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Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About?

By Cuauhtémoc Medina

According to the press, 2008 was the year when more bullets have been fired in Mexico’s recent history. That same year, more than 5.000 people were killed due to violent clashes and executions among criminal gangs, and in operations of the security forces, whereas approximately 2.800 died in similar circumstances in 2007. Beyond the fact that the statistics of casualties have climbed to war zone levels, the carnage provokes a long lasting trauma for families and communities.

Due to the recent upsurge of violence, Teresa Margolles (* 1963 Culiacán, México), that for almost two decades has concentrated in the exploration of the artistic possibilities of human remains, the memory of the loss provoked by violent death and the institutions that manage human corpses, has acquired an even greater poignancy. Her radical approach to the "life of the corpse"as part of the SEMEFO collective in the 1990s, that led her to develop a number of evanescent and abstracted methods to infuse with body substances the post minimalist aesthetics of global contemporary art, has recently undergone a new turn to work from the material traces of killings in the streets and the associated verbal production taken from execution notes, police reports and press accounts of violence. This is an artist who has left the morgue where she originally located her studio, to absorb the pervasive extension of death into the social body and propose an unsettling interaction of contemporary aesthetics and debased materiality.

Margolles’s exploration of the contemporary necropolis involves the transmogrification of the strategies of urban research of the modern flaneur. The artists and her collaborators explore the urban territory, in search of minute material traces and residues of the assassinations. Through different methods (the soaking of pieces of cloth with mud or blood in the scene of an execution, the collection of the minute fragments of windshield glass after a shooting, or the visual and aural recording of a landscape symbolically and emotionally charged by the memory of death) Margolles harvests the formless leftover of thousands of lives, mapping a territory affected by the accumulation of corpses.

At Venice, she has performed an overall intervention based on discrete, and sometimes almost immaterial, continuous actions taking place in a historically overcharged location. The substances of anger, loss and social waste, are transferred (or better said, smuggled) into a Sixteenth Century Venetian Palace, cannibalizing the traces of decay and history of the building. More than a presentation of objects or images, Margolles exposes her audience to the ghostly and abject sacrality of fluids and traces: jewels made with fragments of windshield glass, murderous aphorisms embroidered in gold on bold, sound recordings of the landscape of death, compose a space of reflection, bodily intimation and anxiety.

In a time where borders are no more able to contain the plague, when politics are mobilized by the ideological uses of fear, and where global capital is accompanied by a whole epidemic of violence, What else could we talk about? would want to suggest the need to politicize discontent and disgust, rather than falling prey of the strategies of a new world order erected over the ruins of the perpetual wars and infinite crusades of the powers to be.

Cuauhtémoc Medina

* 1965 Mexico City; lives there. Curator, art critic, researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

© Text published by the organizers as press material

Pavilion of Mexico 2009

Cuauhtémoc Medina
is the curator of the exhibition at the Mexican pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2009

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