Teresa Margolles What else? catalogue

Teresa Margolles

WHAT ELSE COULD WE TALK ABOUT?

TERESA MARGOLLES

Work & Images ©Teresa Margolles Editor Cuauhtémoc Medina Texts © Cuauhtémoc Medina, Taiyana Pimentel, Teresa Margolles, Elmer Mendoza, Ernesto Diazmartínez, Antonio Escohotado & Mariana Botey Translation Michael Parker & Lorna Scott Fox Photography Teresa Margolles Luis Cárcamo Editorial design Cristina Paoli: S consultores en diseño S.C. Copy editing María Bostock Publication coordinator María Bostock Publication coordinator RM Isabel Garcés Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes Reforma y Campo Marte s/n Col. Chapultepec Morales Polanco Del. Miguel Hidalgo 11560, México D.F., México © 2009 RM Verlag, S.L. c/ Loreto, 13-15 Local B 08029, Barcelona, España info@editorialrm.com www.editorialrm.com © 2009 Editorial RM, S.A de C.V Río Pánuco 141. Col. Cuauhtémoc.

C.P. 06500, México D.F., México ISBN 978-84-92480-66-1 Legal Deposit: M-23.955-2009 Printed in Artes Gráficas Palermo, S.L. Av. de la Técnica 7. 28522 Rivas Vaciamadrid.

Madrid, España. May 2009 All rights reserved

Cuauhtémoc Medina, Editor Taiyana Pimentel Ernesto Diezmartínez Guzmán Elmer Mendoza Antonio Escohotado Mariana Botey

TERESA MARGOLLES

WHAT ELSE COULD WE TALK ABOUT?

INDEX

Credits....................................................................................................................................................

Presentations...........................................................................................................................................

Cuauhtémoc Medina, Materialist Spectrality..............................................................................................

Mexican Pavilion, 53th. International Art Exhibition-La Biennale di Venezia..................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Table........................................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Flag........................................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Cleaning..................................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Narcomessages..........................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Score Settling............................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Sounds of Death.......................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Recovered Blood........................................................................................

Extramural actions..............................................................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Embassy........................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Groundwork for Recovered Blood.......................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Sounds of Death’s preparation............................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Jewels Promanade......................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Cards to cut up cocaine......................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Embroidery....................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Public intervention with Flag...............................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Submerged Flag...............................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Floating Flag..................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Drained.........................................................................................

What Else Could We Talk About? Dragged Flag..................................................................................

Taiyana Pimientel, Cuauhtémoc Medina y Teresa Margolles, Conversation.................................................

Ernesto Diezmartínez Guzmán, We Ate Something That Went Down Wrong.................................................

Elmer Mendoza, Every Time I See A Map Of Mexico I Feel Like Painting It Black........................................

Antonio Escohotado,The Pharmacological Crusade:Twenty Years Later..........................................................

Mariana Botey, Toward A Critique Of Sacrificial Reason: Necropolitics And Radical Aesthetics In Mexico............

Curriculum............................................................................................................................................

Selected Bibliography..............................................................................................................................

...................................................................................................................................................... 006 ...................................................................................................................................................... 009

...................................................................................................................................................... 015

...................................................................................................................................................... 033 ...................................................................................................................................................... 034 ...................................................................................................................................................... 038 ...................................................................................................................................................... 042 ...................................................................................................................................................... 048 ...................................................................................................................................................... 050 ...................................................................................................................................................... 052 ...................................................................................................................................................... 054

...................................................................................................................................................... 059 ...................................................................................................................................... 060 ...................................................................................................................................... 062 ...................................................................................................................................... 064 ...................................................................................................................................................... 066 ...................................................................................................................................... 068 ...................................................................................................................................... 070 ...................................................................................................................................... 072 ...................................................................................................................................... 073 ...................................................................................................................................... 074 ...................................................................................................................................... 076 ...................................................................................................................................... 078

...................................................................................................................................................... 083 ...................................................................................................................................................... 101 ...................................................................................................................................................... 109 ...................................................................................................................................................... 115 ...................................................................................................................................................... 131

...................................................................................................................................................... 144 ...................................................................................................................................................... 152

crEditS

Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes Consuelo Sáizar President Fernando Serrano Migallón Cultural and Art Office Jaime Francisco Hernández Martínez Executive Secretary Martha González Rios International Affairs Advisor

Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes Teresa Vicencio Álvarez General Director Ricardo Calderón Figueroa General Vice Director of Fine Arts Alejandro Villaseñor Valerio Administration General Vice Director Magdalena Zavala Bonachea National Coordination of Visual Arts Paloma Ruiz Rodríguez Advertising and Public Relations Office

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo, A. C.

José Narro Robles Rector

Aimée Servitje Executive Director

Sergio M. Alcocer Martínez de Castro General Secretary

María Bostock Coordinator

Juan José Pérez Castañeda Administration Secretary

Clara Rodríguez Communication and Development

Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez Institutional Development Secretary

Magda Carranza de Akle President

Ramiro Jesús Sandoval Community Services Secretary

Board Javier Arredondo, Ery Camara, Bertha Cea, Magda Carranza de Akle, Vanesa Fernández, Enrique Guerrero, Boris Hirmas, Ana Elena Mallet, Ramiro Martínez, Nina Menocal, Abaseh Mirvali, Mariana Munguía, Patricia Ortiz Monasterio, Paloma Porraz, Haydée Rovirosa, Osvaldo Sánchez, Patricia Sloane, Viviana Kuri y Roberto Servitje.

Luis Raúl González Pérez General Lawyer Cultural Promotion Coordination Mtro. Sealtiel Alatriste y Lozano Coordinador Julieta Giménez Cacho García Technical Secretary of Programming and International Affairs

Sponsors Jocelyn Arellano, Carlos Dell’Acqua, Patricia Bessudo, Barbara Braniff, Gaby Cámara, Alonso de Garay Montero, José Pinto, Ángeles Rion, Teresa Serrano, Boris Hirmas, Mariana Munguía y Magda Carranza de Akle. www.pac.org.mx

mexican pavilion. 53 biennale di venezia

Organization Committee

Exhibition Credits

Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes

Artist Teresa Margolles

Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura

Artist’s Production Staff

Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo A.C. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México With the additional sponsorSHIP of Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, Suiza Instituto Sinaloense de Cultura Teofilo Cohen Abadi And the support of Galería Salvador Díaz, Madrid, España ILLUMEUROPE s.r.l. Italia MACROLUX s.r.l. Italia Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Art Department Production Institutions México: Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo A.C. Italia: ASSOCIAZIONE MEXICAN PAVILION, Venecia Curatorial Committee Ramiro Martínez Guillermo Santamarina Itala Schmelz

Production Manager Antonio de la Rosa, ASOCIACIÓN CULTURAL PARA LA LEY Y EL ORDEN Assistant Cynthia Krell Contributors Rafael Burillo, Ana Citlali Cruz, José Antonio Dávila Buitrón, Jose Alfredo Elias Dabdub, Julia García Mora, Oscar Gardea, Alpha Hernandez, Gabriel Horner, Fritizia Irizar, Carlos López, Ismael Peñuelas, Alex Parra, Ana Roldan y Oscar Sánchez.

Curator Cuauhtémoc Medina Assistant curator Jessica S. M. Hernández Support curatorial Helena Chávez MacGregor (MUAC, UNAM) Graphic Design Cristina Paoli, Eduardo Sánchez y Sofia Broid: S consultores en diseño S.C. Production Mexican Pavilion in Venice, Italy Production Manager Gastón Ramírez Feltrín Assistants Griselda Ramírez y Emanuele Basso Production Staff Antonio Zordan, Massimo Cogo, Alessandro Laita, Enrico De Napoli y Francisco Rojas Miramontes.

Architects VERLATO+ZORDAN architetti associati Arch. Dino Verlato y Arch. Michele Zordan Security Geom. Cassandro Davide Sound design and audio devices Gideon May. Montreal, Canadá.

Legal Advisor SINERGO s.r.l.

Insurance INA-ASSITALIA DEL SASSO ASSICURAZIONI s.r.l.

Materials and Suppliers ILLUMEUROPE s.r.l. Dal Maso Fabio, Adriano Azzalini MACROLUX s.r.l. Bettiol Alessandro, Bettiol Francesco TESSUTI Chiarastella Cattana TAPEZZERIE Giusto Eros FERRAMENTA BATTISTIN, Battistin Marco.

FALEGNAMERIA SALVAGNO, Salvagno Alessandro SANIPUL S.R.L., Lovo Mauro, Battistella Cinzia CABI s.r.l. Biolo Giuseppe Press Office in Italy Simona Pezzano Custodians Ana Laura Pascal, Annabianca Traversa, Chiara di Stefano, Eva Gómez Espinosa de los Monteros, Francesca Endrighetti, Francisco Rojas Miramontes, Gabriela Carpizo, Luca Volpin, Marianna Anoardi, Enrico De Napoli y Marta Battistella.

Photographic documentation Luca Vascon Venue Palazzo Rota Ivancich, Venecia, Italia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The artist, the curator and PAC would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for the help provided to make this project possible: Luis Astorga, Leobardo Alvarado, Francis Alÿs, Gina Arizpe, Paul Avalos, Gracia Chávez, Teresa Franco, Mario Canal, Luz Cárcamo, Malena Clary, Patricio Clary, Leticia Clouthier, Verónica Conchado, Agustín Coppel, Jose Luis Corazón, Merce Corvera, Graciela de la Torre, Silvie de Pauw, Wilibaldo Delgadillo, Jose Delgado, Elizabeth Diaz, Carolina Díaz, Rafael Diaz, Pamela Echeverría, Mireya Escalante, Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, Alberto Fierro Garza, Martin Fokken, Elisa Frasinetti, Claudia Friedlli, Gloria García, Oscar García, Mtro. Fausto Gómez Tuena, Sergio González Rodríguez, Sabine Guldenfub, Lic. Sergio Jacobo Gutiérrez, Carlos Jiménez, Peter Kilchmann, Doña Irina Ivancich Marchesi, Danna Levin, Carlos Lopez, Eduardo Lopez Palacio, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sabina Malacon, Jesús Malverde, Jose Martin Margolles, Jose Margolles Sierra, Margarita Margolles, Pilar Margolles, Rocio Margolles, Ramon Mateo, Manuel Mathar, Gemma Melgar, Familia Núñez, Marta Pacheco, Silvie Pawa, Alejandra Peña, Anibal Peñuelas, Rodrigo Peñuelas, Mercedes Pico Coña, Taiyana Pimentel, Guillermo R. Gudiño, Dolores Repetto, Francisco Rojas Miramontes, Renato Sales, Aldo Sánchez, Carlos Sandoval, Roberto Servitje, Magdalena Sierra, Juan Show, Hartwig Snack, Jimis Tatoo, Geom. Elvio Terrin, Sergio Vela, el Costrita, el Piwi, the faithful “Fronchi,” photographers Brito, The Art Palace Madrid, Art Department (Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez), Factory Kusthalle Krems, UNAM Aesthetics Investigation Institute (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), El Noroeste Newspaper, Pacto para la Cultura Ciudad Juárez, El Mercadito of Culiacán Jewelers, Colectivo Tercerunquinto, Grupo Garrobos, Artepistilos Madrid, Cantina El Paraíso de Ciudad Juárez, Culiacán’s Restaurant Bar Don Quijote, Rock Palace Madrid, Culiacan’s Rio Mocorito Street, people of Ecatepec, Culiacán and Ciudad Juárez cities, the volunteers for the different actions, and the collegues who responded professionally to our selection.

The presence of Mexico in the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennial is of relevant significance: this forum opens the opportunity to engage in an international contemporary art dialogue, where to consider our artists and establish starting points of comparison and differentiation of the aesthetic proposals.

The importance of biennials and of our participation in them was evident in 2007, when the Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer presented an exhibition of his work at the Palazzo Van Axel, representing Mexico after decades of absence in the Venice Biennial.

In this venue, Mexico has again the opportunity of participating in this artistic exchange with the work of Teresa Margolles, Sinaloan artist who has given to the Palazzo Rota Ivancich along with Cuauhtémoc Medina —curator of the exhibition— an aesthetic solution that integrates the execution of the project in a Venetian palace subject to stringent requirements for preservation.

Margoles’s strategy for the 53rd edition of the Venice Biennial consists in undertaking several actions that give the appearance of a very subtle or null intervention to the exhibition space. Basically, after this veil, there is an operation that leads to sway the viewer. Societies have always shown through art, the beauty and the violence they harbour.

This black and white has been a stimulus for the sensitivity and intelligence of artists. The results have grown into contemporary art since Baudelaire shown us that horror and ugliness can be beautiful in aesthetic terms.

The Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes thanks Galerie Peter Kilchmann of Zurich, the Instituto Sinaloense de Cultura; the Patronato de Arte Contemporaneo and the Associazione Mexican Pavilion, as well as the Organizing Committee. Also thanks the Galería Salvador Díaz of Madrid, illumeurope and macrolux.

The joint effort has made of What Else Could We Talk About? an approach that calls to seriously deploy the reflexion of its attendants.

Teresa Vicencio General Director Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes

The violence provoked by drug trafficking, and other phenomena not less dark, creates as reaction a collective imaginary that is determined like a sole anecdote of the sinister: the yellow press or the musical chronicle of facts of the narcocorridos that are true and that dilutes into our daily lives without been perceived at all in any apocalyptic proportion.

The present work constitutes a statement of the scope of imagination versus an almost elusive reality; it is as well an act of protest that goes beyond any ideology surrounded by the irrationality of what happens and arises from the northern border of the country.What can visual arts provide to this intricate context of lawlessness, impunity and contraband that moves geographically according to what ambition dictates? Teresa Margolles, irrepressible artist for her vision of the social and individual construction of death, faces with keen sensitivity the disdain balances and the tedium that results from the brutality, showing the loss of surprise and how the uncertainty of vulnerability sustains every act of sense, thought and coexistence.

This is why the Universidad Autónoma de México (National University of Mexico), through its Coordination of Cultural Diffusion, is proud to partner up with the important experience of having an official Pavilion at the renowned Venice Biennale, presenting this creative effort that seeks to deepen in the sense of our condition as rational individuals of a civilization, which, paradoxically, has ceased to be convinced of having an intuitive knowledge of its own existence and the infallible perception of the Being.

Sealtiel Alatriste Coordination of Cultural Diffusion Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Convinced that contemporary art is a reflection of our times and its problems, an immediate symptom of what happens today, since its creation in 2000, the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo a.c., has sought to build a link that enables people to approach different art forms, supporting and promoting art both, nationally and internationally. Through strategic alliances and support for high quality programmes, pac enhances the art scene and contributes to the understanding and enrichment of Mexican contemporary art. pac’s work gathers the voluntary efforts of an independent panel of professionals, all committed to contemporary art and whose contributions allow achieving pac’s mission of supporting individuals and institutions dedicated to the preservation and comprehension of contemporary art practices.

This year, the Mexican artist, Teresa Margolles presents a series of works in the 53th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia 2009, that demonstrate how art works as index and evidence. What else could we talk about? curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina reinforces the importance of art as catalyst and multiplier of the questions of the self and its environment.This is why; pac decides to be part of the organization team of the Mexican Pavilion as we are certain of the relevance of this show within the global context.

Aimée Servitje, Executive Director María Bostock, Coordinator Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo, A.C.

The artist and curator dedicate this project to the memory of PrĂ­amo Lozada & Olivier Debroise

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Doctor in Art History and Theory (PhD) awarded by Essex University, UK, and BA in History from Universidad Autónoma de México. He is a research fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. From 2002 to 2008 he acted as the first Associate Curator of Latin American Art in the Collections of Tate Modern, UK.

Materialist Spectrality

i. The trepidation of the imaginary

1

“2008, year with most bullets fired in recent Mexican history”, in “Entre el horror y el Luto”, Reforma, Mexico City, 5 January 2008. Anuario 2008.

2

“Más de 5.000 asesinatos en México en lo que va de año”, El País, Madrid, Spain, 3 December 2008. (http://www. elpais.com/articulo/internacional/5000/ asesinatos/Mexico/va/ano/ elpepuint/20081203elpepuint_16/Tes).

According to the summary in Mexico City’s Reforma newspaper of the figures that appeared in its day-to-day reportage, these executions included 50 soldiers, 552 police officers, 626 bodies with evidence of having been tortured, and 170 decapitations. 312 bodies were accompanied by a message of some sort. See “Ejecutómetro 2008”, animated graphic at http://www. reforma.com 3

Enrique Krauze, “La defensa de nuestra imagen”, Reforma, México, 14 January 2009.

4 US. Joint Forces Command, “The Joint Operating Environment 2008”, November 25, 2008, p. 36. See: www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2008/JOE2008.pdf 5

Mary Beth Sheridan, “Clinton: U.S. Drug Policies Failed, Fueled Mexico’s Drug War”, The Washington Post, 26 March 2009; p. A01.

6 Rolando Herrera and Benito Jiménez, “Prometen duplicar la fuerza en Juárez”, Reforma, 26 February 2009, and Rolando Herrera, “1,800 soldiers arrive in Juárez”, Reforma, 1 March 2009 7

“Narco: Ejecuciones 2009”, Reforma, 25 April 2009, p. 2. Among the victims recorded up to 25 April 2009, the paper specified 188 individuals who had been tortured before execution, 129 associated with messages, and 64 decapitations.

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According to the Mexican press, more bullets were fired in 2008 than in any other year of the country’s recent history.1 Figures from both official and journalistic sources concur that more than 5.000 people lost their lives in violent incidents connected with drug trafficking and the efforts to control it; the total for the previous year, 2007, was around 2.800.2 The shocking arithmetic of these statistics, showing the net level of violence in Mexico surpassing that of several war zones around the world, was widely reported in early 2009 by all the major news agencies – causing national politicians and intellectuals to sound the alarm at the deterioration of “Mexico’s image abroad”.3 The trepidation of the imaginary reached its height in January this year, when the United States Department of Defense published a report by one of its strategic analysis groups. This evoked the possibility of Mexico’s “rapid and sudden collapse” as a result of the stress placed by criminal gangs on the nation’s judicial, police and financial structures.4 The report’s characterization of Mexico as a “weak, failed state” was immediately repudiated by the Mexican diplomatic corps, and some weeks later the new us administration seemed to be adopting a more conciliating discourse that acknowledged the co-responsibility of North America in the violence: both in terms of its insatiable demand for illegal substances, and as the provenance of the vast majority of the weapons at the disposal of the armed wings of the various cartels.5 Nevertheless, the crisis forced the Mexican government to dispatch thousands of soldiers to patrol the streets of border towns, as the only way to reduce the belligerence.6 Even so, the first four months of 2009 saw a death toll of almost 1.900 people caught up in the whirlwind of executions, decapitations and shoot-outs.7 Though it may be an exaggeration to speak of the displacement of the nation-state by outlaw organizations taking control of some of its territories and populations, in a serious challenge to government hegemony, it is certainly fair to say that the exacerbation of the violence has given rise to a situation of chaotic disorder,

of the kind that was once the preserve of social revolts. In a country where, as in most parts of the world, modernity amounts to an unhinged experience (in the sense of outside the frame) that moves from the murkiness of colonialism to the perpetual drift of the nation-state, it cannot be denied that the emergence of pure destructiveness is also the sign and the engine of transition from one period to the next. ii. Phenomenology of what has died

For over fifteen years, in its various incarnations, the work developed by Teresa Margolles around the institutional treatment of corpses and the materiality of death has operated like a kind of unconscious historiography of the brutality of Mexican social experience. This narrative springs not from any direct impulse towards reportage, so much as from the exercise of a heterodox experience of knowledge and an ethical investigation pushed to the limit. Margolles’s oeuvre, like much else that falls into the tired category of “political art”, is the visual transcription of a project of public opinion. It is politically corrosive above all because it refuses any other mode of thinking and sensing the social.This adventure on the outer limits, one of very few such that have infiltrated the artistic arena, combines the heterogeneity of a point of view with individual, subcultural negativity, and undertook the risk, from the outset, of operating out of one of the blind spots of our imaginary: that involving contact with, learning about, and working on deceased matter.

