Julieta Gil and her work on the pints on the Angel: "Monuments have to represent us as a society"

The Mexican Julieta Gil, winner of the Lumen 2019 Prize for Art and Technology for her work

(Our Victory), recreates the Independence column, popularly known as the Angel of Independence, through photogrammetry.

In the work you can see the feminist graffiti with which the national symbol was intervened in August 2019 as a protest against femicides in the country. 

The emblematic monument was full of slogans against sexist violence.

The words "México Feminicida", on the centenary stone and marble of the Angel, generated a strong controversy and discussion about the meaning of the monuments and the need for society to express its discontent through them.

Juieta Gil decided to use thousands of images for her work that recreated in 3D how the monument was left, since immediately after the protests took place, the Government of Mexico City chose to fence the place and covered a large part of the paintings made by the women.

"Everything is simulated on the computer, the final image I created is a render. The same technique that is created in architecture to show construction models", he points out.

Trained in Los Angeles (California), Julieta Gil has been working for five years on the symbolism that exists between monuments and societies.

"I was trying to imagine the role of institutions and monuments in our time and if we have to reinterpret them, reimagine them", Gil points out.

She says that her work is a tribute to the collective effort and struggle of organized women in Mexico.

"His constant struggle to end the violence managed to resignify this monument", hence the collective name of the work.

It is interesting to note that for Julieta Gil her interpretation of the Angel of Independence focuses on the base of the statue and not on the winged Victory that crowns the column.

As the base was the only thing intervened by the protesters, Gil's work focuses on it and modifies the meaning of such an emblematic place in the country's capital.

"We have to change our way of understanding monuments because they are public works that have to represent us as a society. Before being taken, the Angel did not represent us and now it is a monument that does represent me and represents what is happening in the streets." , says the artist.

Gil's recognition in the United Kingdom comes at a time when the feminist protest in Mexico is being questioned and attempted to criminalize and delegitimize, while the women's movement is reprimanded for protesting and damaging monuments of national interest.

"The project aims to create a digital archive of the monument in its state of occupation by civil society. Hours after the protest, government censorship prevented people from seeing the Angel of Independence by enclosing it and immediately working on its restoration, thus erasing all the claims against violence that women hung all over the monument, "said the award jury.

"This award gives more strength and validates the claims of the feminist movement in Mexico. It allows the words and actions of protest to remain in our collective memory," explains

Julieta Gil.

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