I'D SETTLE FOR BEING ABLE TO SLEEP

The contemporary artistic collective Mondongo satirizes the dichotomous construction that contrasts the purity and sanity of Disney with Latin American poverty. The work I´d settle for being able to sleep presents Snow White, the purest of the realm, immersed in a mud made of trash and the type of bricks and corrugated metal found in Argentina’s villas miseria (slums). The minuteness and detail invite a closer look that reveals an even more sordid sublevel. A small skull displays a strand of feces on its forehead; a group of pharmaceutical pills forms the broken beads of a tiara. The work makes a direct allusion to the iconic scene in the Disney film where the dwarfs, overwhelmed by grief, watch over Snow White. But instead of being inside a gold and glass casket, Mondongo has placed her upright in a display case like Zoltar, the sinister automaton fortune teller that, for a few coins, predicts your fate at the low-budget amusement parks in the United States. That Snow White was remote, transcendent, and radiant; this one shows the tension of burgeoning disgust in the curl of her upper lip and in the shift toward purple that tightens her face: her closed eyes do not rest, they reject; her hair, compact like a helmet, here becomes a nest of greasy strands; her head rests on a pillow made not of flowers, but of sausages, blood sausages, and other abject cured meats; instead of a bouquet of flowers, Snow White has a dead mother rabbit on her chest, from whose womb various bloated fetuses fall out like excretions.

—Nieves Cereijido, 2017