This ominous epistemological adventure has achieved a painful public relevance over time. Without being precisely the implementation of a program, Margolles’s work has embraced a succession of subjective and aesthetic positions, all of which have functioned against a background of concrete historical processes. Thus it is perfectly feasible, in general terms, to outline a phenomenology of the various phases through which the dead has figured the living in this work. While Margolles proceeds with visceral sensibility within a domain which most of her contemporaries would go out of their way to avoid, the construction of her serial perspectives can be seen as the double foundering of a social epoch. The stages of her work are like codified, hyper-sensitive ghost-doubles of a period that has been anything but the expression of historical inertia.8 C uauhté moc Medina

8

The arguments in this section draw upon the reading of Margolles I developed in my essay, “Zones of Tolerance: Teresa Margolles, semefo and beyond”, Parachute no.

104, October-December 2001, pp. 32-49.

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9

All these allusions were explicitly made

by SEMEFO in their classic actions and exhibitions of the 1990s, most prominently in the group’s first museum show, Lavatio Corporis (1994) at the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City.

10 Lourdes Morales has provided a detailed examination of the sub-cultural currents feeding into SEMEFO, with special attention to the “dark” category, in her master’s thesis entitled “From Darkness to Metonymy” (“De la oscuridad a la Metonimia. Un ensayo sobre SEMEFO y Teresa Margolles”; MA in History, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, Mexico City, UNAM, 2006).

—Gothic Modernity: At the beginning of the 1990s, the semefo group fielded a gothic aesthetic as it investigated the “life of the corpse” by means of performances, videos and hybrid sculptural objects. This activity coincided in unsettling fashion with the disruptions of the social order imposed by globalization and the neoliberal turn upon the economies of the South. In retrospect, semefo’s way of referencing Artaud, Bataille or José Clemente Orozco constituted a nihilist reaction to the propaganda of a sublime modernization that promised us imminent entrance into the mercantilo-democratic normality of the “first world”, provided we were ready to throw out the post-revolutionary social contract. semefo’s macabre games presented the Mexican experience as a montage of conflicts and catastrophes, encompassing indigenous sacrificial practices, colonial extermination and the violence of subsequent revolutions.9 Indeed, rather than confine itself to the subcultural margins one might have expected of its origins in Death metal rock and its clear predilection for the dark side of the urban tribes of the periphery,10 semefo established itself as a key exemplar of the kinds of “art of the crisis” that flourished in the Mexico of the 1990s – largely because its negotiations with the ultimate horror worked as an extreme cipher for shared anxieties. However, the collective’s uncompromising anti-humanism was the feature which set it apart from other artists and groups emerging from the counterculture at that time. Conveying the contact with repellent or abject things in an ecstatic register, vilifying modernity with the objects expulsed by historical putrefaction, semefo foresaw the way the capitalist party would entrench cyclical instability, in Mexico as in practically all the southern economies. The “gothic” aspect cultivated by the group (including in its Frankensteinian allusions) expressed a classic aesthetic condition of modernity, in which the theme of horror and the “undead” stands for a primal reaction to the brutality of modernization – for it expresses a present haunted by fear of the return of the repressed, and bracing itself for changes that are quite the opposite of those dangled before us by the illusions of progress and homogeneity.

—The morgue as atelier. During the next phase, roughly corresponding to the second half of the decade of the 1990s, Margolles (first as a member of semefo, and then independ-

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M aterialist Spectralit y

ently) moved towards the necrological appropriation of the protocols of artistic production, by using the forensic institution of the mortuary as her studio. A double disruption was this effected: not only was the artist abusing a pillar of the legal apparatus, twisting it away from its official purpose, but also she was contaminating the contemporary aesthetic apparatus with sacred horror.11 Over and above the worth of specific pieces produced in that workshop, Margolles’s use of the mortuary as a studio entailed a structural consequence. All of her artistic operations became defined by the fact of occupying a classic institutional space, of the kind Michel Foucault described as “heterotopias”: spaces designated by every civilization as “outside all places”, even when they are clearly localized; institutions “controlled by an unspoken sacralization”.12 To operate within the morgue, and upon its content and purpose; to operate from this “space outside” allowed Margolles to realize a “heteropology”: a description or reading of a territory that appeared as a “refutation, both mythical and real, of the space of life”.13 The critical potential of this location found itself heightened by historical contingency, when the fairy-tale of Mexican modernization met its nemesis in violence. The outbreak of the Zapatista rebellion, the pandemic of crime unleashed by the economic crisis of 1994-1995, and a string of spectacular political assassinations marked the collapse of the one-party regime that had ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000.These events transformed Margolles’s gruesome headquarters into a public image of the political and social crisis of the mid-1990s. The necrophiliac studio had turned into the showcase of necropolitics.

11

“This sacredness is the revelation of a continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite.” Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, translated by Mary Dalwood, City Lights, San Francisco, 1986, p. 22.

12 Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces”, in: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion. New York, The New Press, 1998, pp. 177-178.

13

Ibid, p. 181.

—Spectral exportation. In the first five years of the new century, Margolles’s work spilled outwards in complex fashion.

Although the investigative terrain, the raw materials and the technical referent continued to be anchored in the Mexican morgue, the poetic spur was now to develop a series of methodologies for transmission beyond the bounds of the institution, which at the same time involved a growing rejection of the circumscription of the “artistic object”. With extraordinary prolixity, Margolles unfolded a whole arsenal of production tactics designed to facilitate a ghoulish contraband of the byproducts and sidelines of forensic work in the direction of C uauht é moc Medina

018

14 Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosis”, in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, edited by Allan Stoekl et al., University of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp. 50-51.

019

another kind of heterotopia: the global art-exhibition room.

She launched into a wide range of interventions upon actual display spaces and surfaces as well as impregnating works specifically localized in urban territory, recycling the water that had been employed in the cleansing rites of the mortuary, the fats expelled by cadaver processing techniques, and even body parts, as a way of spectralizing the exhibition space.

Except for a number of crucial exceptions, Margolles exported the waste products of her work environment, rather than dead bodies themselves. Corporal substances and fluids were transferred into the surroundings and bodies of the spectators through variously contaminated media: the essences were dispersed in the form of vapor, mixed into cement, or turned into soap bubbles. The artist also used human fat to coat monochrome installations or as “filler” to repair cracks in the building, the social body. Esthetically speaking, she was enabling this contraband by subjecting the post-minimalist repertoire and the poetics of de-materialization to a process of symbolic pollution.

The “purified” esthetic of the monochrome, the production of environmental conditions that are sensitive on the purely material level of exposure, the recourse to minimal sculptures to transport the body of a foetus, the systematic over-use of the procedures of the ready-made – all these were deployed like parasites exploiting the dominant esthetic. Under the deceptive guise of a minimalist conceptualism, Margolles was performing surreptitous operations involving a materialist cadaverism, exposing her audience to a category defined by Georges Bataille as “base materialism”: things that can neither be classified not controlled, “what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority” and remain “external and foreign” to the objects of productive idealization and consumption.14 But the full radicalism of such an infiltration can only be appreciated once we see that in these polluted pieces, Margolles was inverting the contemplative relations of modern esthetics. In place of any neutral, dispassionate observation of “beauty”, spectators’ bodies and feelings were being exposed to works in the form of substances that violated the distance implied by esthetic attention; that threatened to merge with the receptor’s very flesh, infused into his lungs and bloodstream.

This invasion, propelled by the commissions and invitations of the world cultural circuit, functioned as a debased M aterialist S pectralit y

analogy of the globalization process. If not deliberately or explicitly, the work’s expansion beyond the walls of the studiomorgue mirrored the insidious, invisible and dissolvent effect of global capitalism, ignoring frontiers and fostering a constant transposition of identities. Indeed, by performing operations which frequently exploited a legal vacuum, Margolles was positing the deregulation of transactions between the dead and that which is destined to be (ex)posed. Not the least achievement of this procedure is how it shows elements which are culturally repellent and instantly vomited out, infiltrating the circulatory stream of culture. iii. Price and Innocence

Every death has a multiplicatory effect. That is why executions are not exclusively directed at the condemned; they establish and maintain a perverse system of communication.15 The lords of the War on Drugs —traffickers and their pursuers— know as well as do the media and its audience that each corpse is a semiotic bombshell, that strikes fear into the population whilst goading the adversary to greater heights.16 Every murder leaves a family forever damaged, local people terrorized, and urban space reconfigured; it will be branded on memories for generations. In the cities close to the US-Mexico border,17 violence has engulfed the lives above all of young people, who run an ever-growing risk of dying before their time. Within the affective networks that constitute families and communities, each violent death, no matter what the circumstances or motives, creates a lasting trauma. “Violence has broken the continuity of a life line. The survivor has not merely changed: he or she is another person.”18 Until recently, it has been difficult to acknowledge the indiscriminate force-field of each of these deaths, due to the interference of morality. The press, the neighbours, family members themselves, and most of all, the state, seek to exorcize the trauma of violent death by applying a double standard that separates “guilt” from “innocence”, the “criminals” from the “victims”. Although capital punishment has been abolished in Mexico, many cruel ends are welcomed with an indifference bordering on glee, in that they are perceived as well-deserved. So long as the bad guys stick to killing each other, that’s nothing to the rest of us. For decades, throughout the criminalization of the drug trade that took place during the Cuauht émoc Medina

15 For an artistic reading of the sign system of violence in Colombia, and of how it is codified in keeping with a Catholic grammar going back to the CounterReformation, see José Alejandro Restrepo, Cuerpo gramatical. Cuerpo, arte y violencia. Bogotá, Universidad de los Andes, Fundación Valenzuela y Klenner, 2006.

16

Luis Astorga, a leading Mexican scholar of the drug phenomenon in Mexico and its history, notes that many former soldiers who passed over into the ranks of the drug gangs would have been trained in psychological counter-subversion techniques, making them experts in the logic of dazing the enemy with terror in order to elicit a hike in violence in return. (Personal communication from Luis Astorga, 21 April 2009)

17

“Son cuatro las ciudades más violentas en México: Patricia Espinosa”, La Jornada, Mexico City, 14 January 2009, p.1.

18

Wolfgang Sofsky, Tratado sobre la violencia, translated by Joaquín Chamorro Mielke, Madrid, Abada Editores, 2006, p. 79.

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19

As is well known, Augustine of Hippo rejected both the manichaean theory of the duality of good and evil and the neo-Platonic argument for the hierarchy of ideas, to arrive at a notion of evil as privatio boni, “the privation of good” (Saint Augustine, The City of God, XI, 22).

Today’s more pragmatic conception of the good always appears insubstantial, as the mere removal or reduction of evil in the search for security. Indeed, for our current hegemony, goodness is little more than the privation of evil 20

last century, the homicides among rival gangs were viewed by the public as an occupational hazard, the effect of immanent justice. It’s not so much the consumption of illegal substances as the murderous economy surrounding this commerce that produces the moralism spiked with ethical indifference which is also the standard reaction to the slaying of a prostitute.

What we have here, then, is a mechanism of class and labor divisions presiding over the act of death. Gangsters, dealers, addicts, users and the very forces of law and order are ultimately regarded as forming part of the same rotten mass that is to be repudiated wholesale. These people are accursed, cannon fodder, eminently sacrificeable. By contrast, the media are duty-bound to whip up maximum shock-horror whenever a crime victim can be portrayed as an illustration of the “absence of evil”.19 A social project can be glimpsed behind these distinctions.

It is not by chance that the etymology of the word “innocence” derives from denial of wrong-doing; in – not, and nocere – to hurt; an innocens is “one who does no harm”.20 Reflecting upon the consequences of the military metaphors embedded in another of our contemporary symbolic “wars” (incited by dread of pandemia), Susan Sontag expounded with great lucidity the implications of the obsession with “radical innocence” that currently inhabits the language:

The Chambers Dictionary, 1998, p. 828.

21

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors,Picador, New York 2001, p. 99.

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Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.21

At the present juncture, where violence acts as a mediation between the capitalist duty of enrichment and the dwindling of opportunity at the edges, the allocation of guilt and innocence constitutes a stratagem that well serves a historical regime committed to the celebration of “normality” equated with “non-guilt”. The cult of innocence that is conspicuous in the narratives about crime consecrates inoffensiveness as the highest ethical value. The smaller the mark an individual makes upon his time and society, the more his death is mourned.We create hells so as to go on believing that heaven is full of meek and silent sheep.

M aterialist S pectralit y

iv. Necro-urbanism

As though in synchrony with the exacerbation of violence in the north of Mexico, Margolles’s work, already (although not without tensions) implanted into the world-wide art circuit, has lately begun to engage with a new heterotopic domain.

Every one of Margolles’s recent works has declared, not without dismay, the obsolescence of the morgue as sole container of dead matter; a comprehensive violence literally carpets public space, the discourse of the media and urban sensibility with the signs and traces of an all-embracing economy of the abject. Given that the mortuary has lost its monopoly on the storage of cadavers, Margolles has abandoned this chilly atelier and proceeded to investigate, both materially and symbolically, the ways in which the “base globalization” of the drugs business (the machine that articulates the oft-denied solidarity between consumer pleasure and sacrificial sovereignty) steeps the public arena in death.The artist has once more pushed her research outward, in order to explore the physical and symbolic spaces of what Sergio González Rodríguez has called “abject architecture”: An uncanny construction, like a kind of branch line of the sewer system symbolically threatening the whole of society, seeking to entrench itself in the most anaesthetic perpetuity with its unacceptable mandate: mind your own business. 22

In this new phase —symbolically inaugurated with the creation of a pavement made of pieces of shattered windscreens from cars whose occupants were shot as they drove through Mexico City, which was installed in a socially debased neighborhood of Liverpool (On Pain/Sobre el dolor, 2006)— Margolles has made use of a wide range of new procedures aimed at concentrating the social waste products of extended terror within the exhibition space, by means of actions and performative pieces.

Margolles’s latest projects, while amplifying all her previous methods of clandestine exportation, are far more energetically invested in the search for material evidence in the streets. By an unusual route, her work has moved into nomadism. It is no longer a question of the abstract presentation of this substance or that, but rather the outcome of a series of necro-geographical tours. Walter Benjamin’s felicitous descripCuauht émoc Medina

22 In his remarkable essay about beheadings in Mexico, Sergio González Rodríguez contends that the proliferation of smuggling tunnels, the safe houses in basements, the “underground” transmission of the imagery and discourse of violence through the media and on Internet, and the multiplication of heterodox sites of worship related to the criminal underworld, such as the temples and altars of Malverde and La Santa Muerte or Holy Death—come together to form a new urban design. He calls this “abject architecture,” the home of all that is “lugubrious, cadaverous, a place of rotting refuse”. (Sergio González Rodríguez, El hombre sin cabeza, Barcelona, Editorial Anagrama, 2009, pp. 161-163.) Nevertheless, one might add that this specialty in abjection is more of an anti-architecture, for it operates at the antipodes of Bataille’s definition of “architecture” as a metaphor for the face of authority, the monumental concealment of death and the structuring of rational thought. See Denis Hollier, Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille, translated by Betsy Wing, Cambridge, MA and London, MIT Press, 1989, pp. 46-56.

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23

Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, translated by Edmund Jephcott et al.

London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 19.

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tion of the flâneur as a wanderer through modernity “who goes botanizing on the asphalt”,23 might here have found its monstruous double. In the combings of crime scenes carried out by Margolles and her network of helpers, the flâneur is reborn as a crew of amateur forensic investigators: collecting up mud, blood and broken glass from the roadway, recording the vacant horror of mortally wounded places on photographs and videos, filleting newspaper reports and popular commentary for the phrases and clichés that every execution attracts. This close tracking of base materiality and verbality takes place once the police and forensic technicians have finished with the scene. After these authorities’ removal of the bodies and any evidence, there are still plenty of remains and effluvia testifying to a life cut short. All such residue (dirt, blood, glass, stains, fragments, noises) is what Margolles encapsulates in the formula: “all that’s left”.

This experience (one that generally resists representation) is an act of defiance and restitution in itself, braving the geography of fear that the killings institute within cities. To tread the dust of these disregarded dead is one way of restoring the right to the city. But the wandering must soon give way to a transportation. “All that’s left” is reworked by the artist with the goal of carrying it, like a body is carried to the grave, into the public terrain of art – and this is done, needless to say, by the infusion of a basely material intervention. The blood and dirt, after drying into lengths of fabric, is re-humidified and thus brought back in the exhibition room. The shards of glass are mounted as pieces of jewellery, modelled on the bling that is so popular among the big crime bosses. The phrases that buzz around the killings are “tatooed” onto the walls or embroidered in gold thread over the blood-soaked fabrics, setting up a friction between luxury, greed and the peculiar moral code supposedly ratified by every assassination. In sum, this body of work uses the artistic space to reveal the complex economy of abjection and desire that bubbles along quietly, like a murder without end. If Margolles has turned herself into a flâneur, the chronicler and philosopher of the new necropoli of the outskirts, it’s because we needed to look squarely at the intimate relations that actually exist between the universal triumph of capitalism-cum-electoral democracy, and the laissez-faire of violence.

M aterialist S pectralit y

v. A crisis of over-execution

The different values assigned to different lives, which make it possible for a society to shrug off the mutual slaughter of the “dispensable classes”, is nevertheless reaching a saturation point that increasingly obscures the distinction between innocent and guilty victims. The relative normality that once allowed drug tycoons and their staff to mingle freely with the local elites, ceases to apply as soon as the “war” ceases to discern between combatants and spectators. In cases of a reckless overflow of violence such as we are witnessing in Mexico, the so-called war on drugs morphs into a kind of “total war” which ignores conventional curbs such as respect for the adversary’s family, restraint towards people who have no involvement with the narco-underworld, or relative deference to authority figures.

