Data ART: Journalism Meets Visual Art

Violence against women — and violence against women of color, specifically — is an urgent political issue. This week, the black, socialist, feminist city councilperson Marielle Franco was executed on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Protests have filled streets in cities across Brazil to express the collective horror about this assassination and to commit to continuing Marielle Franco’s work to create safer communities.

Do artists play a role in witnessing and exposing this kind of violence? What is that role?

That is one of the central questions in Artememoria’s first issue, Witness Testimony. But here, let’s expand the possibilities of socially committed art even further. Let’s consider a unique initiative that joins artists and investigative journalists from across Latin America to represent human rights violations.

The project, Data ART, was originally founded in El Salvador. In late 2017, the exhibition displayed pieces about gendered violence in Latin America in partnership with the Brazilian publication Gênero e Número. The show was on display at the Parque das Ruinas in Rio de Janeiro.

The founder, journalist Cristina Algarra, sat down with Artememoria to discuss her unusual method of fostering art grounded in numbers for the sake of public awareness.

Artememoria: What inspired this idea of mounting an exhibition of journalistic art?

Cristina Algarra: Well, the idea for the exhibition came about in El Salvador during an afternoon of tacos and burritos with a former colleague at the Foro Centroamericano de Periodismo. That colleague was Alejandro Córdoba, and at the time he was working on an initiative to add art exhibitions to the lobby of the Luis Poma Theater. He approached me to say that when he was in Guatemala a few months before, he’d seen a play by Daniel Villa Toro, a Guatemalan journalist who displayed his work in public plazas.

Dani is a bit unusual. He’s an investigative journalist, the kind of person who likes to dig into numbers and documents, and that kind of person often works alone, in isolation with data. But Dani isn’t anything like that, and he also has a creative, artistic side that journalism never allowed him to explore.

It’s possible to take journalistic investigations based on data and turn them into works of art, ones that also display that information and the stories in the original report.

This concept of data based art inspired a piece called Brecha, which uses four clocks to represent the labor inequality that exists in Guatemala when comparing gender and the indigenous and not indigenous populations. What amount of time does each group dedicate to work in the home, which generally is uncompensated labor? According to the research, it amounts to a savings of 29% of the national GDP for the Guatemalan government. And yet, it is an invisible kind of work, one often carried out by women and, most often, by indigenous women. All of this information that Dani published in his report is very easy to see when looking at these four clocks that show these huge inequalities.

Though some people go to news sources to find that information, a huge part of the general public doesn’t want to search for good news. We want to confront them with reality and bring them the investigations that we carry out. These are things people should know. And so with that in mind, the idea is also to bring journalism to spaces like a theater lobby, and a theater lobby that is located in a mall. Most people who frequent that mall are not the typical consumers of independent journalism or the kind of investigative reports we carry out.

So, after eating all of those tacos and after dreaming up these ideas, we then had to ask ourselves how we were going to make this project happen. The idea isn’t to turn a journalist into an artist. A journalist is a journalist, and an artist is an artist. The idea is to have them come together.

We didn’t go about looking for someone from each genre of art to contribute. The exhibition came together organically. Dancers and people working in theater did performances representing the issue of disappearances in El Salvador, and musicians created the atmosphere of the exhibition through sound.

Artememoria: The exhibition on display in Rio de Janeiro is focused on gender, as you are collaborating with the Brazilian organization Gênero e Número. But beyond this particular show, what kinds of topics are you trying to cover? Is any kind of journalistic report included, or do you have a sort of editorial line?

Algarra: In our first exhibition in El Salvador, we didn’t have any kind of specific topic in mind. The only guideline was that the journalistic report be an investigation based on data, statistics, and numbers that reveal realities in various Latin American countries. In that show, we sought to create a dialogue between different Central American countries about what is going on in the region, as there are a lot of similar issues that cannot be approached in isolation. Immigration, the structural violence in the Northern Triangle, corruption, drug trafficking… Those issues don’t affect just one country, but rather have a broader scope.

That first exhibition then led us to incorporate pieces not just from Central America but also from Latin American more broadly.

Artememoria: In other words, the project is organized along the methodology of collaboration between journalists and artists, not through a particular topic.

