Bienal de Pontevedra

This installation is dedicated to the victims of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when the Government exterminated 70% of the Tutsi population, with more than 500,000 deaths. During those 100 days, many women were raped and deliberately infected with HIV as part of a strategy to ensure their death and that of their offspring. In this piece, Paloma Navares uses strips of poppy flowers hanging next to fragments of bodies and figures of girls and boys. The poppy, which symbolises the memory of war victims since the First World War, here becomes a symbol of violence and suffering. With this work, Navares wants to denounce the situation of women and children during the genocide, using the flower as a form of protest against war.