Media reports and citizen protest, faced with the magnitude of the carnage, no longer revolve as before around who did, or did not, deserve everything he got due to the company he kept. Not only does the rise in the number of slayings appear to place the very stability of the Republic in jeopardy; it actually defies understanding, it has become inconceivable.

The production of corpses is on such a scale that the warehouses of good and evil can no longer contain them. The argument of individual responsibility is just one more casualty of the frenzied “bullet-fest” that is overrunning countries like Mexico. vi. From “all that’s left” to what does not appear

Margolles places us in a tough, tense, intractable negotiation both intellectually and emotionally. The referent of violence does not provide us with any context, since it features on a quasi-dematerialized level. The phenomenon to which it alludes cannot be articulated as metalanguage, nor is it figuratively lodged in any object. Its bringing-across devolves into a series of situations marked by an unmediated short-circuit between filth and gold, blood and money, palatial decadence and impoverished suburb. It’s clearly a machine, but less clear is what it produces.We might venture to say that this machine squeezes, from “all that’s left”, an “appears”.

Only by means of an immanent development of the devices through which contemporary artists lay claim to a field of practice, can a particular level of esthetic autonomy continue Cuauht émoc Medina

024

to obtain in contemporary art. This is true even (or perhaps especially) when the chief medium of poetic production relies on a combination of capture and intervention of reality.

More precisely, the friction set up by the contemporary artwork between the social fragments or episodes which it absorbs and adapts, and its finality, which is to parasite on, or intervene in, spaces, social circuits, collective affects and public discourses, negotiates a role which is anything but to represent: because the esthetic operations have shed their inert or ideal condition as non-things, and the image they offer of “reality” can never now be stabilized as a piece of conscious data. In all the confusion between criticism and affirmation, this non-production/non-consumption has nothing to display: its goal is to perturb epistemologies and practices. This is a political undertaking, to the extent that it refuses to have any truck with the amazing efficiency of the art world at grinding concern with history down into curatorial pabulum. Here at least is an operation that refuses, tooth and nail, to offer up a violence tamed.

Following this path, it is no less imperative to discard the notion of the artistic artefact as a self-sufficient whole, guaranteed by being distanced. Indeed it would be a let-down, surely, were vestiges and fragments susceptible to being treated as a coherent whole, however crumbling this entity might be inside. The register of the residual is incompatible with notions of medium and technique. At any rate, the gesture which until recently ruled that the artwork was a product of its abstract, negative differentiation from the functional or reified object can no longer be made, since the dissonance can scarcely any more be heard due to the cacophony of the socalled art world. The residual can be brought to bear only as the input into a machine that churns out more residue. This is the figure of a process, a fluid, that is impossible to collect.

It can certainly be felt, on the other hand; it smears us all over.

Leaving us with trash under the skin.

And yet, this way of sweeping through what has been swept, just to stir it all up, allows us to air a provisional epistemology.

Its interaction with collectivities and institutions unleashes a friction in which the text, rather than postulate a “context”, introduces it partially or in localized fashion into its own texture. But this altered reality is by no means generalizable.

Like all sweeping, it’s a task that is never done. It gathers, it

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M aterialist Spectralit y

disperses, but does not sediment anything. It mixes up social knowledges, absorbs them, scatters them, and returns them to dust. If there is a writing that could accompany this experience, it too would have to be a blend of glimmers and dirt, facts and weeping, interjections and aphorisms. Margolles’s machine exists in the form of an unclean intelligence. The “almost nothing” that is “all that’s left” many not even be capable of being perceived as a “work of art”. No matter: what matters is that the artefact should at least agitate that phantom. Likewise, its value as a clue or symptom is minimal.

Violence brought across into art only indicates that out there, the violence goes on.

An intervention like that which Margolles is effecting in Venice must have as a corollary the creation of huge insatisfaction. It’s obviously not about to work as a showcase or proxy for the Mexican foreign service, tourism ministry or cultural bureaucracy. But nor will it gratify the receiver with the slightest sense of understanding either its raw material or its referent, in benefit of acquiring some global knowledge. The bringing-across of the thing, of death, must not sediment the least gain in terms of justice, truth or safety.

As anyone knows who has lived in a city besieged by a pandemic, what pokes up, what appears behind the “it’s nothing”, is a materialist spectrality. Here, the unclean cannot be sublimated: it is administered, yes, in dilute enough form to preserve it from disgust. But the dose has to be sufficiently concentrated to make us uneasy about its microscopic virulence. vii. The atrophy and hypertrophy of sovereignty

Beneath the bland unreality of the statistics and the battle to contain their symbolic effect, a relentless drama unfolds, which, like all power struggles, plays itself out on the farthest limit of bodies and feelings. The violence between the cartels, as we call them, and the organizations of the state is discharged in games of perception, affiliation and language, but its ultimate implementation is upon the lives of concrete individuals: their skin, their organs, their illusions, their fears, their privacy and their integrity. What was once a person, possessing a full range of potentials, flaws, neuroses and lights, becomes reduced to a formless, infectious mass. As we can see from the grisly pictures splashed over the crime tabloids, and equally in the scenes broadcast like war trophies Cuauht émoc Medina

026

24

Due to the traffickers’ need to settle their disputes without reference to a court of law, and to accumulate ever more weapons against their competitors and the police, as well as to the way in which the drugs war distracts the justice system from prosecuting other offences. (See Arthur Benavie, Drugs. America’s Holy War, New York, Routledge, 2009, p. 38.)

25 Probably unleashed, as Sergio González Rodríguez has suggested, by the “planetary impact” of the photographs of prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib, and the response of radical Islamic groups to post decapitation videos online. (Sergio González Rodríguez, op. cit., p. 73.)

26

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York, Vintage, 1995, p. 49.

27

It is not, to reprise Benjamin’s terminology, either a “foundational, mythic” violence (such as that originarily invoked by states), nor a “conservative-repressive” violence (as that which re-establishes the rule of law); but nor is this a “divine violence” that overthrows the law as the expression of revolutionary redemption. (Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 243-244.)

28

Ibid, pp. 41-45. It is interesting to note how Slavoj Žižek concretizes Bejamin’s notion of divine violence in terms of the revolutionary Jacobin terror in France, between 1792 and 1794. Slavoj Žižek, Violence. Six sideways reflections. New York, Picador, 2008, p. 196.

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by contemporary armies of occupation, death by execution has the peculiar trait of not being spiritualized. Unlike those who die from “natural causes”, the murdered gangster finds his memory overlaid by the fearsome image of his remains.

Beyond confirming that “criminal violence” is to blame for the outlawing of drug circulation and consumption,24 a further element stands out in the Mexican case: the way in which for some years now, the battles for control over the black market have increased not only in number but in theatricality. An execution has to play its part in the growing induction of terror, which implies wide publicization of tortures when alive and dismemberment when dead; that is, the constant exercise of what the media like to call “a luxury of violence”. What is intolerable is to see that faced with the withdrawal, delay or failure of the state’s “monopoly on legitimate violence”, there is no diversification of the “legitimate violences” represented by rebellions. Instead we have the proliferation, theatricalization and inexorable progression of a violence that is spectacular and without measure.

In particular, the fever of beheadings25 suggests that in northern Mexico, the scarecrow of a sacrificial sovereignty has emerged: the search for affiliation, the stupefied fascination with a kind of pre-modern power that imposes itself by making “everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign”.26 We cannot, therefore, but detect a close relationship between the atrophy of a democracy helpless to implant itself by the force of its measured violence,27 and the hypertrophy of the sovereignty of a sacrificial practice that does not aspire to political hegemony: it merely seeks to tighten control over this necessarily fluctuating commerce, whose illegality turns it into an particularly deregulated branch of contemporary capitalism.

Indeed, the violence raging over many parts of the world has no organizational potential, and thus cannot project itself as the foundation of a possible order to come.28 It appears as a hypertrophied sovereignty, because in its massive outflow of transgression and its rehabilitation of the sacrificial economy, it turns out to be the mirror of today’s labor market. After all, what the police refer to as “organized crime” works exactly like a maquiladora, or assembly plant. The assassin only resorts to extreme measures in order to avoid being the next casualty.

Such was the argument of a beheader interviewed by Sergio M aterialist S pectralit y

González Rodríguez, explaining that his principal task was to please the boss: At the time, I think: I don’t want it to be me. But this guy was asking for it, and I don’t even know his name. Just hope I do it right so they can see I did what I was told, and don’t kick me out of a job. […] After that I’m at home by myself, waiting for the boss to phone and say what he thought of my hit.29

The viscous, spectacular dying that inundates our fields and streets is an image of unemployment. The only difference is that the sackings are accomplished with a sharp chop from a machete.

A hundred years after America’s imposition of total prohibition based on the Puritan assumption that “drugs can destroy the soul”,30 what Richard Nixon called the “drug war” has proved to be the most ineffectual campaign in history. Its sole achievement has been the encouragement of an ever larger market for ever cheaper “illegal substances” – and, of course, a towering mountain of corpses. It is not even true that the violence occurs mostly in the South: some estimates claim the number of homicides connected with illicit drugs in the United States to be around 10,000.31 The fact that the countries most affected by drug-war violence (the US, Colombia and Mexico) are still the loudest advocates of prohibitionist orthodoxy in all the international forums, ranged against Western governments which are increasingly tempted by the heresy of “harm reduction” policies as an alternative to the rigid “Just Say No”,32 provides an excellent illustration of how ideologies articulate themselves around the compulsion to repeat. As Luis Astorga has pointed out, this obstinacy in “prolonging a policy of failure that compounds the problem, and insisting that nothing else will do” sums up the fundamental tautology of the war on drugs: “the real goal of this alleged war seems to be its own perpetuation”.33 Just like the “war on terror”, the exclusion of migrants, the management of pandemics, and even the fight to stop global warming, the war on drugs is a model for perpetual war. Rather than the dynamic whereby states located their foundation in an act of originary violence, we are drifting into a normalized management of conflict, designed to secure the immortality of democratic capitalism by means of everlasting wars without truces or victories. The scandal of the social body must C uauht émoc Medina

29

González Rodríguez, Ibid., pp. 148-9.

30 Proceedings of the Association of the American Pharmaceutical Association, 51, 1903, p. 447. Quoted by Antonio Escohotado, Historia General de las Drogas.

Completada por el apéndice Fenomenología de las drogas, 8th edition, updated and expanded. Madrid, Espasa Calpe S.A., 2008, p. 607.

31

Benavie, Drugs. America’s Holy War, pp.

4, 37. As Benavie demonstrates, the data proves that throughout the twentieth century, the homicide rate in the US doubles or more during periods of prohibitionism.

32 This split emerged very clearly in the recent statement put out by the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in March 2009, after meeting in Vienna. Twenty-six governments including Germany, the UK, Australia and Croatia signed a dissident interpretation of the international resolution, in favor of “harm reduction” policies. See “After months of talks, UN still split over strategy on drugs”, The Guardian, Thursday 12 March 2009.

33

Luis Astorga, El siglo de las drogas. El narcotráfico, del porfiriato al nuevo milenio.

Mexico City, Plaza y Janés, 2005, p.180.

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not let us glimpse the torrent of violence beneath the asepsis of distancing. It is more appropriate in this situation to delve more deeply into shock, to dirty our hands with pain and grief, aspiring without knowing how to found a politics of discomfort. Otherwise, we run the risk of submitting to a new order, founded on fear and the infinite crusade. viii. A theory of scandal

34

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud; Vol. XVII (1917-1919).

London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953, pp. 241-242.

029

The experiences which Margolles confabulates and releases cannot be absorbed without anguish. If there is something of witchcraft in this material hubbling and bubbling, it has to do with the artist’s ability to summon up all sorts of unspecified terrors. Margolles’s procedures lure her audience into a house of phantoms. A space which, as Freud said about the uncanny – unheimlich – is at once familiar and estranged, intimate and alien, modest and obscene. The pavilion is a place where we must relate “to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts”, always fearful that “that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off ”.34 This is why, to the spectators as much as to the organizers, the pavilion sometimes feels like a vector of contagion. The matter which is the work and yet is not a work, by the process of washing/polluting the pavilion floor, invades us as we walk upon it; summoning the dead to follow the dead.

This spectral operation (appearance and summons to appear) has taken possession even of the rhetorical question that serves as the title of this intervention. “What Else Could We Talk About?” is, of course, the retort to a reprimand. The sentence encloses a visceral reaction to the expectation of the Mexican elites that for the sake of the national image, or to safeguard the illusions of tourism, we should maintain a contrite silence about the indiscretion of a society bent on slaughter in such a noisy, immoderate and public fashion.

They wish. In reality, the only thing liable to silence the obligation to do and to speak about the present catastrophe, will be the next one. The worst of experiencing history as a serial compulsion to disaster is that all too soon, there will be something else to talk about: the next massacre, the future failed revolution, a fresh cycle of economic collapse, the renewed disappointment of democracy, environmental cataclysms galore, another looming pandemic. Just as the mounting M aterialist Spectralit y

deaths resulting from the drugs battles was all that could smother the outcry over the hundreds of women murdered in places like Ciudad Juárez, so the only way to break the spell of the beheadings in the north of the country was for Mexico City to become the source of infection of a new strain of global influenza, as happened in April and May 2009.

Staggering from crisis to crisis; living from one scandal to the next. But no dialogue is being mooted here. The curator would simply like to share his delight in the fact that the word “scandal” derives from the Greek skandalon, meaning “stumbling-block”.35 As we shall soon see…

35

The Chambers Dictionary, p. 1471.

From a ghost-town called Mexico City, 2009.

Cuauht é moc Medina

030

Right: Outside view, Rota Ivancich Palace, Venice, Italy.

Mexican Pavilion, 53th International Art Exhibition-La Biennale di Venezia Interventions in the Rota Ivancich Palace

What Else Could We Talk About? Table, 2009.

Concrete furniture manufactured with a mixture of fluids collected from the place where a person was murdered.

What Else Could We Talk About? Flag, 2009.

Fabric impregnated with blood collected form execution sites in the north border of Mexico.

What Else Could We Talk About? Cleaning, 2009.

Cleaning of the exhibition floors with a mixture of water and blood from murdered people in Mexico. The action will take place at least once a day during the extent of the Venice Biennial.

What Else Could We Talk About? Narcomessages, 2009.

Fabric impregnated with blood gathered form the places where murders took place embroidered with gold threads.The fabrics will be progressively embroidered during the Venice Biennial. [Work in progress].

The embroidered phrases have been taken from the messages that the organized crime uses in its executions. see, hear and silence until all your children fall thus finish the rats so that they learn to respect

What Else Could We Talk About? Score-Settling, 2009.

Gold jewellery set with fragments of glass from the shattered windshields originated from a “settling of scores” that involved crossfire from car-to-car in the streets of Culiacán, Mexico, April 2009. During the Venice Biennial, these jewels will be safeguarded in a safe inbuilt in the walls inside the building.

What Else Could We Talk About? Sounds of Death, 2009.

Audio recordings from places where bodies of assassinated people were found.

What Else Could We Talk About? Recovered Blood, 2009.

Installation of mud impregnated fabrics that were used to clean places where bodies of murdered persons were found in Mexico. The transfer of this material to Venice is performed through the remoisturizing of these fabrics.

Right: Intervention and cleaning up in the streets of Ciudad Juรกrez in sites where assassinations took place, Ciudad Juรกrez, Mexico, April 2009

Extramural actions Culiacรกn & Ciudad Juรกrez, Mexico-Venice, Italy

I.

Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Embassy. Intervention to the United States pavilion at the Giardini of Venice with fabrics with blood of executed people in the north border of Mexico, April 2009.

II.

Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Groundwork for Recovered Blood. Series of actions by volunteers in the places where people have been executed in the north of Mexico. Spring-Summer 2009.

III. Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Sounds of Death’s preparation. Audio recordings from places where bodies of assassinated people were found. North border of Mexico. April 2009.

Photography: Luis Brito Photography: Carlos Sandoval

IV.

Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Jewels Promenade. Actions with Account Settling pieces in public spaces in Venice, Italy, 2009. Context documentation in Culiacรกn, Mexico.

V.

Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Cards to cut up cocaine. Multiple of ten thousand copies to be distributed during the opening days of the Venice Biennial. Summer 2009.

VI. Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Embroidery. Joint activities in the streets of the city of Venice with people embroidering with gold threads fabrics with blood collected from execution sites in the north border of Mexico.

VII. Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Public intervention with Flag. Fabric impregnated with blood collected form execution sites in the north border of Mexico. Exterior of the Rota Ivancich Palace,Venice, May 2009.

VIII. Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Submerged Flag. Public action in Lido Beach,Venice, done with fabric impregnated with blood collected from execution sites in Mexico, May 2009.

IX. Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Floating Flag. Public action in Lido Beach,Venice, done with fabric impregnated with blood collected from execution sites in Mexico, May 2009.

X.

Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Drained. Public action in Lido Beach,Venice, done with fabric impregnated with blood collected from execution sites in Mexico, May 2009.

XI. Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? Dragged Flag. Public action in Lido Beach,Venice, done with fabric impregnated with blood collected from execution sites in Mexico, May 2009.

Right: Intervention and cleaning up in the streets of Ciudad Juรกrez in sites where assassinations took place, Ciudad Juรกrez, Mexico, April 2009.

Taiyana Pimentel

Havana, Cuba, 1967. Studied a degree in Art History, University of Havana, 1990 and studied MA in Art History at the UNAM. She lives and works in Mexico City as an independent contemporary art curator. Some of her recent shows are “Institutional Investitures”, Colectivo Tercerounquinto, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, 2008; “Project for Ecaptepec” (Wound), Teresa Margolles, Fundación Colección Jumex, Mexico, 2007; “1549 State Crimes” Santiago Sierra, Centro Cultural Tlaltelolco, Mexico, 2007; “Bridge”, Francis Alÿs, Havana-Key West, 2006 (in collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina). Between 1999 and 2001, she worked as curator for the Museo Rufino Tamayo where she developed “Sala 7. Proyectos Contemporáneos”. She has been appointed curator for Plataforma 2010-2011.

Conversation BeTween Taiyana Pimentel, Teresa Margolles and Cuauhtémoc Medina

TP: I’d like to begin by asking you both, what made you decide to start putting together a possible presence for Mexico in Venice?

CM: For decades now, for historical reasons related to the Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico has not had an official pavilion at the Venice Biennial. Except for a few official entries in the 60s, not sent on a consistent basis, and a not very useful representation at the iilas (Instituto Italo-Latinoamericano) pavilion, Mexican artists went to Venice in response to individual invitations, even in 2003 when the Biennial asked Gabriel Orozco to curate a part of the show. But by 2007, once the Mexican government suddenly decided to set up a pavilion for the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, then a new challenge emerged: how to deal critically with what was being sent? When along with other curators, I received the invitation to present a project, I thought this could only be valid if it translated into sending something that wasn’t just for show, but rather, would transmit the sense of conflict and friction that has been a part of local artists’ activities on the global circuit in the last fifteen years.

