Coffin Conversations - by dementia

Mexico's gruesome drug war and its hundreds of executions a year are the inspiration for an art exhibit of red-splattered blankets meant to represent shrouds used by hitmen to dispose of their victims.

Rosa Maria Robles has laid tattered blankets, some of them with bits of plastic tape stuck to them, on floors in a museum in Sinaloa, a rural northern state that has long been a hotbed of drug smuggling and gangland murder.

Organized criminals in Mexico often cover the corpses of their victims, hands taped together and shot in the head, with a blanket before dumping them on quiet roads or abandoning them in the trunk of a car.


Robles exhibit, called the "Red Carpet" and open since May, had included blankets from actual crimes, complete with real blood, museum curator Rosa Maria Hass told Reuters.

"We decided to hand them over to the attorney general's office for investigation," Hass said, adding the artist has refused to say where she got them.

Evening news programs in Mexico regularly show images of forensic investigators photographing bodies draped in bloodied covers and the verb "to blanket" has taken on new meaning.

Another part of Robles' exhibition draws attention to beheadings, increasingly used by drug gangs to terrorize rival groups and even the army.

The government has sent the army to hotspots across Mexico to dismantle smuggling cartels battling for lucrative territory along the U.S. border, but there are few signs of improvement.

An artist offered guests meatballs cooked in his own body fat when he hosted a dinner party recently.

Marco Evaristti shocked his friends when he explained that he had used fat extracted from a recent liposuction procedure to cook their meal.

An art teacher who moonlighted as a 'butt-printing artist' has been fired from his school.

Stephen Murmer had initially been suspended from work after a YouTube video of him appearing – in disguise – on a TV show, demonstrating how he used his buttocks for painting, was circulated amongst pupils at the school.

I projected photographs of mutilated and dead Iraqis on American houses, supermarkets, churches, and parking lots. I was thinking of this new generation of kids who will be traumatized for life by growing up during wartime. It was a desperate gesture: my personal protest for the lack of interest for the non-american victims.