Teresa Margolles: Sobre la sangre

Teresa Margolles
Sobre la sangre
curated by Francesca Guerisoli and Angel Moya Garcia

Teresa Margolles (born Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico, 1963–lives and works in Madrid) is a visual artist, who examines the causes and social consequences of death, destruction and civil war in Mexico. The artist has developed a personal language like an intradiegetic narrator, a witness for the silent subjects and the victims defined as “collateral damage," often unnamed and therefore treated only as a number. Subtle and seductive, her works initially offer a pleasant aesthetic experience, which soon, however, becomes something else.

The exhibition Sobre la sangre is part of this context of gender violence and comprises the touring installation Frazada (La Sombra), the large canvas that lends its title to the exhibition Wila Patjharu / Sobre la sangre and the new site-specific installation Testimone. In its complexity and articulation, the exhibition entirely transforms the architecture of the exhibition space at Scompiglio, altering the physical and perceptual characteristics, transporting the visitor to a dark and labyrinthine environment that totally envelopes them.

The starting point is the itinerant installation Frazada (La Sombra) (2016), created for the Bolivian Biennale in 2016, which will travel around the squares of Lucca on its opening day and will subsequently be set up in the outside spaces of the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio. The installation is made of a sheet mounted on a 1.9m high metal structure usually used for market stalls. The sheet was salvaged from the morgue at La Paz and it is soaked with the blood of a female victim of femicide, causing discomfort to anyone who uses its shade to get relief from the heat on sunny days, as they only gradually become aware of the strong odour of blood emanating from it.

The heart of the show, in the exhibition space, is the large canvas Wila Patjharu / Sobre la sangre (2017), in this case, saturated with the blood of ten femicide victims of La Paz and subsequently embroidered by local artisans using traditional decorative technics of Bolivian folk dance costumes. It appears much like the way that folklore and tradition often succeed in covering, concealing and transforming a daily tragic realty into ornament. Floral motifs and caporals embellished with sequins, beads and bright-coloured threads, line a synaesthetic, 25-metre pathway, along which the public, enveloped in semi-darkness, is guided in a walk of confrontation with their own convictions and ethical and aesthetic securities to the sound of their own footsteps.

These footsteps lead to the third installation in the exhibition, titled Testimone (2017), and realized specifically for this show. The environment is configured like a perimeter corridor in semi-darkness, in which are arranged audio traces and two photographs that depict Carla and La Gata, two transsexual prostitutes who died prematurely in the Mexican city, Ciudad Juárez. The audio recordings revolve around refusal and social reluctance, experiences and broken dreams. The former, killed at age 67 in 2015 and the latter at 32 in 2016, paid with their lives for the gender hatred borne by not only their killers, but also the institutions. Being transsexual, prostitutes and poor, makes these deaths that do not count. As Judith Butler says in her essay, “Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence”: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, what makes for a grievable life?”

Teresa Margolles (born 1963 in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico) has exhibited in numerous museums, institutions and international foundations. Among the major exhibitions: Dallas Biennial, 2017; Biennial of Bolivia, 2016; Neuberger Museum of Art, Acquisto, NY, USA, 2015; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, 2014; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, 2014; Principe Claus Fund, Amsterdam, 2012; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Città del Messico, 2012; Museo de Arte Moderno, Città del Messico, 2011; Museion, Bolzano, 2011; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 2010; the Venice Biennale, Mexican Pavilion, Venice, 2009.