That’s why I decided to work with Teresa Margolles, quite cognizant that her work’s tactics and themes in recent years were about understanding and confronting the effects of violence in the region, and in a non-sublimated fashion. This is not a strictly Mexican story, but rather is also evidence of social fluidities, cultural cataclysms and political dramas involved in globalization. The idea was to build a pavilion that would be a space of friction.

TP: That’s where my question was headed. What sense would it make today to generate a national representation for someone who has been notably critical of any kind of construction of national identity?

CM: Because I don’t think I’ve ever avoided the theme, but rather, have managed to come up with a problematic inter-

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vention. In part that comes with the understanding that operating within global culture requires being equally uncomfortable with cosmopolitan positions as you are by national ones.

Acting within a space like that of national representation implies assuming that there’s no place that could provide a refuge from the problem of representation, since the culture of the State exists and continues to be one of the diffusion bases for visual culture in the world. The nation state is still one of modernity’s principal mechanisms in terms of subjectproduction and in the production of power itself.

TP: Teresa, how do you see your work in relation to some level of national representation in the case of Mexico? The interesting part here is understanding that you represent a category, a construction.

TM: What interests me most is expressing that part of a work process—one extra link. I’ve been exhibiting outside Mexico since 1999 and every time I do, I am inevitably a national representation. Whether I like it or not. I’ve been to biennials before, I’ve done solo exhibitions in museums in Europe and Latin America, and I always appear as part of a national representation. I really don’t see an essential difference in this case.

I have the same consciousness of what I’m doing in one place as I do in another.

CM:What Teresa says is absolutely true.The art world’s structures of representation continue to be national, especially when it comes to artists on the periphery.

TP: I believe this project comes along at a very interesting time because, in effect,Teresa has an almost decade-long history building a structure that supports the emigration and export of Mexico’s violence to other cultural and urban centers (for example to the 2006 Liverpool Biennial).That emigration introduces a new problem within the work: How is death exported?

TM: That’s quite complicated because each piece, each relocation, has its own set of problems. But in each of them I try to simply be a channel for processing what I believe is happening, and what I care about least is that it be seen as the work of just one person. Something key for me is building strucTaiyana Pimentel, T eresa M argolles y C uauht é moc Medina

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1

Medina, Cuauhtémoc. “La muerte infiltrada” in the newspaper Reforma, 9 July 2003. Mexico City.

2 SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense), a collective founded in 1990 by Carlos López, Teresa Margolles, Juan Manuel Pernás, Juan Luis García Zavaleta, Arturo Angulo, Arturo López, Víctor Basurto and Antonio Macedo. Among others, see: Semefo.

Lavatio Corporis, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Carrillo Gil, 1994, Mexico City.

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“A través de”. In Fumus Fugiens, a collective exhibition curated by Tessa Giblin and Bianca Visser. SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007.

tures to retell what’s happening in Mexico, in my hometown, or what I’m seeing in the morgue. Cuauhtémoc put it really well in one article when he said the morgue was the nucleus of society.1 When I worked with semefo2 I was very interested in what was happening inside the morgue and the situations that were occurring, let’s say, a few meters outside the morgue, among family members and relatives. But Mexico has changed so violently that it’s no longer possible to describe what’s happening outside from within the morgue. The pain, loss and emptiness are now found in the streets.

TP: I’d like to think about a few pieces from this visit. For example: your idea of saturating the glass in the gallery with the smell of a homeless person’s clothes.

TM: That was the initial idea, to start with the smell of this person who lives on the streets and is homeless. It was in Dusseldorf; the smell was really pronounced and I was interested in the contrast it generated among this person’s fellow citizens. But that was the beginning of what I did as I continued working: eliminate the body and only retain the smell and at the same time return to the body by means of memory.

In those days I wanted to work with fear: in Ciudad Juárez I interviewed women who lived in a state of fear because they’d been threatened or beaten, as well as male prostitutes that were in the same situation. I wanted to work with the fear that gets imbedded in clothing, and is transformed into sweat, bodily oils and odor. I gave them tee shirts to wear for several days in a row, and I asked them not to shower. I presented this piece in Amsterdam3 and I mounted it in an entirely empty space that only looked out onto the canals via large windows.

I “cleaned” the windowpanes with the cloth (i.e., the clothing) that was saturated in the bodily oils. But more than a cleaning, it was an adhesion of the oils to the surface of the panes so the public would look “through” something towards the outside, when they looked at people or at life. Audiences were informed about the work, as in previous pieces, by an explanation within the display.

TP: At the Liverpool Biennial of 2006, you decided to pave a pedestrian walkway with windshield shards gathered at execution-style murder sites in the north of Mexico.

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TM: One time when I was in the morgue, I saw a girl who had been murdered in a car-to-car drive-by shooting. Her body was covered in glass shards that had come from the car windows. I tried to remove them with some tweezers, a nearly impossible task that I worked on for hours. That led me to think about the rest of it: pieces of glass that were taken from a dead body and put into a plastic bag. Shards that touched a body and entered into it and that, as they were removed, were stained with blood or bodily oils. After there’s a car-to-car drive-by execution on a public street, the body and the car are removed from the scene of the crime for further forensic studies. But the shards that came from the shattered windshields are not—they stay there in the street, clustering in the cracks of the asphalt, in its fissures, and are integrated into the urban environment. They are little brilliant sparks—areas that shine by night because of so much ground up glass. They sparkle as a result of murders.

Those forgotten, ignored shards form the rest of it.

TP: So, where did you get this idea?

TM: It emerged from two lines of thought. One was a logical consequence of the work, like a development of the previous thought. The other came from observation: from walking around neighborhoods whose streets had been the scene of violence. From seeing what marks the violence left behind, from seeing its wounds.

TP: In Liverpool you chose a specific space, where junkies now congregate.

TM: I read cities. I walk them. Once I find a site, I take short walks in the surrounding area. That’s how I found the place I wanted to work. Typically, places where you find junkies are warm, since junkies are always cold and looking for someplace to warm up. The place where they accumulated was interesting because of the social frictions that emerged from it.

Every city has its own code. It’s expressed in different ways. I try to find that language.

TP: We talked a lot about this piece and you said it was what Mexico should return to port cities in Europe.

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TM: That’s true, but the idea came from a curatorial thesis by Gerardo Mosquera. When he invited me, he explained that Liverpool is a port where goods used to ship out to America.

Based on that idea—the concept of “What would America return to Liverpool? What would Mexico send back?”—my response was death en masse.

CM: But what was sent back?

TM: Two metric tons of broken glass that were gathered on streets throughout Mexico: in the north, in Puebla, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. Friends, artists, art-school colleagues all picked up glass from the streets, whether manually or with vacuum cleaners, to make a 7 by 12 meter surface and then a floor in Liverpool. I went all over the city looking for the site; I chose a passage that leads you from one social situation to another. On one side there are family residences and on the other there’s a zone of bars, discos and pubs. The passage behaved as a medium for distinct realities, generating social tensions. It was a private space, which meant negotiating with the owners. They were interested in the possibility that the project might change the passage’s appearance and reality.

They thought that by turning it into the setting for a work of art, its situation might improve, since it had been taken over by musicians, junkies and drunks. The latter slept and continue to sleep there. It’s a space where in the mornings you’d walk through vomit and feces, products of the night before.

TP: From one social space to another.

TM: Right. I was interested in changing the color of the place. The walls were painted yellow and I wanted to paint them white so the space would become a sort of blank canvas and that what would happen over time would be seen as a pictorial intervention, while leaving the lights as they were and covering the floor with glass.

The floor is a piece that has a life of about 14 years. People, the city or maybe the neighbors thought that through transformation—because it turned out to be remarkably beautiful—the space’s condition could be changed. At first, of course, people respected it; there was a saxophonist who played there, and with the change he collected, he retired. But over

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time it reverted to what it was, along with the vomit and the rest of the activities that took place there. Violence returned as well. The glass got covered in blood all over again.

TP: I’m interested in the identifications you make between the social-conflict spaces you look for everywhere you go.

TM: I got to Liverpool and the first thing I saw were bloodstains on the floor and some kid talking to a cop, calmly but all beaten up, and further ahead, I saw this guy carrying a club with a nail driven through it, trying to beat up some other guy.

Maybe that’s just the Liverpool I want to see—you tell me.

CM: Yet in Venice what you found was a palace that had already been designated for use as a pavilion…

TM:Yes, an historical pavilion.

I didn’t have any contact with Venice save what my artist friends had told me, because I don’t even know anyone who had been there as a tourist. So what I found was a space that in many ways was unusable as a space for doing contemporary art, with a lot of restrictions on the building’s use. That made me shift strategies and ways of operating.

CM: This is an ancient palace with preservation and use stipulations that are basically like those in archeology, that forced you in some ways to work in reaction to the event’s and the space’s limitations.

TM: Right. This work continues along investigative lines related to the dead body, but outside the morgue. Now I base what I do on information from the press, in the analysis journalists make, and from crime blotters in newspapers. How did the crime blotter become the very organizing principle of the news and a way of understanding what’s happening in our country?

It’s the neuralgic nerve center that we use to assess the nation— the daily national tragedy: bound, gagged and shrouded cadavers4, ditches as common graves, the decapitated. Newspapers like Noroeste or Debate, in Culiacán; El Norte and El Mexicano in Ciudad Juárez; and El Universal, La Jornada or Reforma in Mexico City are the current-events troubadours that sing to us about this war’s casualties.The strolling players that tell us we’re Taiyana Pimentel, T eresa M argolles y C uauht é moc Medina

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This has been identified as one of the symbols of score-settling: cadavers that are discovered wrapped in blankets in urban or rural areas.

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losing a generation that will demand redress for our having remained silent. How can you not mop the floor of a Mexican pavilion at the Venice Biennial with the remains of the dead?

Are you going to dress it up, or give it a slick design? How are you going to tell this story if not by means of a simple mop-up?

If people show up and there’s nothing on display, it’s because we can’t say anything more other than simply mopping up with these victims’ bodies, and it has to be silent, without any parties, without anything else. A mop-up every day using those cadavers and we have to do it without judgment: I don’t care if we’re mopping with the good guys or the bad guys. I’m merely bearing witness to a retelling of the facts: thousands of dead, and hundreds of children killed in the crossfire.The big danger is fear, which can create more fear. Fear is the worst thing that can happen to a society.

TP: I think an important point resides in the move from the morgue toward the press and public space.

CM: Previously, Teresa’s work implied using the morgue as a heterotopia from which one could understand an historic phase negatively. What has happened in recent years, as Margolles’s work has moved toward an encounter with two public spaces—the street, as well as information and discourses from the press—has happened because the space of violence and, as Sergio Rodríguez González called it in his book El hombre sin cabeza, “the architecture of abjection” now includes society as a whole. That’s why the methodologies in Teresa’s work now involve the search for evidence and not just an engagement with the bodies. So I understand that Teresa involves methodologies of relocation in her work, but as well uses certain modalities of contamination…

TM: I never think about provoking a “contamination,” nor do I try to make it so people get contaminated. I want people to get involved. Or…well, what kind of contamination are you talking about?

CM: Contamination in terms of positing contact with a substance that’s perceived as dangerous…

TP: And how would you posit such a thing?

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TM: The idea emerged from the question of who cleans up the blood left by someone who’s murdered on the streets.

When it’s one person, it might be the family or a neighbor, but when it’s thousands of people, who cleans up the entire city’s blood? The piece consists of using a damp rag to clean the area where someone’s body fell after he was killed.The rag dries out and then gets taken to Venice where it’s wetted again with water to subsequently be used to mop the floor there.

The piece is the build-up that will form as a result of continuous everyday mopping since by cleaning the floor for the Biennial’s six-month duration, residue will be left behind.

TP: I’m remembering that a few years ago you washed cars.5 In that instance, you did the work in Mexico City’s historical downtown area with water that had come from washing cadavers in the Mexico City morgue.

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“Lavado de coches/ Car Wash”. In the collective exhibition Espectacular. In parallel with the Feria de Arte Contemporáneo de México. Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City, 2004. Curated by Taiyana Pimentel.

TM: To do that one, I got in contact with a group of so-called “street kids” who live in the city center’s sewers.The work consisted of washing cars that were parked outside the space where the exhibition was taking place, the Centro Cultural de España.

TP: How are the floors going to be cleaned in Venice?

TM: This is going to be a change in work strategies. Right now I’m doing the work where the murder victim’s body fell. I read the papers and figure out the crime’s exact location. Once the body is removed and they’ve done all the official forensic work, the blood-stained area gets cleaned (by me and my collaborators) with damp rags. There’s absorption.

Afterwards the cloth is left to dry; once it’s dry it’s transported to the place where the exhibition will be held and then it gets dampened again in the local water. And with this mix the floor gets cleaned. The idea begins with “who washes the streets?” When it’s a body, or three, or when 6.000 people get murdered in one year, who cleans up the remains that are left behind? Where does the water, where does that blood/mud agglutination go? It goes into the city’s sewers, so the city grows more and more saturated in that blood.

TP: On one hand, you’ve left the morgue for the streets and you’re following what the press publishes. On the other hand, Taiyana Pimentel, T eresa M argolles y C uauht é moc Medina

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there are fluids from the crime-scene evidence. Something’s happening here—in strategy and in practice.

CM: The scene of the crime gets moved, via the mud and the sound.What it’s moving is the place where the death occurred.

6 Teresa Margolles: “Herida”, 2006. At the Fundación Colección Jumex. Ecatepec, Mexico State. Curated by: Taiyana Pimentel.

TM: Something happened there; something got cleaned up or something didn’t. Something stayed there to be melded with other events or actions. How do I relocate these possibilities? Starting with “Herida,” a piece we did together in a space at the Fundación Colección Jumex, in Ecatepec,6 I started imagining a way to carry the work to Europe. How would I transport it? How do you move a furrow made of blood? We couldn’t transport it in its original form, so the way to do it, I discovered, was by dehydrating it, using a cloth as a support, as a medium. Of course, if the cloths can be a support medium, then so can blood—it’s the medium of what’s left of someone’s life.

TP:There are two moments in the pavilion project.The first is when the cloth that’s bathed in the street fluids from Mexico appears. The second is when the cloth that’s bathed in crimescene mud and body fluids is presented. Could the mud be a substitution strategy?

CM: The thing is in Venice the piece couldn’t be done with pure blood. We have to pass a strict architectural and sanitation review process in Venice, but there’s another factor. In the press, Teresa saw a relationship between the cadavers from the north of Mexico and mud, and it has to do with the northern cities’ landscape of degradation.You’re talking about places where the land is not yet fully urbanized, where in effect there’s loose dirt on the ground.

TM: We’re talking about different kinds of crimes. In the same place they found the cadaver—the same place the press reported. The biggest difference between these and collecting blood is that the crime doesn’t have to have happened yesterday. In the case of the fabric from Ciudad Juárez—Alex Parra brought me four from there—he found two sites that were old and two that were new. He would go to the site with water and sop the cloth in the mud. It’s a different technique.

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CM: In Krems, Austria, in 2008,7 Teresa used cloth saturated exclusively with fresh blood. The work in Venice is a new piece, a step forward in her narrative where she takes charge of the crime scene in relation to what was left behind in the city. Just like shards of glass remain on the streets after an execution, these scenes documented by means of mud remain inscribed in the urban imaginary.

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“El lugar de los hechos”. Factory, Kunshalle, Krems, Austria, 2008

TP: In other words, from the morgue, to the press; from the bodily fluids you used to get at the morgue, the human grease, or the water used to wash bodies, toward evidence gathered in the streets…

CM: And the memory the city materially maintains of these places.

TP:You seem to be looking for a certain amount of veracity.

TM: I don’t know about that. Why veracity? I don’t know if that’s what it’s about. I don’t think it’s veracity.

TP: Now then: Is there another level to the relationship with the street?

TM:When compared to the morgue? Absolutely. In the morgue the only relationship I had was with the cadaver. A lot of times, without knowing its identity, I found myself before an open body, with its surviving family waiting outside. I was on that line that separates two things: the son and the mother, the father, the friend. Now I’m working publically in the streets right in front of people who know the essence of what it is I’m cleaning.

TP: So why base yourself in the mud from a place where someone was killed?

CM: I have a reinterpretation of that but I don’t know what Teresa thinks about it. My sensation is that we have an historical change where in spite of the fact that there was a situation of violence and fear, one of the ways it was managed socially was that it remained within a territory of specialists: there were those who killed, those who died as well as police forces Taiyana Pimentel, T eresa M argolles y C uauht é moc Medina

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and forensic organizations that interacted in relation to the dead. Now what we have is a situation where what’s involved is the destiny of the entire region or of the entire city, and it is this that has become the theatre of death. It’s no longer localized in a particular space; it has turned into the entire urban territory and the Liverpool piece in some way marked the beginning of the representation of this change, when you realize you’re talking about a geography that’s defined by an economics of death.What the Venice piece explores is that expanded territory where first you have an urban structure that’s saturated in this constant death, and in a second moment, you have a population that does not relate to that, as if it were an isolated case that did not involve that group of people. The audience is inside the space of execution. I think that what relocating the work makes so effective is the move to that second moment and that’s why you have this territorial notion.

TP: Doesn’t this have something to do with the possibility that death moves among the living—that the living will be the next to die?

TM: Clearly they’re the next to die. Do you think that people in Culiacán, or Ciudad Juárez or Tijuana don’t know about that possibility—that there’s a knife hanging over their heads?

Social conditions that could guarantee anyone’s life do not exist. In Ciudad Juárez, people are running away.Who guarantees anyone’s life? Why am I reading the daily papers? I’m afraid to read that it might be someone from my family, a neighbor or a friend who becomes a crime blotter protagonist.

TP: Perhaps the decisive moment in the show is when they decide to empty half the space, with the intention of accentuating the idea of emptiness and assigning the task of cleaning the floor with vestiges of murdered people.

TM: Here’s where we get to the particular and not the general. We’re not going to talk about numbers or statistics, but rather of the importance of one single dead person in a family, and of the tragedy this represents.

TP: Why did you two decide to replace all those objects proposed in the first project in favor of this idea of empti-

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ness? Are you looking for other parallels? The archeological meaning of the building itself? Or the idea of a ruin?

CM: From the first project, Teresa wanted to ensure her works coexisted with the building’s state of decay and ruin over time.

It’s a very subtle decay.That is, the building isn’t in a ruinous or dangerous state; but there is wear in the tapestries, and certain moments of damage in the ceiling… it’s simply evidence of the passage of time and an erosive state. In the first place the project bumps up against the nature of this building, which makes it impossible to display elements of the works in a simple or natural way, because, since the building is protected, you can’t hang anything without the addition of other mechanisms, whether it’s false walls or easels or near-sculptural objects for something’s support. Therefore Teresa’s work, involving an immediate friction between the substances and materials she is bringing in and the building itself, would have been compromised by the form of the structures that we would have had to put up, simply to hang something up. That’s why she made the radical decision to get rid of those structures and carry out the work so as to keep the relationship between artwork and building the most direct it could be.

