is site specific. The preferable format is a freestanding pink wall where the nametags are installed one and one, each held by a single sewing pin. The pink color is the same as the women in Ciudad Juaréz have chosen as their color of protest.

Desconocida Unknwon Ukjent continues to expand, sadly because new victims arrive weekly on the list of murdered women in Ciudad Juaréz. The project will last as long as the situation there remains unchanged. The duration functions as a continuous remembrance and points to our reality where abuse and murders of women are something we cannot escape but have to continuously fight.

Lise Bjorne Linnert