about Only Good for Crying
Only Good for Crying, 2025
Art and Design: Eliana Pérez.
22” x 11” x 1¾” Hand bound, laser-engraved cast acrylic panels, 9 pages. Accompanied by a copy of the book’s text, including a braille transcription. All text engraved in Atkinson Hyperlegible font. Can be displayed with the included LED light strip.
Only Good for Crying is the third book in Eliana’s series exploring the intractable challenges facing Colombia, her native country. It records the brutal tactics used by the militarized Colombian police forces in suppressing peaceful citizen protests. In the spring of 2021, the ESMAD (Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squad) used “less-lethal” weapons to purposefully inflict debilitating eye injuries on more than one hundred peaceful protestors, often resulting in the complete loss of sight in their injured eyes. The title, Only Good for Crying, is taken from a doctor’s frank assessment of one victim’s eye. Her gruesome injury was the result of a shotgun blast of “less-lethal” plastic birdshot.
The clear acrylic pages are laser-engraved with drawings and text. Sitting on a table, Only Good for Crying resembles a block of ice. The transparency invites the viewer to look deep into the book, with the ability to see multiple pages and layers at the same time. Refracted light reveals cavities trapped within the block, like bubbles rising in a frozen pond. These empty spots appear where letters in the text used to be, hollowed out violently, like bullet holes where eyes used to be. On one side of the book, a dimensional drawing comprises nine layers, each set at a different depth, simultaneously evoking elements ranging in scale from microscopic (nerves and capillaries) to cosmic (galaxies and the universe itself). On the other side, a volumetric cloud of unreadable text collapses in upon itself, suggesting the confusion and difficulty with which the victims navigate the world after their injuries, now challenged with previously simple tasks like reading text. When the page is turned, the text becomes readable, at the same time peeling a layer away from the volumetric drawing. The more pages that are turned, the more elements disappear, stripping away complexity, nuance, and detail, in the same way that the victims are robbed of their ability to fully experience the visual world.
Only Good for Crying text
In many places, the police are a civilian force, ostensibly trained to protect the public. The cops in Colombia are different. They’re under the command of the military, stocked with men trained for combat against narcotraffickers and well-armed criminal groups. The ESMAD (Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios / Mobile Anti-disturbance Squad) is the Colombian police version of a SWAT team, with armored suits and “less-lethal” weapons to use against their fellow citizens.
The ESMAD’s mission is not the stated one of settling unrest and bringing order. The true objective of the ESMAD is to engender fear of their organization in the mind of the public and thoroughly disincentivize participation in civil disobedience or protest. That was true in the spring of 2021 when they were sent to suppress protests in cities around Colombia. Within four weeks there would be dozens of civilians dead, hundreds missing and thousands of reports of police abuse.
As injury and abuse reports ballooned, an unusually high incidence of eye trauma became evident. The ESMAD were deliberately targeting the heads, faces and eyes of civilians at close range with their “non-lethal” weapons: shotguns firing metal and plastic birdshot, and tear-gas grenade launchers. The ESMAD understood that attacking a delicate, unprotected organ was the best way to injure their assigned enemies. During the month of May, over 100 protestors suffered grave eye injuries, leaving the victims permanently disfigured, disabled and blinded.
The mostly young victims face a lifetime of struggles ahead of them; every task is more difficult with limited vision. But the consequences of state-directed violence extend far beyond the initial physical harm.
The government and police propaganda is surprisingly effective at branding protestors as criminals, and this stigma follows them as they seek medical treatment and legal recourse, often resulting in denials for treatment or substandard care and representation. When victims take legal action against abusive police, they and their families often receive threatening calls, messages, and visits; some victims who have the resources have fled the country out of concern for their safety.
Victims suffer lasting psychological trauma. Fear of authority and a reluctance to contact police or government agencies for help is common. They experience on-going issues with self-esteem including insecurity about their disfigured appearance, and a loss of confidence in their abilities to perform competently at work or school.
The economic damage to the victims and society is also very real. These injuries will require a lifetime of costly treatment and care, and the earning potential of the injured is significantly curtailed.
Deliberately targeting the eyes of protestors by authoritarian police forces is not unique to Colombia, and has precedents in uprisings elsewhere in recent history.