But more than an aesthetic of emptiness, it’s about interjecting—in general terms—the meaning of its use: fluids and actions. It’s not so much, I think, an argument on emptiness but rather one of silence, so that the spectator really perceives this modified environment. One of the fundamental motives behind this decision was the nature of the building itself: what it means to put together a work in Venice, a city that is an overprotected world heritage site, and that is as well, for the history of modern art, a reference to the impossibility of leaving the past behind. You have to remember that starting with the futurists,Venice is a reference to that past, which cannot be separated from the impossibility of accessing a simple modernity. And in effect Teresa took this up in a way that is the complete opposite of the empty white cube. Recently she’s worked by creating friction in an unadorned, empty, modern space that houses artworks without presenting any previous discourse. This time it’s the exact opposite: she has to interact with this space that’s so imposing and that also reflects clearly visible historical phases.

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TP: Speaking of ruins, and archeology, do you find, Teresa, any sort of parallel with representation—with a representative pavilion from Mexico?

TM: We came into this pavilion after it had been chosen. It was only once in Venice that the modifications were begun. I though that instead of fixing the palace’s disrepair, it was necessary to accentuate it. The cleaning piece is going to be the one that takes up the greatest amount of space in the building.

The public will walk on top of it. It will be cleaned for six months and layers will build up to form a sort of scab. They’ll be walking atop the remains of young people that were murdered in Mexico.

TP: It looks like you two are looking to extend and develop a process.

CM:The thing is that there are analogies in what Teresa is doing that are not deliberate. They are not historical references (in the way that conceptual art in its beginnings posited the question of what the movement of a territory implied). Here basically you have a symbolic movement in which a territoriality that seems to be in one place is suddenly in another, although it’s done in a subtle, almost immaterial and to a certain extent ghost-like way. I think there’s a level at which a certain combination is evidenced, where Venice itself ultimately is the reason for its contemporary exploitation: what gets exploited commercially through tourism and image is the ruin of a very ancient phase of capitalism, of a social splendor from five or six hundred years ago.

TM: The Spanish newspaper El País published an article entitled “The Crisis is Sinking Venice” CM: And that’s what we have now: a tension between one moment of connection between history and the circulation of wealth and with a situation that involves suffering. It seems there’s evidently one level where Teresa’s register is mixing with those two situations symbolically; through movement the palace becomes activated. But it remains untouched, since it’s being activated as a reflection of the pain that’s present there.

This activation contains a certain amount of irony. The jewelry

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of Account Settling in this case is not exhibited. It remains safeguarded in a safe inbuilt inside the palace, reactivating the sense of wealth and power in the space despite their invisibility. This jewelry brought from Mexico is, as well, part of an obfuscation process somewhere between luxury and violence.

I suspect this double reflection is going to be evident to audiences. It will be an in situ project, but one that involves another site. I think its particularity emerges from this: it’s specific and at the same time it’s metaphorical. In Teresa’s work these two territories exist amid a certain instability.

TP: I’d like to add a last critical level that has to do with national representation…

CM: One of Teresa’s actions that has to do with the representation of a process that is transnational was the intervention in the Giardini.The us pavilion’s bricked up windows and doors were blocked with blood-stained fabric.

TM: …They were bloodied on the nation’s northern border.

CM: …On the border between the pavilion and its exterior.

TM: But bloodied with cadavers from the border between Mexico and the United States.

CM: So there she really is doing something with the representation of the United States to make manifest something that can only be discussed on the border of national representation.

TP:Talk again about the jewelry work Teresa has been developing since 2007. The first work was shown at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, and later it was exhibited, like a commercial window display, at the Galería Salvador Díaz in Madrid.8 Today you are proposing that there are five or six jewelry models made of shattered glass collected from one murder victim’s death and put together by a single jeweler. Why reproduce this series of designs symbolically associated with violent deaths? As well, I understand that a critical reading is carried out in this project with regard to “art as institution.” So was the jewelry specifically conceived for a commercial art gallery? What Taiyana Pimentel, T eresa M argolles y C uauht é moc Medina

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Decálogo, Museo Experimental El Eco. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Curated by Guillermo Santamarina, 2007. Also, Ajuste de cuentas, Galería Salvador Díaz, Madrid, 2007-2008.

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strategies will you implement for their use at the Venice pavilion?

TM: In general I wanted to have this interaction in institutional settings, whether they were governmental or private. To somehow speak of greed, desire and its representations.To substitute shattered glass from the streets, the product of a murder, for diamonds. The jewels are not displayed, you only can read their technical information..Who is it? Who was it? What was that person like? It’s no longer a piece of glass someone found; rather, it’s an element that touched a body, that was extracted from it, from a person who ceased living.

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Abaroa, Eduardo. “La curaduría homeopática”, Crónicas, controversias, puentes.

Primer Simposio Internacional de Teoría sobre Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, PAC, 2002.

CM: I’m interested in interactions that unite—under the apparent purity of the pavilion intervention—a constant short-circuit between high and low, the prohibited and the legal, capitalism and the criminal underworld. Their proximity, it seems to me, clearly indicates that we are dealing with a socially unified circuit and not separate elements. The relationship between blood and gold, mud and water, death and luxury also seems important to me, as a means of bringing together elements in conflict. There’s an analogy there with the act of distributing cards for cutting up cocaine that bear the image of someone who died in drug-related violence, a person consumers seek to ignore. Handing out these cards in art world circles and amid the hubbub of Venice Biennial openings potentially exposes consumers to the other side of their pleasure—to the knife-point of the conflict. I believe there’s a level where these operations are “homeopathic,” in the sense of homeopathy that at certain times, as artist Eduardo Abaroa9 pointed out, intervenes in a social conflict using the same materials as the conflict. Curiously, Teresa also undertakes a homeopathic process when she involves the substances she uses, in sufficiently low dilutions so as to present no real danger, but that nevertheless allow the substances to have a role in the show. These two principles speak to the subtle and intelligent ways Teresa gets close to what society tries to keep separate and avoid admitting is a part of the same overall economic system.

TP:As I review the structure of this book, I’m seeing masterful writers from the north of Mexico, especially from Culiacán, Sinaloa. I also understand that the people who are carrying

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the fabric elements to Venice from various cities in Mexico are also from Sinaloa…

TM: Things have to be told with a direct voice and it’s been many years since I was in Culiacán, Sinaloa, since I’ve been living in Mexico City for years now. That’s why it was necessary for people from the north be the ones to carry the materials in these movements.

CM: Jokingly, I said to sociologist Luis Astorga that with this project he was getting to know the other “Sinaloa Cartel.”

And the fact is, paradoxically, that today the region that constitutes the north of Mexico is becoming one of the principal nuclei for cultural, intellectual and artistic production in the Americas. While the politics of cultural decentralization in countries like Mexico are usually just demagoguery, here we have a case where the distribution of talent is the product of violent change in society, and this includes the contribution to the catalogue made by Élmer Mendoza, one of the most important writers in Spanish today. His work, like Teresa’s, also works by means of a rhythm of verbal short circuits between narrators, interlocutors, timeframes and actions. I think Teresa acts as an artist who is clearly conscious of speaking from a region’s locus of protest/objection, and on various levels.

Presenting her work in Venice also seeks to confront the global system’s demagoguery, which continues to operate based on stylistic, linguistic, thematic and material exclusions, where the reference point of the center is never absent. In spite of numerous difficulties, and of every kind, that were involved in doing this pavilion, I always had a precise idea in mind: if an artist like Teresa Margolles can’t realize her work at the Venice Biennial, then perhaps the Biennial ought not to exist.

TP: One of the works inside the pavilion is a flag. How did you construct this symbol? To what level of representation does it aspire?

TM: Originally the flag was going to be outside the pavilion and it was going to be exposed to all the changes that flags are subject to when they remain outdoors. Since the Biennial hasn’t happened yet, the flags are in Venice. I don’t know if they will change them every two years, but in general, the Taiyana Pimentel, T eresa M argolles y C uauht é moc Medina

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flags are in tatters, and the idea was that the weather, outdoor conditions, and the street would affect the flag—that something would happen in the course of six months. The flag is put together in the same way that the cloth from the other pieces is made, and in the same way the cloth that will mop the floor is made. It’s made from the site where a murdered body fell in the north of Mexico. Last year there were over 6000 murders and 650 children have been killed in the crossfire or for reasons related to organized crime. Thinking of them, thinking of that part of the country…

TP: A flag, in Mexico’s Venice Biennial pavilion, is a national representation.

TM: It’s a rag that was used to wipe up Mexicans’ blood that’s become a standard or banner.

TP: What do you think, Cuauhtémoc?

CM: I was thinking that in Latin America, a common task for many artists is to operate openly in relation to the most economically unequal region in the world. By involving an artwork in social tensions and preventing art from ignoring or evading the social fabric, contemporary artists seek to question the taxonomies and symbolic limits of their surroundings. This is why the concept of “institutional criticism” frequently seems like something of an importation: the works’ effective questions are posited in relation to the make-up of society. Artists like Teresa seek to produce friction between unequal social sectors and with this they respond to evidence of the false distance that elite sectors maintain from the rest of society. As to the violence the work produces, this is just one anecdote in relation to the violence that the work harnesses in order to subject it to a certain kind of reflection. As Mexican anarchists used to say at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, we’re not the cause of any conflict—just the symptoms of an immensely widespread malaise.

Mexico City, April 2009.

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Ernesto Diezmartínez Guzmán

Sinaloan critic and writer born in Culiacán in 1966.

WE ATE SOMETHING THAT WENT DOWN WRONG

Ever since I can remember, Culiacán has been a violent city: it’s the place where some of Mexico’s biggest narcotraficantes from recent decades, from Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, by way of Rafael Caro Quintero, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, or Amado Carillo “El Señor de los Cielos,” have lived or come into their own. But until not so long ago, Culiacán was a small and peaceful provincial city where a boy of fifteen could leave the baseball stadium at 11 at night and walk home without worrying, unmolested by anyone or anything.

How to reconcile these two images: the Culiacán of the narcos, the bloody wars between different gangs and execution killings in broad daylight, with the picture-postcard Culiacán, quiet and rustic, traversed by two rivers that merge in the very heart of the city? Is it an inevitable childhood idealization that’s causing me to remember a Sinaloa, and a Culiacán, that never existed? i.

Narco violence has been around for a long time now, no doubt about it. In the 1970s, the “Little Chicago” we called home was struck by shootings and executions on more than one occasion. But the “deal” that everyone understood—by those in “the business” as well as those of us who functioned as mere spectators—was that if you didn’t owe anyone anything, then there was nothing to fear.

The death of innocent parties was unusual, weird. Or at least that’s what they—what we—all used to say. At family gatherings, when someone’s recent gunning down was brought to the table, someone never failed to make a typically Sinaloan remark: algo se comió que le hizo daño (“he ate something that went down wrong/did him harm/didn’t agree with him”).

This epitaph was repeated again and again and its moral was implicit: if you don’t want that meal to go down the wrong way, the harmful way, then simply don’t eat it. Stay away from it. But if you already decided to try it, beware the consequences.

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Sinaloan society has always been ambivalent about drug trafficking and its legends, stories and personalities. It’s politically correct to point fingers at the traffickers, and say that “respectable” people are the majority in Culiacán, and throughout Sinaloa; that it’s unfair that everyone identifies us with violence when this is the land of Mexico’s best tomatoes and its winningest baseball players, or the birthplace of Pedro Infante, Mexico’s greatest movie icon.

Yet ask any Culiacán resident, or Culichi, to tell you about narco attacks, places, the anecdotes—about the narcos themselves—and he’ll never shut up. “This is where Miguel Félix lived when I was a boy…” “This store belongs to Mayo Zambada’s family…” “This neighborhood is called Tierra Blanca and they talk about it in a lot of narco-corridos” (songs about drug traffickers as folk heroes). “This is the restaurant where El Chapo Guzmán ate the other day: they say he picked up everyone’s tab, but wouldn’t allow anyone to leave until he’d finished eating.”

For years, the city’s very geography was marked by its most famously violent events. Las Quintas was the neighborhood where they set bombs on New Year’s Day to “receive” a governor who had just taken office; a certain corner opposite the oceanfront was the place where a stray bullet had killed a corn vendor who was unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time; they killed a police chief and several of his guards at that crossroads that’s in front of one of those bridges that crosses Culiacán’s rivers…

The pattern was always the same and Sinaloan society got used to looking the other way when bullets flew by and looking at things closely after it was all over. Every once in a while a “civilian” would die—like that poor corn vendor killed outside the exit of this fashionable nightspot—but besides this or that exception, the rule was always in effect: the victims “had eaten something that went down wrong.” They got what they deserved.

The problem was that, little by little, imperceptibly, more and more people began to have similar “stomach problems,” at every hour of the day and in every part of the city. What was worse, even those of us who’d not only never tried that food, but didn’t even know what it was, began to get sick. In other words, we’d all eaten something or had let others eat something. So then we all started to get sick.

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ii.

Faced with a rapid rise in executions, disappearances and murders—in Mexico in 2008 there were between five and six thousand deaths ascribed to drug-related violence, and more than a thousand in Sinaloa alone—Culiacán’s older geography took on another aspect, to such a degree that in the last few years—in the last few months—the former one lost all its validity. Not only because some of the attacks have increased in intensity or have gotten more and more spectacular, including the deployment of a bazooka in the parking area of a local shopping center, but because the number of murdered innocents grows ever higher.

We’re not talking about that poor, anonymous corn vendor anymore, the one who lived in some random neighborhood, who, for the same reasons, is so easy to forget. Now we have a pair of university professors, father and son, who had gone to pick up a car from the shop; an events photographer who stopped to fill his tank and ended up being massacred before his young wife’s eyes; the young college kid who’d gone somewhere to ask for a job and was sprayed with bullets, along with several others, both guilty and innocent, indiscriminately; or the office supply store employee who, from behind the service counter, couldn’t figure out where the stray bullet that entered her chest had come from…

Along with ever more violent clashes, and the execution of the capos’ children and brothers, the old rules were utterly forgotten. Innocent “civilians” are no longer off limits and neither, of course, are the drug traffickers’ families. Women, mothers, sisters, children and infants all began to show up on crime blotters in the local press. Nothing can stop the death-warrants, the vengeance, the score-settling, the “business.”

Along with the paranoid impulse to flee when certain kinds of people get near you, or to get religion all over again when a smoked out Hummer pulls up next to you at a traffic light, or turn your head to avoid seeing something—anything—that could compromise your safety, the State’s chaotic and abusive reaction makes everything worse.

Not only do citizens die from the bullets exchanged between different narco factions; now they also die from gunfire on the part of the forces of order who, theoretically, ought to be protecting us. So the owner of a little store in a town called La Joya de los Martínez up in the Sinaloan sierra lost

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his wife, his brother, his brother’s wife and their three children when a group of soldiers opened fire on his pick-up truck, for allegedly having failed to stop at a military checkpoint. The subsequent investigation showed the man was not carrying any firearms, had not consumed any drugs, and that he was just a common, ordinary working man.

Of course, losing your life in the middle of narcotraficante gunfire is not the same as dying as a result of a grievous error on the part of some disoriented soldiers. In fact, the soldiers were detained and have been tried in courts martial and are currently serving sentences. Oh, and naturally, the State picked up the medical and funeral bills.What a relief. It turns out the State is good for something after all. iii.

Images in Sinaloa have grown ever more confused and, at the same time, more natural in recent months. The dead pile up and it’s no longer possible to know where they come from. Or even to really take an interest in them. Until the violence reaches us. Until it knocks on everyone’s front door. Or more precisely, on mine. Or on my bedroom door.

And my children’s.

It’s Friday, just a few minutes after midnight. Machine gun fire can be heard nearby, just a few meters away. That metallic noise is unmistakable. Instincts have become habit in Culiacán: you grab your wife by the arm and you drag her to the floor.

“Is it here?”Yes, it’s here. “Here,” in Culiacán, bears the mark of inevitability. Here was where they found that body in the trunk of a car, here was where they found all those decapitated bodies, here they left a rattlesnake and a “narco-message,” here is where that guy lives, here is where they opened fire yesterday, here is where they killed those other guys…

That Friday’s here lasted from 12:06 am till two in the morning. Automatic fire, solitary shots, shouts protesting innocence, long but ominous minutes of calm that precede more automatic gunfire, more single shots, more shouting…

And there you are, in a hallway in your own house, crawling on the floor, pretending you’re calm, telling your daughter to go back to sleep—she’s on the floor next to her parents, who keep muttering “everything’s going to be all right.”Then you’re dragging yourself toward the other bedroom to find your innocent son is sound asleep. Dragging yourself from E rnesto Die zmartíne z G u zm án

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here to there, your eyes adjusted to the dark, your soul accustomed to blackness.

The following day we saw where the shooting had taken place: we saw the houses and the bullet-riddled cars.We heard the neighbors’ stories: “I saw this; I heard that.” And as the hours passed and the witnesses’ stories started piling up, the worst part: the people that did this weren’t narcos fighting among themselves. No, the people who’d shot up façades, entire houses, cars and six citizens were federal forces that made a mistake, that got confused, that temporarily went crazy.

Fortunately no one died. There has to be some advantage to living in the city, a few meters from the local university campus, in a neighborhood of professors, professionals and retirees, and not in La Joya de los Martínez, in the thick of Sinaloa’s sierras. One of the gunshot victims, a young man who’d recently been married, lost some mobility in one of his legs, but government representatives paid for his recovery, some of the houses’ façades were repaired, some of the victimized neighbors received indemnifications… I insist: the State is good for something. Isn’t that great? iv.

In this scenario, violence becomes normal. We’ve learned to live with it.To get to know it.To identify it. And ultimately, not to think of it.To forget it, to put it aside.

We’re all in bed, nearly asleep. Shots are heard again, clear and resounding. My first impulse was to pull my wife down to the floor and drag myself to my children’s rooms. At this point I know the drill: in less than a year I’ve done this twice. Months earlier, one Sunday afternoon, they killed someone in an ak-47 fusillade in the parking lot of a shopping center that’s 100 meters away from my house. A few weeks later the incident led by the “confused” federal forces that I previously described happened.

So I was about to throw myself onto the ground again, to assume the heroic position already recounted, when my thirteen-year-old daughter, wide awake, noted from her bedroom: “Don’t worry…the sound of those bullets is from far away. They’re not shooting on this block.” The following day we confirmed my daughter’s excellent ear in the newspaper.

Indeed, they’d killed some kids several blocks from our neighborhood. Close enough to hear the shots yet far enough away that they didn’t represent any danger to us.

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And here you have the legacy we’re leaving our children: expertise in identifying gunshots, the distance at what remove they’re being fired, and an ability to distinguish a Kalashnikov from an automatic weapon. It’s the inheritance we got from our parents and the one we’re passing on to a new generation of Sinaloans: blood flowing in the streets as if part of the daily landscape, something natural, practically a tourist attraction. v.

And now we finally get to the cherry on top of the sundae.

