made for abuse
by Jenn Tyburczy and Mike Werckle

Project consists of a white, blonde paper maché piñata stuffed with candy and toys and a piñata fetus.

Like the other project, this is a “found” object, and one that brings the audience back to childhood. While hitting the piñata we played a popular Mexican song, Doña Blanca (Mrs. White). This mood of innocence creates a friction with what we´re actually hitting, its connection to the words of the song and what comes out of the piñata.

The piñata itself visually dances on dangerous. The artificiality of the woman represented coupled with the typical piñata falsity is startling. We chose a white doll with blonde hair, a pink dress and large breasts. As a piñata, she is literally made for abuse. She provokes questions of appropriating another culture´s festive traditions for our own pleasure while American society often destroys or banishes important cultural traditions that don´t serve its pleasure or are viewed as dangers to society.

This piñata was bought on Cesar Chavez in Austin, Texas where most of the clientele is Latino/a. Why would they buy a very white, very fake, pink-dressed, boob-jobbed prom queen? Why did the store make them in the first place? What pleasure did they think they were giving their audience? What do people usually fill her with?

What seems so special about this doll is that she can be immediately associated with violence from the way she´s designed and the way she looks. Do you want to hit her? Do you want to see her crumble?

An important question for us was what to fill her with. We thought of the bloody fetus, not to express a political opinion, but for shock value. We thought there would be a lot of anticipation to discover what we put inside her. The image of a bloody fetus piñata, and the confetti and candy falling around it was an image that appealed to us. Also, we liked the idea of people falling over themselves for the candy, and the fetus as a secondary visual element or vice versa. The dead fetus can be seen as a metaphor for failure or the end of some great potential or something destined to die, end or pass away.

The participants were blindfolded and dizzy as they engaged in the act of hitting the piñata. Coupled with the blindfold is the idea of recycling a quotidian object, which in the piñata´s case is not an everyday object, but one used for “special” occasions, traditionally birthdays and Christmas.

The mixing together of all these elements creates a fiction of myths being rubbed together, that seemed jarring to our ears and our sense of the things taken separately. The main and most general point being that this is not benign.

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