On September 26 , 2014 , the small town of Iguala , Mexico made national headlines when 43 college students were brutally abducted and slain . According to a '' Time Magazine '' article , “ corrupt police and cartel thugs in the town of Iguala went on a killing spree . ” Although she did n’t know any of these victims of violence personally , Fernández tackled this tragedy through an installation entitled '' Erasure '' . The installation includes paintings , sculpture , text , as well as a performance . A video and photographs from the performance where Fernández paints the entirety of a room black and proceeds to paint herself black until nothing but her piercing green eyes are visible . In a 2017 interview for the Denver Art Museum , Fernández speaks about '' Erasure '' and the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping explaining , “ T hrough this absence of my identity , I was kind of wanting people to question who are these students ? Who are these 43 individuals ? ” In the exhibit '' Foreign Bodies '' , Fernández takes on women ’s rights within her own culture . During her Ted Talk , Fernández spoke of traveling to the Yucatan Peninsula where a tour guide explained that a sinkhole , also known as a cenote , with beautiful blue water was actually a mass grave for girls that were sacrificed as offerings to the Gods . An article was written about a team of archaeologists that went to the Yucatan Peninsula discovered evidence that the human sacrifice Fernández learned of was more than a myth about the Mayan culture . The October 2003 issue of '' National Geographic '' explains , “ N ewly discovered skeletons have yield evidence of sacred funerary rites and human sacrifice . ” Shaken by this , Fernández returned to the cenote in Mexico in 2012 . This time she rented a white stallion named Tequila and outfitted in stilettos and a black dress , she entered the cenote on horseback attempting to conquer nature instead of being sacrificed in it . In a 2014 interview with '' SF Art Enthusiast '' , Fernández illuminates , “ I went to a sink hole in Mexico where thousands of virgins had been drowned as sacrificial offerings to the gods . I went into the sink hole and attempted to ride a wild white stallion , as a way to reclaim or change the history of that site . ” '' Borrando la Frontera '' or '' Erasing the Border '' is Fernández ’s most renowned performance . It is possibly also the most personal . She used shade of sky blue paint to give the illusion of camouflaging a section of the barrier at the Mexico-United States Border in San Diego into the sky and surrounding ocean . It was the same border that she crossed as a child to come to emigrate from Mexico to the United States with her family . She did this for the first time in 2011 after learning about the way undocumented people were suffering . In a Hyperallergic article dated November 2 , 2015 , Fernández enlightened , “ As immigration becomes more and more of an apparent reality with deeper problems , and intimate stories of despair and frustration get revealed , the general public is more open to listen and talk about it . And art is doing just this , opening a platform to address these issues in new ways , being open , honest , but also imaginative . ” '' Borrando la Frontera '' started off as an understated performance piece with photo and video documentation and transformed when she was invited by Arizona State University to continue the project at the US-Mexico border in Nogales
2014 Iguala mass kidnapping
2014 Iguala mass kidnapping
Ana Teresa Fernández