If before, when I was a kid, the murdered were guilty because surely they’d “eaten something that went down wrong,” and apparently there were no innocent execution victims, then today’s dead, whether they’re “guilty” or “innocent,” or “good” or “bad,” whether they’re narcos, cops or “civilians,” whether they’re “just working people” or “gangsters,” all receive the same treatment. Or more precisely, the same indifference. They’re just numbers, statistics, columns, diagrams. Nothing more.

Halfway through last year, one Sunday afternoon, the city’s downtown area was paralyzed by a group of community organizations, artists and private citizens who shut down several blocks of Culiacán’s main street. At that point the murder rate had reached “just” 578. A number of painters and artists had taken on the task of sketching the chalk outlines of each and every murder victim. Common passers-by stopped and observed the protest and then offered to volunteer: 578 citizens lay down on Culiacán’s downtown pavement so the artists could sketch the outlines of their massacred bodies. 578 chalk outlines stretched out over several city streets, beyond the horizon.

The time had come to stop making distinctions. Among the almost 600 victims, there had been more than sixty police and a handful of “little people.” That is, strictly speaking, that the majority of the 578 who had died were people who’d been executed by one or another band of drug traffickers. So therefore, almost all of them were “them;” very few were “us.”

Someone—the citizen chair of the State Security Board— put it in the most transparent possible terms the following day.These sorts of protests did no good because they attracted outsiders’ morbid curiosity. Culiacán is more than just violence. What’s more, most of the dead were “bad guys.” At worst, this person said, the number of innocent dead, among the E rnesto Die zmartíne z G u zm án

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578 who had been executed, barely reached twenty. And since there were so few, why talk about them? Better that we talk about the positive. vi.

In Mexico, in Sinaloa, in Culiacán, we ate something that went down wrong a long time ago.That’s still causing damage.

And that will continue to damage us and our children. For decades the problem didn’t exist outside family chit-chat and what you read in the morning paper: news of some shoot-out or the appearance of one or two bodies murdered executionstyle was forgotten over breakfast and hot coffee.

“As long as you don’t get involved with them,” our parents used to tell us, “then nothing will happen to you.” “Let them kill each other off. After all, they’re the bad guys,” said someone else. “What are you going to do? That’s the price you pay for all the money that’s changing hands in Sinaloa,” said the most cynical.

All of those years of refusing to look at things does have its price. All those years of refusing to talk about drug trafficking seriously, or about all its tentacles (social, cultural, economic, political…) have a price. Now we’re paying it. With interest.

That might not be fair. It’s true that many of us “haven’t eaten anything” directly, so therefore we don’t deserve to have it “go down wrong.” But let’s not play dumb: one way or another, we all sit at the same table and we’ve let other people join us and sit there, too. The least we can do, the minimal moral imperative we must honor, is to stop talking in euphemisms, which is worse than saying nothing.

No one who turns up executed, locked in a car trunk, decapitated or ridden with bullet holes simply “ate something that went down wrong.” These deaths, every one of them, must be remembered.We have to collect those bodies, look at them closely and take them into account. Not only because we could have been—we might be—one of them, but rather, because somehow, we are already one of them. No more looking the other way. No more silence. What else could we possibly talk about, except them—except us?

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Élmer Mendoza

Is a writer and literature lecturer at the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa and a member of the Colegio de Sinaloa. He received the Tusquets prize for novels with Balas de Plata (2008) and the José Fuentes Mares prize for El amante de Janis Joplin (2001).

He conducts creative writing workshops for new novelists in numerous cities throughout Mexico and for the Instituto Sinaloense de Cultura.

Every Time I See a Map of Mexico I Feel Like Painting It Black

The night I met Tere Margolles it was pouring rain. She was walking slowly down the street with a basket on her arm, while the downpour opened up like the colored seas. I remember because I was going through some problems then.

The night before I’d enjoyed the immense pleasure of being with the Reina del Atlántico. It was always wonderful, but that night her husband had called; he’d come home ahead of time. I went out whistling and took up my bodyguard’s post, next to the front door. The capo went in. How are you, Regino? Fine, señor. What’s up? Did you abandon your post or what? No, señor, I’ve been right here. Well, there’s a smell of street whore on you can be smelled from the street.

What are you doing? I saw that she took something from the air and she was putting it into the basket she kept covered with an embroidered napkin. I pick up pieces of Nothing. Are you crazy or what? I want to create something without memories, something to provoke other reflections. She stood on her tiptoes, grabbed a handful and placed it under the napkin.

The next day he didn’t call. He simply appeared in the bedroom with a pistol in his hand and he killed me. Two point-blank shots. La Reina shouted with fright and he went over to console her while I stopped the bleeding with corks from empty bottles. I got dressed and left the bedroom and the fortress with the orange cupolas, where I had rendered my services for two years and change.That’s when I found her.

Hola, crayola, I see the rain has no respect for you. Don’t get wet yourself. Well, it’s just that they just killed me. With time you might have been a piece for me, now I’ll only treasure your memory. Don’t fuck around, pinche Tere, if I found you it must have been for a reason, don’t you think? Are you hungry?

At El Quijote we orderd pork loin sandwiches and beer. She was wearing dark sunglasses and her hair was black. Why did they kill you? When the president declared war on organized crime, that created a million jobs, remember? Even the Jetas gang put up banners inviting people to join this new crusade.

I didn’t have to go that far. I bought a pistol from a surplus lot off this soldier, I studied the society pages in my favorite paper

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and three days later I was part of a group operation, shooting things up like a maniac.

I’ve never managed to separate my objects from my fears and I’ve never been able to get over my feeling that everything will turn out catastrophically, which I really don’t think is that exaggerated. More and more I convince myself that we’re living in a mightily fucked-up age, where you can run up against something or someone you don’t want at the worst possible moment. Are you saying that about me?

The first time we finished off 14, the second time 16, and the third time I lost count. We tried to spare the innocents, but they’re so curious and they were crossing back and forth and bang! they’re down and what can you do? They can’t blame me. We went after cops and rival gangs and not a day went by when they didn’t drop like flies, until finally we were at something like three thousand—that’s a nice round number, no? The boss was totally hyper, and every day he’d get us together and he didn’t plan anything; he’d just issue orders.We’re going after the Sánchez gang and we’re going fuck them up; or after the Ortegas or the Medinas and I don’t want one bastard getting out alive. He never went with us—that wasn’t his job. We’d pack Barret 50mm rifles, ak-47s, ak-15s, 38 specials, shrapnel grenades, 40mm grenade launchers and a 50mm antiaircraft machine gun on a tripod plus the boxes of ammo we’d need. If you’re thinking that with that arsenal nobody could touch us, you’re right.

While we were hitting each other the president declared they were winning the war. It’s not that we wanted to accept it, but a lot of times we figured maybe he was on our side, that we were the good guys. Can you believe it?

I’m a screw-up artist. There’s no one who can clean up after the consequences of my stupidity. Better just order a beer, pinche Tere, because I can’t work as a bodyguard any more.

When the boss figured that was enough we cut out for Tijuana, and it was burning up, but not because of the temperature. We ended up working there for months and we never let up. My fingers got bent from so much trigger-pulling. I arranged things so I could go out with this high-class chick— she was beautiful, kind of like Scarlett Johanson. Whoa: just remembering gets me hot. The relationship was going well, we kept going out and we had some expectations for the future. I was totally in love. One day I spoke to her father: I want Élmer M endoza

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to marry your daughter. He looked at me arrogantly: I know who you are, so naturally I’ll never allow this marriage. So then I’ll carry her off.That’s the last thing you’ll do, asshole— the guy got really snotty. Do you know who my most important partner is? He said his name into my ear, and well, I guess it was better to calm down. I wasn’t going to turn against my boss. The next day they sent me to Ojinaga and from there to Chihuahua where the work was tremendous.

Couldn’t you do something else? She commented indignantly.Why kill people—young people? Since when have you been such a moralist, pinche Tere? Well, it’s just that, what kind of country do you want for your children? What do expect in the future? I don’t have kids, much less a future, Tere; I’m dead—I found you because I’m dead.

One morning, when I was exercising in the park, I met the Reina del Atlántico, who was sad because her husband never stopped organizing gangs of thugs and she hardly ever saw him: Do you think this war will last for long? Your entire life, sweetheart. And you know, you try to understand. You can’t console all the girls out there, but some you can, so what the hell—why not fuck?

Then I went to Ciudad Juárez, where the struggle was in a low-intensity phase. One day I went to buy beer and I ran into La Reina’s husband, who before he became a capo was a cop, and before that, if you can believe it, he’d been my shooting instructor at the police academy. He hired me right away and I accepted just as soon as I saw his wife.

Now the work was more relaxed. We’d go after soldiers or this or that cop, but nothing more. The boss got along with everyone. The president kept grandstanding and gangs kept shooting happily. But the señora demanded action from me, she didn’t want to suffer like before, she said, so, hey, why not give her what she wants?

It’s ridiculous, but every time I see a map of Mexico, I want to paint it black. The perfect color for evening dresses.

Are you an idiot or what, pinche Regino? This is a country in mourning, a country full of spilt blood and the blood turns black, and you know it. I never stayed around to see how it changed colors; I always saw it when it was red. Because you’re a goddamned assassin—an unfeeling bastard. Well, I’ve seen pieces of yours that left me cold.You want me to tell you which ones?

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What I want is to create art that people don’t value—do you hear me? Art born of dispossession, of refuse, of what’s left in the streets after the crime is committed; I recognize a new smell that’s floating around the country—the smell of extreme putrefaction—and I want to use it. But it’s raining, doesn’t that tell you anything? You’re dead and you’re not getting wet.

You’re not getting wet either, you’re alive and from what I can tell you smell the rain. It’s a fact we’re not going to discuss.

The morning was coming. We heard far-off shots. That’s what really gets to me, she revealed. What city, what country could put up with such a relentless pace? Violence isn’t a symptom; it’s a career in itself. Why? Because it’s steady work.

Right that instant, La Reina del Atlántico came in. And you, what are you doing here? I couldn’t find you. Finally they told me they’d seen you with Tere. Can I sit down? Margolles removed the basket that had been on a chair. Of course.What happened? Nothing; as soon as you went away he calmed me down, we had a really hot fuck and then he shot me in the chest. She had a double stretch of surgical tape between her tits to keep the blood from seeping out. In fact, there’s a bunch of people outside. Oh. There looking for Tere, they want to give blood. Margolles froze; we stood up. The president wouldn’t stop repeating, please don’t talk about this, please don’t, and we left.

They were all there. The good, the bad and the go-betweens. Enough people to fill a stadium. Tere contemplated the crowd and looked at us. This country’s going to have to learn more from its dead than from its living, she concluded, and then she started to sketch out her ideas. La Reina and I put glass containers in place so everyone could pour their blood in and rest in peace.

Several days went by.

Sweetheart—I went over to Tere Margolles who’d yet to stop working on her most meaningful work—it’s time for me to take out these corks. And for me to take off this bandage, la Reina revealed.There’s no way around it, is there? I said no.

Don’t say any more. I’ll use your blood to print my name. It’ll be better than Nothing—you’ll see. And that’s for sure.

That was the most recent time we said goodbye.

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Antonio Escohotado

Madrid, 1942. He is a jurist, philosopher and sociologist. He has published more than a dozen books, the most noted of which are La conciencia infeliz. Ensayo sobre la filosofía de la religión de Hegel (1971), De Physis a polis: la evolución del pensamiento griego desde Tales a Sócrates (1982), Historia general de las drogas (1989), Rameras y esposas (1993), Retrato del laberinto (1998), Caos y orden (1999), Sesenta semanas en el trópico (2003) and Los enemigos del comercio I. Historia sobre las ideas de la propiedad privada (2008).

The Pharmacological Crusade: Twenty Years Later*

1. Milestones

In a globalized world, new trends emerge as quickly as they disappear, and the pharmacological situation may have similarly undergone notable changes between 1989 and 2008.

Having been fascinated for some time by the relationship between politics and religion, and returning for a moment to the subject of drugs (in reality a sub-variant of that relationship), I can see to what point writing lets us forget an object without losing it. When attention is refocused on that object, it continues to be there, but it becomes the memory of a memory, and the abundance of its details isn’t so overwhelming.

Conditioned by the immediacy of things as they were then, or changes produced over time, what would I highlight from that research and what have I left pending? For one thing, distance lets me sum up the development of the pharmacological crusade drastically.

The crusade broke out in a United States that was conscious of its future as a superpower and was thoroughly instructed in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which contemplated a moral regeneration within the nation itself as well as in the rest of the world. Focused on that Destiny—and while Europe prosecuted the First World War, in 1914—the us Congress ratified a series of bills that included: a) restricting access to opium, morphine and cocaine to physicians and pharmacists; b) making the production and consumption of all alcoholic beverages, except Eucharistic wine, illegal; and c) extending a prohibition of public tobacco use, already in place in twenty-eight states, to the entire United States. Spearheaded by the Prohibition Party—then a powerful element in the Senate—the new laws also counted on support from two fundamental entities: the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association, both motivated by licenses to continue prescribing small quantities of cognac and whiskey for medicinal purposes, and above all, in order to wield a definitive blow to unlicensed competitors (“quacks”).Then us Representative Herbert C. Hoover—who was later elected president—defined the new law as “the greatest moral experiment in History.”

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Controlled or prohibited substances represented a notable source of tax revenue, and given that revenue collection was soon to contract by one-fourth, Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing the federal government to tax personal and corporate income. Prohibition is, therefore, the origin of the irs. Prohibition would later be repealed in 1933; and tobacco successfully resisted its detractors until clashing with them again and the end of the last century. But those three controlled (though originally pharmacy-dispensed) substances would ultimately become dozens, and later hundreds, and finally countless other mood-altering substances, some available by prescription only and others excluded from the pharmacopeia. Distant from the original source of the change, the therapeutic community liberally continued consuming and dispensing morphine and cocaine, until police, impersonating addicts or simple users, started showing up at clinics and pharmacies, so that by 1921 some 70.000 us doctors, dentists, and pharmacists had been or were in prison for “unlawful conduct.” In that same year the Journal of the American Medical Association denounced a “conspiracy to deprive medicine of its traditional rights and responsibilities.”

These new measures placed the United States into a set of complex consequences—contraband, institutional corruption, organized crime, disregard for the law, and the first generation of so-called “junkies”—but it’s important to remember that the rest of the world didn’t get dragged into all this.There was a spiritual difference in the us, easily appreciated when we remember the words of Senator J.Volstead (Prohibition’s laws were called the Volstead Act) when his project went into effect:“All men will once again walk upright; all women will smile; and children will laugh; the gates of Hell will be closed forever.” Europe and the rest of the world undertook a much less ambitious policy, that in time came to be known as harm reduction. Between supposing that certain drugs were limited to medical/scientific uses, and denying those uses—as us crusaders proposed—the rest of the world’s doctors preferred the former attitude.

As well, advances in synthetic chemistry were rendering the traditional arsenal of intoxicants obsolete, and it was easy to outmanoeuver restrictions on opium, morphine and cocaine by consuming other substances. Since in the us morphine ended up being returned to the medical establishment without undue restrictions, an easing-up of things was seen once the sale of alcoholic beverages was no longer prosecuted.There was a whole A ntonio Escohotado

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galaxy of new analgesics, sedatives, stimulants and sleeping aids, sold pure, cheap and over-the-counter in pharmacies, and hardly anybody misses cocaine when they can find more potent, cheaper and purer stimulants right in their medicine cabinets. The same thing could be said for opium and morphine once heroin, and sometime later, demerol or palfium were available, soon joined by benzodiazepines for use as tranquilizers and sleep aids.

Some will remember Optalidon, a remedy especially embraced by housewives around the world since the 1950s, whose secret was a combination of amphetamine and barbiturates. In Europe, lax control measures were supported by positive results in practice, and pharmacies were even allowed to dispense hallucinogens such as mescaline. Note that it was older, upstanding individuals that availed themselves of these products and they did so in no scandalous fashion. But with the end of World War II, the United States, now the unquestioned superpower, once again reverberated with a sense of Manifest Destiny, and its paladins denounced drug makers and pharmacies for surreptitiously fusing cabaret vices with those of an opium den.

The left and permissiveness were their enemies, and the recently created United Nations received generous subsidies to create a network of international organizations committed to promoting prohibition. Before the end of the 1950s, the un had rolled out its first five-year plan for a “drug-free world.”

At the heart of the project was us delegate H.J. Anslinger, a former prohibition agent who was used as a behind-thescenes organizer and ideologue for decades.The un Bulletin on Narcotics, a monthly publication where he presented his own ideas on dangerous drugs and unseemly minorities, was also his initiative. We can read in the Bulletin, for example, how opium was linked to child abuse among the Chinese in San Francisco and New York; cocaine with rapes committed by black men in the South; liquor with immorality on the part of the Irish and Jews; and marijuana with episodes of manic dementia among Mexican immigrants or Malaysians literally running amok.

This precarious balance between normal life and a drug-free world collapsed at the end of the 1960s, a period of insurrectional apotheosis that reclaimed drugs and sex so earnestly that it proclaimed slogans like “it’s prohibited to prohibit.” Under the aegis of its triumph in matters of aesthetics and tastes, May 1968, Woodstock and other analogous phenomena also marked the beginning of an explosion in recreational drug use. A

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brotherhood of the needle—founded by William S. Burroughs within the world of certain sordid us conditions—or Timothy Leary’s antics—endowing lsd with the ability to conjure up 100 orgasms or better steer the us economy—were among the most outrageous. An even greater stupor provoked a “back-tothe-land” pilgrimage among numerous young people, which some interpreted as a shift from the System to Nature. A French version, involving worshippers of Mao and Che, was soon opting for heroin and terrorism. The Anglo-Saxon tendency, that officially sought only peace, rejected the fixed menu offered in pubs and pharmacies for an a la carte plan where marijuana and other hallucinogens were the preferred fare.

With the horror of the Vietnam War as a background, the institutional response was a war without quarter, declared by President Nixon on drugs old and new.The us’s sponsorship of un prohibition organizations, up to that point insufficient for getting the West and the East to join together in an officially declared crusade, proved fruitful when those organizations proposed an accord demanding just such an effort: 1971’s un Convention on Psychotropic Substances. International Legislation once limited to narcotics and addictive drugs was now broadened to include any sort of substance with psychotropic effects (psychotropic being a neologism created by the Convention), in an understanding that “all member states ought to look out for the emotional state of its citizens.” Up to that point, only us legislation had punished the consumption or even mere possession of controlled or prohibited drugs; now it was the un that was acting against them. Furthermore, it pressured all states to create specific narcotics task forces, toughening previously existing penalties for trafficking and possession. Where such laws were not already on the books—as was the case in India, Iran or Afghanistan—the convention urged they be created.

“Pharmacological disobedience,” the nation’s number-one enemy, Nixon declared, was a plague commensurate to the black death of the Middle Ages. The world was then still embroiled in the Cold War, divided into friends and enemies of business; yet for once, communists, capitalists and developing nations were in agreement, and the list of nations that punished the drug perp with death went from almost none to nearly forty.The remaining countries—a conglomerate from which Spain was the exception, since its judiciary refused to criminalize simple consumption—joined without A ntonio Escohotado

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hesitation in support of the Convention’s only cogent point. Specifically, that laboratories and pharmacies scale back production substantially, handing over monopoly-like conditions to the black market.

