Safia a Muqdisho

Antoni Miró created this as part of the “Mani-Festa” series. The work portrays the pain of a mother cradling a dead baby in her arms. She grieves, sitting on the ruins and debris of Mogadishu Cathedral. Hers is a universal pain that would overwhelm any mother, but she is also affected by the pain of poverty and war, which are common in failed states such as Somalia, racked by Civil War for almost thirty years.

In many cases, it is the gaze of the figures in a painting that structures the composition of the scene. This is one of those cases: the melancholy and sadness lower the woman’s gaze, down and to the side, creating a clear diagonal tension ordering the scene. Yet we know that hers is the blank gaze of someone lost in thought.

The protagonist’s gesture is one of introspection. Yet, that of the viewer towards the picture cannot be so, for it evidences a lot of suffering. In the process of aesthetic appreciation of the work, one must acknowledge the pain, and the only way out is through empathy. War always treats people with great cruelty, even more so when scarcity is extreme. The artist’s gaze at the victim is solidary, bearing out Contreras’ statement four decades earlier that “Humanity cannot be alien to humans”.

There is no longer any need to establish a relationship between the sign and the deed it refers to, as Aguilera Cerni suggested in the nineteen seventies: faithfulness to the facts makes the message of a work easily accessible. One needs to delve into the grounds for denunciation to paint the work and immortalise the situation in a way that the media cannot do. This is what Cerdán Tato meant when he alluded to “pictorial permanence”. In connection with another stage in Miró’s artistic career, José María Iglesias noted that the artist “pictorially enriches an image without denaturing it or hiding its origin, which is also the reference, something that makes the work’s purpose more authentic”.

Santiago Pastor Vila