Algarra: I think you take something away from the work when you pressure people to focus on a specific topic. One of the best things about working with artists is the creative dimension of things, the different way in which artists look at reality. When you plan projects that curb that free expression and the power for people to tell the stories they really want to tell, you lose something.

Artememoria: What exactly does art add to journalism? How does art communicate the witnessing of real events?

Algarra: I think that art adds something very material and physical. It isn’t just numbers. It’s personal. It makes you feel a situation and see its dimensionality. It’s not the same thing to say that 1,247 minors were sexually assaulted in one year in El Salvador. That kind of statistic goes way over your head. Instead of 1,247 I could have said 3,000 or 4,000,000. You can’t visualize it.

But then, you see a full wall lined with colorful paper dresses, and that inspires emotion. You get the sense of children and their games. People go up to the wall saying, “look at this! It’s so nice.” And then, when tell them that each of these dresses represents a child who was raped, that’s when people feel shocked. To see that number of dresses in a physical space gives a face to each child, in a way. It’s no longer a statistic, but a story. I think that’s what art can do.

Art has always served to communicate. In fact, artwork is often used as historical record. What journalism adds, though, is a specific, ethical approach to information. Artists can take on a very subjective lens, a personal perspective, and a singular perspective on an issue. Committed journalists are obligated to take a much broader view and search for honest information in everything that is being told. That happens when journalists seek out the perspectives that conflict with their view of reality. So, because of that, joining art and journalism is really special.

Artememoria: Why are you personally interested in that combination?

Algarra: For me, I think it’s important to reach new audiences. People need to know about what’s happening. And sometimes, they don’t want to see it through journalism, because an article is really long or because they don’t read the news since it’s filled with depressing stories. That’s true, it’s depressing, but people need to know. Closing yourself off in a bubble is not an option. I want to burst bubbles. And I think this exhibition is a way to do exactly that.

I also am interested in traveling with these stories. I’m here in Rio right now, talking about what’s going on in Guatemala. Because of that, people here might find out about what’s going on in El Salvador. With certain pieces, people ask about what it’s like there or why certain things are going on. I think it’s so important that people leave here talking about what happens in El Salvador and how that related to what’s going on in Rio.

Artememoria: I’m interested in the idea of the space of the exhibition. Right now, we’re at the Parque das Ruinas in Rio, which is a free space often frequented by tourists. A lot of people might come here and encounter the exhibition without looking for it. Do you have a method for choosing the spaces for the art? What are your priorities for that?

Algarra: Most of the spaces are the ones that give us a chance to display the show. But ideally, they are spaces that break away from the typical areas related to journalism. Then, I also invite journalists to the events. Journalists should also know about cultural spaces.

Artememoria: Do you have a favorite piece in this show? Perhaps something that captures what you’ve witnessed firsthand as a journalist?

Algarra: I would say that the piece based on the report “El Salvador es un Paraíso para Menores” (El Salvador, A Children’s Paradise), published by El Faro, is my favorite. It was such an important piece of journalism.

The investigation brought together all of the testimonies of sexual assault against minors from one year. Just the testimonies, which is just the tip of the iceberg of sexual violence against minors in El Salvador. The journalists also interviewed judges, since only 10% of the accusations resulted in a prison sentence. Many judges justified the low number of conviction by saying that the relationships are based on love. They don’t convict the assailant who is 10 or 20 years older than the victim because he has promised to care for the girl, love her, marry her. They say it isn’t a judges role to get in the way of love.

Mainstream media picked up the story, and people have kept talking about the issue since. Recently, child marriage was banned in El Salvador.

The way Andrea Burgos and Carla Asencio visualize the story is amazing. I love to stand near it and watch viewers react when they see the piece for the first time, and then when the figure out what it represents. It’s a piece that puts you face to face with reality.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Cristina Algarra is a Spanish journalist currently living in El Salvador. She is the coordinator of the El Foro Centroamericano de Periodismo (ForoCAP), an international network of journalists and specialists in El Salvador. Founded in 2010, ForoCAP aims to foster journalism in Central America with a focus on transparency. ForoCAP is associated with the publication El Faro, one of the first online publications in El Salvador. El Faro reports on human rights violations through in-depth investigative articles with creative approaches to nonfiction storytelling.