The new international law exchanged each country’s then existing paradigm in favor of one that dismissed improvisation and local particularities, but did not prevent the introduction of a new, spontaneous paradigm that further widened the gap between intentions and results. For example, it was at this point that young people began to be the principal consumers of drugs; and that the “brotherhood of the needle” began to engage in prostitution to get its fix, or steal and mug, as us reformers had feared—though unfoundedly so—early on in 1914. Something that was once problematic only for marginalized indigents had become generalized throughout all socioeconomic sectors.

Demand for cocaine and heroin went up as their pharmacybought analogues grew scarce; cannabis and recently illegalized lsd became the favorites of the counterculture, which denounced the crusade as a pseudoscientific initiative, whose solutions did nothing but aggravate drug-related illness. ii. Self-organization Within Out-of-Balance Realities

Some thirty years of total war passed, during which us directives against old and new drugs was ever more widely imitated by the international community, with the exception of the Netherlands and Switzerland, since all or some of their municipalities favored a policy of harm reduction (though this did not prevent them from being signers to international conventions). 60s radicalism did not survive much more than a generation, and a fair number of those who’d once shouted “it’s prohibited to prohibit” had od’ed on purpose, or, more commonly, had been killed by adulterated substances. But in the meantime, innumerable individuals from every part of the world had come to disobey prohibitions, and involvement in drugs had come to be the number-one cause of arrests and convictions across the planet, as well as the source of a parallel increase in crimes against property and persons, perpetrated by addicts or those who claimed addiction as an alibi.

The United States, the only country with previous experience regarding this new kind of criminal, soon achieved a prison inmate population of 1 million. Other nations confronted this exponential growth in repressors and the repressed by means

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of different responses, among them corruption. At the end of the 80s, the un, through its International Narcotics Control Board (incb), declared that Colombia, Burma, Afghanistan, Morocco and 21 other countries mass produced or distributed illicit drugs, fostering a business of roughly a half trillion dollars annually, whose laundering involved worldwide banking. The incb failed to point out that the common denominator uniting these corrupt states was that they complied to the letter with the incb’s own directives, punishing trafficking with the death penalty or life in prison. In practice, however, punitive inflexibility sanctions monopolies that are divided up between the military and the police.

At about that time, what was a simple narcotics division founded with thirteen inspectors became the us Drug Enforcement Agency (dea), the only us government organization with more employees than the cia, whose director amended a previous policy of eliminating supply in favor of a defensive war, or war of attrition: the goal would now be to make drugs impossibly expensive and adulterated. Nevertheless, not having competitors means that the black market ends up competitive, and its products end up being the most immune to price increases. At the same time, policing, punishing and promoting abstinence created a revenue stream that before long became comparable to the stream produced by illegal traffic, at the same time it employed millions of individuals from all across the globe. Illegal traffickers took advantage of growing demand to introduce an innovation known as “design.”

A memorable moment in this process occurred in spring 1985, when a un blue-ribbon panel convened to decide what to do with the emergent drug known as mdma, or ecstasy. The agenda featured testimony on the part of psychiatrists and pharmacologists who favored adding the drug to List ii or List iv, along with products like codeine and valium. Not one technical report in opposition was presented during the entire session.

A classification of the substance in accordance with a regime of legal manufacture and more or less controlled distribution seemed imminent when at the eleventh hour, the Experts decided to place it on List i (drugs lacking any legitimate medicinal use, like heroin, lsd, cannabis, etc.). Its response to the corpus of reports regarding therapeutic use was to declare that the “Committee recommends member states […] facilitate further research into this interesting and intriguing substance.”

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Nevertheless, research regarding List i drugs is not permitted, and the dismay of the professionals who had assembled for this 22nd session was summed up by no less influential an observer than the then director of the dea, Frank Sapienza, who explained to the press that “a drug doesn’t get banned because it’s dangerous; but because apparently a lot of people want to take it.”. In effect, a lot of people wanted to try it, and they were going to try it, but it wasn’t going to be under the supervision of psychologists and family counselors as the participants at the 22nd session had envisioned. Illegal trafficking therefore added the most popular drug in recent decades to its menu, to be consumed by young adults (and those even younger) whether it was on the beach in Bali, Thailand or Vietnam—or in discos and at home in temperate or colder climes. Expensive and pure at first, later cheap and adulterated, it was the most effective alternative to the recreational model represented by the alcohol and cocaine combo. Making ecstasy illegal changed nothing.

As ecstasy began to cause a sensation in youth circles, prohibition, in reality, found itself battling chemical innovation and invention—an adversary motivated by profit and rebellion.

The black market adapted to that change, and since then has offered merchandise that fits into every possible space in contemporary life, through alternatives to traditional products that simultaneously satisfy the market’s interests as well as those of the consumer. That is where design comes in, which includes Moroccan hashish, crack, rock, a wide variety of pills, and special k among its discoveries, as well as fentanyl, so-called liquid ecstasy and hydroponic cannabis. Furthermore, I’m certain I’m forgetting the illegal imagination’s latest discoveries.What these substances have in common is that they’re not the old original ones, whose absence may be felt with varying degrees of nostalgia, and that they better adapt themselves to user groups and subgroups, specific time zones and even transitory spaces.

Their improvisatory “chefs”, in some cases renowned chemists such as Alexander Shulgin, offer up their discoveries and suddenly a sedative called “hashish gum” appears, at the same time as do thousands of phenethylamines and tryptamines, more or less distant cousins to mdma. The highly technical work of launching a new drug goes hand in hand with prosaic adaptations of existing drugs and the creation of new uses, such as taking a dissociative anesthetic to wind down at an after-hours club or multiplying the thc in cannabis by means

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of advanced agronomy. thc causes a “bad trip” for many, so to serve this market, there are those who transform it into cannabinol (cb)—by simply sun-drying the marijuana—offering a hashish that doesn’t “kick in” like the classic varieties, but at the same time provides the same “choreographic” effects and also offers a certain psychoactivity.

The “alternative designer drug” era also brought normalization and standardization into the world of the prohibited, which seamlessly became a part of youthful rites of passage and increased the prominence of the increasingly democratic weekend.

Inconceivable a generation earlier, the custom of “partying hard” every Friday and Saturday might have been considered the height of frivolity had it not also become a notable focus of economic activity and a means of open socialization through stress relief and relaxation. Contemporary societies are now the antithesis of asceticism, and the fact that partying is always ceremonial exerts a magnet-like attraction to any drug that affords intensity or endurance. Alcohol’s powers for removing inhibitions have traditionally exerted a central role in celebrations, but as such occasions multiplied, grew more prolonged and diverse, their undesirable side effects have allowed for infiltration by an ever wider array of supplements and alternatives.

Cocaine, for example, allowed one to disguise alcohol-induced intoxication with a certain amount of muscular coordination, so a notable cohort at the disco favored such a mix.

Another party subset consumed only pills and water. A third sector practices an even more heroic variation with hallucinogens. A fourth starts with pills and if it can’t find special k or something analogous to bring down the party, falls back on cocaine and booze. A fifth sector drinks little, smokes a little cannabis and maybe takes an opiate. The sixth… And all these millions upon millions of people are neither gangsters nor their molls—but rather something akin to a crowd afflicted by some sort of St.Vitus’s dance. Contemplating this spiraling consumption, a good part of law-enforcement and the judiciary stopped supporting prohibition starting at the end of the 80s.

It was at that point that an ongoing vogue for televised debates on drugs ended up demonstrating that a reformist position might overturn the traditional prohibitionist one—perhaps even by wide margins—if the question were left to local and national referenda. On the other hand, contemporaneous surveys indicated that drugs were the number-one cause of public A ntonio Escohotado

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alarm, and no government was willing to risk the political costs of intervening in something where special interests, prosecutorial zeal and near-maniacal passions had converged to form an inextricably tangled ball of yarn. The fashion for discussion of drugs led to televised debates on sundry other subjects—with an identical format wherein the audience applauds or boos a panel of guests whose numbers make it impossible to examine any issue properly. But at about the time these programs fell out of favor, it also became impossible to claim, without being quite hypocritical, that in Spain and in much of Europe institutions were still operating in a state of pharmacological war.

Rather on the contrary, in a moment when the quantity and variety of products demanded a hardening of hostilities, repression mechanisms began to provide funds for educational campaigns, in support of studies on the dangers of this or that illicit substance, therapeutic bureaucracies and rehabilitation teams. Teenagers would be subject to fines or inspection on the part of municipal police, but detectives and judges no longer felt the hate/pity they had in other times for occasional users and addicts, which was equivalent to seeing the crusade as an ultimately pointless expenditure.

Before anyone could even propose it, the crusade began to contract right when it needed to expand, and ignoring un recommendations, began to be content with merely keeping up appearances. Nor was there any other way to react in the face of absurdities ranging from organizational budgets to the fact that points-of-sale for drugs were multiplying without a corresponding uptick in overdose rates, one among numerous indications that those given to drug-induced euphoria were developing autonomous mechanisms for training and awareness, and were doing so in less conflictive ways. Given the impossibility of reining in the user/provider spiral, jailing just a small percentage was exposed as discriminatory. Judiciaries began insisting on the prosecution of large-scale traffickers only; however, this left local channels intact at the same time it ignored that large-scale trafficking only exists in conjunction with support and facilitation on the part of police—and that every arrest comes at the price of impunity granted to others. In short, the so-called underground empire continued to grow and consolidate power, once more making manifest that the vitality of unconscious or self-fashioning orders always exceeds the power of the resources put in their way by any particular and deliberate scheme.

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Variables as divergent as the ability to “cook” and cultivate in any house, increases in spending power on the part of teens and young adults, a collapse in the social stigma surrounding illicit substances and a growing sense of impotence on the part of those charged with achieving a drug-free world could be added to that overarching root-cause. By the mid 1990s in Spain and throughout the eu—except in Ireland—illicit drugs were cheaper and in some cases purer than they had been in two decades. Some, because they could be made at home (marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, and every other kind of plant), and others because their synthesis, with the right equipment, was not difficult (ecstasy and its hundreds of cousins, for example, plus lsd and speed), and still others because demand outweighed the costs of elaborate exportation schemes from Latin America or Asia (e.g., heroin and cocaine).

On a parallel path to these changes was the fact that users’ and addicts’ civil disobedience advanced hand in hand with “pharmacological education,” using “psycho-nautics” (Jünger) as a response to drug-related self-destructiveness and marginalization that had peaked in the 70s and 80s.

Magazines with readership comparable to equivalent journals on motorcycles, fishing and political gossip, as well as conferences, associations and specialty stores, complemented the emergence of consumers who adopted observant attitudes, as might an entomologist or an astronomer, something closer to a wine connoisseur as opposed to a drunk. Although “psychonauts” are by no means immune to subjective follies, the vision of drug use limited to crusades and equally foolish rebels has developed into something more akin to the old Greco-Roman principle of sobria ebrietas.

Even Dr. Frankenstein’s pharmacological monster, the junky, changed more than a decade ago, willingly shifting from needles to alternative, less risky administration methods.The addicts that would hold up pharmacies or even passers-by with a supposedly sero-positive syringe have disappeared and even though there are more users of illegal substances, overdoses have steadily become less frequent and no longer figure in National Plan statistics.

On somewhat closer inspection, the abatement of these most problematic cases has depended on settlements in Spain run by Roma people that have emerged on the margins of cities.

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allows us to see something supported by equal parts discreet realpolitik and harm reduction. In addition to the demoralization that comes from observing a population that is essentially toothless and in rags, one also witnesses a stream of buyers who seem no different from normal citizens. Police patrols monitor entrances and exits; a city-sponsored iv drug-use unit gives away needles and syringes, and a methadone-dispensing mobile health unit takes pity on those with no money. Day and night, the board that serves as a table in every modest, lowslung dwelling supports three plastic bags and as many kitchen scales for the dispensing of heroin, cocaine and crack. The salesperson, male or female, insisting on silence within the house, only wants to know how much, and of what, from clients. After visiting more than one dwelling we noticed that the ubiquitous, seemingly subhuman locals hanging out on the fringes really weren’t the major buyers. Normal-looking customers are attracted to the fact that rivalry between dealing families tends to insure the cheapest and least adulterated product in every city.

iii. The Current Future

Unnerved by the stink of a toilet-free shantytown, we breath a real sigh of relief leaving behind this penultimate metamorphosis in the drama—a “supermarket” that evokes a medieval leper colony at the same time it fulfills complex functions.

“Under-control” users access drugs that would otherwise be more tightly controlled by the black-market monopoly; “outof-control” users access an area where they can spend a good part of the day among their peers—even tents can be rented for seasonal camp-outs.They’re an offense to the senses, but city hall knows in every case up to what point they can displace these settlements without their disappearing, and that their existence perceptibly reduces collateral crime and street sales. Unseemly as it may be, it’s the only option as long as pharmacies and other legal dispensaries have no access to salable alternatives.

In 2007, Andalusian authorities made public results of years-long observations of two control groups, one supported on methadone and the other on pharmaceutical heroin. The report showed that those who received the drug considered the most nefarious were happier and more willing to work than those who received the supposed antidote—a far from unforeseen conclusion. In effect, methadone is a more toxic compound, devoid of euphoric properties—just highly addic-

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tive. Anyone attempting to use it long term probably adds valium, alcohol, cocaine, liters of coffee, and heroin, naturally, to the mix, while the straight heroin addict is satisfied with just his drug. So heroin is more humane for addicts; giving them heroin instead of methadone better supports their reinsertion into society. For the time being, however, program participants only get the drug intravenously—now an anachronism for most junkies—because sniffing it or inhaling the fumes it produces when heated are not considered appropriate delivery methods within medical protocols.

Even though it has come up against resistance since the beginning, the crusade has achieved much of what it set out to do in its original country and in the rest of the world, demonstrating zealous energy to an excessive degree. Like Che Guevara’s revolutionary cause, charged with “struggling always until victory”, the crusade is neither an ethical, medical or legal school of thought, but rather an amalgam of politics and religion, subject neither to questioning nor discouragement.Without doing anything more, it has maintained an unchanging stance before situations as divergent as the initial one—a planet ordered by lax, highly idiosyncratic rules—and the current one, where a highly strict order reigns formally, and the underground empire grows at will. In crises like this, the danger ascribed to others is also a measure of each person’s fear of himself. What sense does it make to reflect on the long- and medium-term consequences of this or that attitude, when chemical nirvanas even tempt our leaders?

Just as in other sublime, coercive undertakings, volition overrides the intellect and presents setback as an impetus for more action, objections as if they were a desertion.The crusade is as prepared to make protests that no one can hear as it is to guide everyone’s conduct with an iron fist. The only remedy time possesses for influencing its decisions is to gradually channel its outrage/anguish into other causes for alarm.

Rational arguments convince those who can think without fear, but do not in the case of those who see “Drugs” as an epidemic, and a state of quarantine only diminishes to the degree that the attack on the part of the threatening other infiltrates the fearful through contact. Right on the table in closed-door sessions with Committees of Experts, you can find reports on the lamentable situation of medicine being dragged into the fight against the chemical imagination, at the A ntonio Escohotado

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1

In Spain and other EU countries, approximately one-third of the total population smokes tobacco.

same time legions of rebels mock each of their recommendations. A certain familiarization or coexistence phenomenon has been the decisive factor, in my judgment, so that a war without quarter ends up as a silent armistice.

In fact, tobacco—the only addictive drug that has remained undisturbed in recent centuries—has now come to take advantage of legal rights acquired on behalf of other drugs, kicking off a “crusade light” that assesses tolerance for a vast minority1 in light of administrative meddling. It’s a way of suggesting up to what point liberal democracy can adapt to the fundaments of the Clinical State (Szasz), and only time will tell if makers and users will continue to tolerate that their belongings be covered in slogans and images printed there without their consent or indemnification, or will tolerate discrimination that provides a third of all adults only one-twentieth of public space—or simply nothing whatsoever. If growing restrictions placed on smokers are not met with resistance, then the “it’s for their own good” reasoning could be extended to go after powders, pills and other non-odiferous substances, and maybe revert to an even greater adherence to the rest of the crusade.

When I began to take notes and accumulate research materials on the history of drugs, I was in my mid-forties. Now I’m nearing 70, and maybe readers will wonder if the passage of time moved me to switch positions on this or that matter. Naturally if I wrote it all again, I’d remove a certain amount of poorly (or properly) contained indignation, since putting in too much that’s obvious weighs down one’s expository rigor. Other than that, I haven’t changed my mind when it comes to crusades in general, or this one in particular; they still seem like explosions of collective paranoia to me, all the more cruel to the degree that they always end up doing the same thing: imposing a strategy of scapegoating on behalf of sundry pretexts. Our minds’ most primitive, reptilian substrata serve as a support to this, more or less permanently derailing our desire and efforts on behalf of responsible liberty, a prerequisite for civilized existence.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the benefits of our relationship with the psychoactive substance arsenal will outweigh its damages, unless we condition that relationship with at least as much care, self esteem, art and respect for others as is required in other spheres of conduct. Nor does it mean that the future will be fundamentally bright and not need attending to.

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The fact that I’m the father of seven children, six of whom are between the ages of 15 and 40, and that I’m proud of them all, doesn’t mean that a phone call in the wee hours of a weekend night—when statistics for highway incidents peak—doesn’t still shake me up.With spending power they never had before, young people prolong something analogous to partying at Prohibition’s funeral, as if some sort of genetic mutation allowed them to ingest amounts and varieties of drugs that would have been able to temporarily or permanently incapacitate a good many in my generation. This comes with familiarity, but life has become increasingly onerous, and stretching the limits of safety—the proportions between active and lethal dose—hasn’t moved the limits of social acceptance one millimeter. Society is more implacable than ever when it comes time to punish someone who wastes his time or thinks she can intoxicate herself without paying the corresponding bar tab.

Within a generalized herd mentality, the Netherlands stands out as an oasis of sanity. By distinguishing cannabis from other drugs in the 70s, it avoided losing the trust of its young people, in contrast to what governments do when they lump any drug except alcohol, tobacco and what you buy at the pharmacy into one diabolical bin. Later the Netherlands rolled out mobile laboratories to detect adulteration in drugs distributed in nightclubs, at after-hours parties, and at raves, following its policy of realistic harm reduction. Its municipalities were also pioneers—along with some cities in Switzerland—in the distribution of heroin as a substitute for methadone, and in the controlled availability of lsd. There is no country with a wider array of drugs available, yet none has fewer of the addicts classified as “incorrigible.” It has casually turned the same marijuana that in Malaysia and other countries calls for a dusting off of the gallows into a largely peaceful business that supports innumerable families and is a source of tourism that everyone can benefit from. As a final source of disquiet to crusaders, thousands of Dutch “coffee shops” (where marijuana is legally sold), with their select offerings of cannabis and hashish, keep domestic consumption at a notably lower level than that of Spain, or even Italy and England.

Perhaps technical progress is inseparable from the expansion of “psychonautics,” which by stretching interior space makes up for a slow, steady shrinking of the exterior caused by demographic pressures and the price of land. It’s also likely that A ntonio Escohotado

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drugs not yet discovered will become de rigeur in certain circumstances, as seatbelts and third-party liability insurance are now. In any case, our children are ignoring the Prohibitionist sermon, whose very presence, because of their indifference, is counterproductive. When we talk about prevention without sabotage, it will be to offer instruction manuals, not instructions for abstinence. The fact is that intoxication isn’t forced on anyone. Steering clear of avoidable misfortunes means building knowledge instead of prejudices. The current challenge is to apply harm reduction policies not only to minorities punished by economic or psychological marginalization, but as well to those individuals who for one reason or another deviate from the official pharmacological menu.

To continue impeding those four or five billion people’s access to the quality controls in effect for pharmacies, dispensaries and supermarkets multiplies the dangers of the nominally forbidden object, easy to acquire in practice, yet singular for including the only things in the world where sola dosis facit venenum. Behind decades of war designed to redeem souls held hostage by diabolical drugs, imagining that an enormous black market could revert to transparency without interventions that are inconceivable today, means believing in something as unrealistic as liberating the planet from all illicit drugs. While the true story continues to forge new paths that will ultimately be decisive, in the meantime, in my opinion, compassion dictates replacing the Crusade’s experiment in eugenics with empirical and observational intelligence, unburdened by myth and fable. The disturbing part of it all is that we will go to the devil if we don’t teach people to administer sensibly, as we tried to teach the professions, since this skill depends on understanding quantity and purity clearly.

The prohibitionist experiment has not managed to dissuade users, limit points-of-sale or even make the illicit more expensive. But it has managed to thicken the fog around the substances’ composition, and for that reason has ended up being the principal ally of its supposed adversary: callous, reckless drug traffickers. *

Editor’s Note:This text was originally written as an appendix to the eighth revised and expanded edition of Escohotado’s classic study: Historia general de las drogas (Madrid, Espasa Calpe, S. A., 2008).

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T he P harmacological C rusade : Twent y Years Later

Mariana Botey

(Mexico City, 1969). Artist, experimental filmmaker and visual studies theorist; she is a research fellow at the University of California MEXUS Program and is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation in the Visual Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine. She obtained an MFA from the Studio Art Program at the same institution and a BA from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London. Her work has been part of exhibitions such as: “Eco: arte contemporáneo mexicano”, National Museum of Art Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain, 2005); “Independent Los Angeles”, Disney Hall (Los Angeles, USA, 2003); “Axis México: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions”, San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, USA, 2002); “The Axiomatic Arcade”, Track 16 Gallery (Santa Monica, USA, 2001); “Video Latinoamericano”, National Museum of Art Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain, 2001); “Mexeperimental Cinema Program”, Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Spain 2000 – New York, USA, 1999); “At the Curve of the World”, Track 16 Gallery (Santa Monica, USA, 2000). Works and lives in Panotla, Tlaxcala.

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Toward a critique of sacrificial reason: Necropolitics and radical aesthetics in Mexico 1

In this article I use the names “the dissident surrealists”, “Ethnographic Surrealism” and “Bataille’s group” to designate an intellectual, internal opposition to Andre Breton’s Surrealism. The project of Documents, which ran 15 issues through 1929 and 1930, drew several unconventional artistic and intellectual figures such as Michel Leiris, Joan Miró, Robert Desnos, Carl Einstein and André Masson among others. The figure of Bataille is at the center of this splitting group, becoming in his own words Surrealism’s “old enemy from within.” For a detailed survey of the importance of Documents to the avantgarde debates see: Dawn Ades, Simon Baker. Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents. London- Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press-Hayward Gallery, 2006.

2 In July 1937, in issue 3-4 of Acéphale a “Note” appeared regarding “A Declaration Relating to the Foundation of a College of Sociology.” Its closing paragraph reads as follows: “3. The precise object of the contemplated activity can take the name Sacred Sociology, implying the study of all manifestations of social existence where the active presence of the sacred is clear. It intends to establish in this way the points of coincidence between the fundamental obsessive tendencies of individual psychology and the principal structures that govern social organization and are in command of its revolutions” (emphasis added). Some of the names associated with the College are Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, Jean Paulhan, Anatole Lewitzky and Georges Bataille.

Other important figures also gather under the conspiring constellation, most notoriously, Walter Benjamin and Alexander Kojéve. For an annotated account of the theoretical production of “The College of Sociology” see: Denis Hollier, ed. The College of Sociology (1937-39). Translated

by Betsy Wing, Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

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i.

Around the time when Georges Bataille wrote his final contributions for Documents (1928-1931), the appearance of a series of critical conceptualizations marked the transition of the dissident surrealists toward a theoretical project defined as a direct attack to the epistemological system-structure upon which European modernity represented itself as Civilization.1 For Bataille the important critical shift was underscored by the fact that the end of Documents was itself a move away from art—as if, in a sense, the project of Documents had dismantled the very construction of art to reveal its neurotic bourgeois character; art became suspect of subservience to its ancient cathartic function of stabilizing dangerous social and psychic energies, an operation that was normative and ideological inasmuch as it was busy in finding a remedial system of symbolic transpositions.

Completing the publication of Documents, and finding its subsequent articulation first with Contre-Attaque, then with Acéphale, and finally, with the formation of The College of Sociology, meant an important step in the process of differentiation of the mise en scène of Ethnographic Surrealism (or the dissident surrealists). There was a significant change on the register that shifted emphasis toward a theoretical practice, and taking a discursive turn was rather an intensification of the performative (political-discursive) dimension of this practice.

The College was conceived under a conspiratorial sign: the program took the shape of a project for a sacred sociology; the agenda was defined as a militant re-activation of a concealed dimension of the sacred.2 Still, the occluded sacred territoriality to be excavated was marked by a structure of recurrence and compulsion that worked by activating and programming the social field in relation to a chain of key terms such as death, mutilation, violence and sacrifice. The group around Georges Bataille engaged in a sort of counter-classification; a catalog of actions and cultural traces having the power to liberate heterogeneous elements and to crack through the apparent homogeneity of the subject. In an extreme gesture, what

was a stake was a reactivation of a deferred or repressed memory through which we could return to a space before the subject; an experiment of de-subjectivization.

These emerging critical conceptualizations were defined by a radical move away from all forms of Idealism: the formulation of a program for a base materialism, and a proposed counter-methodology assembled under the concept of heterology, signaled a theoretical operation that acted as a systematic process (machine) for the de-sublimation of modernity.

Both Base Materialism and Heterology operated according to a strategic re-inscription of those examples that unsettled the logic of rational production (instrumental reason) by illuminating a radically other logic propelling the forces at play within modernity. Among those examples, the idea of Mexico and its indigenous root and culture, served as a recurring referential imaginary. Actually, the imagination or Idea of Mexico functioned as a symbolic-allegorical reservoir for revolt and revolution across the two basic camps of Surrealism.The connection between Andre Breton and Diego Rivera exemplifies the staging of avant-garde practices from the localization of Mexico, situating it as a crossroad in the international map of connections to some of the major political and cultural confrontations during the interwar period, such as the formation and expansion of the Comintern, the cultural politics of the Popular Fronts and the beginning of War World ii. ii.

The argument that I will propose here—notwithstanding the critical gesture directed to art as failing agent for heterogeneous radicality, that is, its diminishing power to manifest that which is nonassimilable—postulates that there are relevant examples of artistic projects that explore, approach and account for this different logical formation operating within modernity; I’m referring to works that appear to be arguing for a register of poetic production dispersed in the social body and woven through the threads—in the specific case of our examples—of an imaginary cathexis at work in the idea of Mexico, a manifestation of a figure of aesthetics that returns in fluctuations (rotations), and that exceeds and overflows the dichotomy of rationality-irrationality on which modernity grounds itself.

Exemplified in the interpretations, elaborations, readings and inscriptions of Georges Bataille, authors like Antonin Artaud, Mariana B otey

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3 For reasons of length this text cannot elaborate on each of these examples in detail (or for that matter extend the list to include other important ones converging at a similar crossroad). The case of Antonin Artaud is critical in the proposed genealogy: contemporary to Bataille, and in his own right a dissident figure within the surrealist debates, Antonin Artaud’s allegorical reading of Mexico is perhaps the most intense and hallucinatory experiential working through the traces of the spectral structure that we are discussing here. Having said that, it is important to underline the textual evidence that links the specific formulation of the Theater of Cruelty to the imagination of the Conquest of Mexico: in The Theater and Its Double, and in a letter to Jean Paulhan from 1933, Artaud refers to his project-draft “La Conquête du Mexique” as the initial and exemplary formulation for the radical conceptualization of theater he was proposing. The structure of immanence/manifestation investigated throughout his life and avant-garde experiments was at that time described as an exploration of the secret and revolutionary logic contained on a double movement of immersion and restoration of the Mesoamerican civilizations. Artaud was the first to invoke the notion of an Indian Revolution in connection to a advancing a critique of orthodox Marxism. For an annotated compilation of Artaud’s texts on Mexico see: Artaud, Antonin. México Y Viaje Al País De Los Tarahumaras. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004. And, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. Translated

by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London, New York, Calcutta, 2004.

4

Contrary to what a superficial criticism of her work would argue, Margolles’s art is not to be reduced to a shocking fetishization of death. The shock comes, rather, from an operation of the use value of death to reveal the logic of fetishization that is always at work in the art market.

We would expect that our interpretations are bound to encounter some opposition from the guardians of the critical legacy of Bataille. However, the obscenity of the violence contained in the work is misin[Continues on next page]

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Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Juan José Gurrola add to our examples forming a splinter rebellious to the romance of the sovereignty and autonomy of the subject.3 In the contemporary moment, the work of Teresa Margolles continues this critical or dissident genealogy. Her practice is also crisscrossed by the iteration of a method of radical transgressions organized by base material processes, and beyond that, the punctuation of a logic—or substructure—of contamination that works through the uncanny circuits operating in connection to the production (and circulation) of death. The important question underscoring Margolles’s practice bridges the disjointed space of art and recuperates the de-sublimated operations advanced by the political agenda of the Ethnographic Surrealism at its most intractable core; that is, pointing to key mechanisms linking death and a sacrificial economy to the production of power and the borders that frame politics.

The work of Teresa Margolles moves like a dismantling or de-sublimating machine through the circulation of representations of violence, deploying an uncanny operation of contagion by circulating the objects, matter and remains of death and its processes: a displacement of dead parts that appear to deconstruct their own symbolic transposition and fetishization in the sphere of art. A drive for macabre play or, Jeu Lugubre, pulsates in works such as Lengua (2000), En el Aire (2003) Tarjeta para picar cocaína (1997), as well as works she produced as part of the semefo group, like Dermis (1996), a piece that turned extreme and excessive for which the group used horse’s entrails to cover a set of couches and sofas (a monstrous mocking of upholstery).4 What these actions and objects invoke is a perverse charting that acts as an interruption of the normative chain of symbolization of death. Aesthetic practice reverses, becoming a sort of nonsublimatory “undoing of the negation;” that is, a systematic challenge to the interdiction that weighs on the taboo field of forces normally invested in dead human parts, remains and fluids. The key logic pushing the set of symbolic displacements operates in the “making uncanny” effected by the intervention (contamination) of space and in particular art and museum space: a process of doubling or making uncanny of key localizations of modernity, postmodernity and hypermodernity.

The critical task of upsetting, unraveling and unfastening the neutralization of the power of death as a cultural-social Toward a critique of sacrificial reason : Necropolitics and radical aesthetics in M exico

device of control and political engineering, separates these forms of aesthetic practice from the realm of sublimatory codes through which capitalism used art as a toolbox to expropriate and expand over (colonize) the psychic territories attributed to “the savage, barbarian, infantile, primitive and demented.” A deconstruction of the protocols of colonial warfare and colonial narratives emerges by making evident a concealed sacrificial trace implied in modern capitalism.

Moreover, the trace is activated and manifests as a political phenomenon that unfolds in the violent and brutal reality of (ex)colonial territories. Thus, we could argue that a postcolonial set of problems underlines the artistic procedure making reason unstable, displacing its centrality as an organizing axiom, and doing so by bringing into play other categories such as death, expenditure, and the concealed pulsations of the libidinal economy: that is, explicitly, by underpinning the inscription of sacrifice as central to a mapping of the human.

The reading that interests us would emphasize the allegorical character of this inscription—the inscription of Sacrifice as the very notion from which to operate the chain of discursive displacement in which death, ritual, politics, metaphysics and aesthetics sediment a different logic: another economy, noneconomy, a general economy.The critical task marks the extent to which the notion of sacrifice suffers an intrinsic indetermination in its multiple manifestations, working simultaneously as: theoretical operative (device-dispositif), historical structure, concept-metaphor, ideological device, symbolic economy, archeological evidence, juridical foundation of the state, the “secret” grammar of power and, also, a counter-image (hieroglyph) for a project of total revolt (i.e. the dismantling of the order of representation-domination).

These examples come exclusively from the realm of art and its discourse (although all of them have heterogeneous correlates in the sphere of politics and the archive of history).

Perhaps because the character —at once concealed and folded— of the problem of sacrifice as the repressed representative operating within instrumental reason has displaced its clear formulation (enunciation) as precisely a form of articulation that manifests mostly as (a) program(s) for a kind of radical aesthetics. The theoretical speculations of Bataille about the sacrificial order of the Aztecs; the analogous conceptualization Artaud proposed in the Theater of Cruelty—which was Mariana Botey

terpreted if it is not understood from its localization and the social relations from which is produced. The critical difference here is that it is obscene because it reflects a political economic history of colonization, social violence and extreme poverty. Any alert interpretations of Margolles’s work passes for an economical critique that evidences the “precariousness of life” for the marginal and poor populations of the global south. By localizing the underground commerce of death occurring in circuits of exchange such as illegal immigration, wars of occupation and the geopolitics of black markets of weapons and drugs the intervention here is one in which the work manifests as a critical fetishization (reification): that is, illuminating the extreme poverty that circumscribes the centers of money and power. Thus, to dismiss it is to misread the colonial-postcolonial dimension of Bataille’s legacy and, to be puritanical in the face of an aesthetic desublimatory act of aggression (i.e. the kind of attack to representation that Bataille valued in the example of Manet).

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5

During the post-war years and taking part of what in Mexico is identified as “Generación de Medio Siglo” or “Generación de la Ruptura,” Alejandro Jodorowsky (Chile, 1929) and Juan José Gurrola (Mexico, 1935-2007) are fascinating examples of this counter-genealogy and, already, unmistakably and consciously indebted to the figures of Bataille and Artaud, as well as a specific local and radical deviation from the surrealist legacy. Jodorowsky arrived to Mexico in 1960 and soon became the catalyst for the new avant-garde languages of experimentation in visual art, theater and film. Moreover, his influence is strategic for an emergent formation of dissident cultures given that he officiated as a sort of instigator and guru for Counterculture, still to this day, having vast repercussion in the realms of theory, criticism and politics. As Cuauhtémoc Medina argues in his short essay “Recovering Panic”, the Panic world (el Mundo Pánico) was conceived as a “sacred trap”: Jodorowsky’s work “pushed counterculture into paroxysm with the ambition of advancing a critique of the social totality, and doing this, by deploying an arsenal from outside the European Enlightenment.”

His happenings “…suggested, in effect, a violent de-sublimation: a succession of iconoclast acts mixed with unforeseen actions and rants, sexual referents and mayor destructive operations of objects and images.” Juan José Gurrola extends these lines of investigation and friction, acting as an important and direct link to the contemporary generation of artists in Mexico.

An emphasis on violence, erotic and moral disorder as well as traces of the “sacrificial economy” clearly separates these works from other forms of Pop art, Fluxus art experimentation in the international scene, and more programmatic or instrumental forms of counterculture as revolution. See: Olivier Debroise, Cuauhtémoc Medina.

La Era De La Discrepancia. Arte Y Cultura Visual En México 1968-1997. México: Dirección General de Publicaciones y Fomento Editorial de la UNAM- Editorial Turner México, 2006, p.97-103.

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also propelled by an imagination of the mythic and ritual dimensions of indigenous culture; the initiatic pedagogy rehearsed by Jodorowsky in his Panic Theater and his early psycho-magical experiments with cinema; or the gestures of sexual transgression, perverted play and poetic violence that crisscross the multiple lexical and formal experiments of Gurrola, participate in a discontinuous and intermittent movement that approaches this other non-economy or sacrificial economy5. The contemporary practice of Margolles emerges in the multiple planes of circulation of these estranged and un-folded (doubled) figures, a diagram of a field of forces that forms and limits the contemporary: a cartography for a de-sublimated modernity, recounting an orgy of violent representations, while at the same time dismantling them, and searching for a space that overflows into (or is expended as) pure manifestation.

Sacrificial Specters

Sacrifice is only possible after accumulation. Sacrifice is superabundance, radical expenditure, exuberance and effervescence.

Its operation is the de-transcendentalizing operation par excellence: it returns man to the animal by a double process of unfolding the body outside death and inside death, by splitting consciousness in a instant into the spectacle of its own destruction and dismemberment. Sacrifice maps human practice by inhabiting the gap between death and the becoming of the subject—provided that becoming-subject supposes upholding the work of death understood as the violence of negativity, to the extent that it is through this confrontation with death that the subject is cast into the incessant movement of history. The very notion of sacrament is bound up with sacrifice, like a hieroglyph in which death withdraws from the horizon of meaning, escapes utility and returns as a power of proliferation: sacrifice is the cryptonym of sovereignty.

The work of Georges Bataille mutinously elaborates and reelaborates the meaning of sacrifice, sidetracking the Hegelian metaphysical apparatus in one of its fundamental categories: pushing death (the key term representative of the power of the negative) to the point at which destruction, suppression and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure that the very mechanism upon which dialectical symmetry operates is unsettled. Bataille’s intervention has critical repercussions for Toward a critique of sacrificial reason : Necropolitics and radical aesthetics in Mexico

contemporary theory on at least two key areas: on the one hand, by withholding death’s signification from the production of truth; that is, by keeping from or arresting it within an economy of knowledge and meaning; and on the other, by effecting a radical digression or deviation from the tradition that modernity has, as a rule, used as a foundation for the conceptual construction of the problem of sovereignty, and as a result, the structure of power and the terms by which it defines “the political.”

Bataille’s inscription and re-inscription of the notion of sacrifice periodically returns to historical data and finds one of its privileged objects in the example of the Aztecs. The historical image is important: it brings about a series of colonial and post-colonial readings yet to be interpreted and traced within the work of Bataille. Still, the Aztec example is made exceptional; it undergoes a process of reification so as to constitute the example that invalidates all other examples.

The exceptionalism invested in the idea of the Mesoamerican civilization echoes what is the most typified rhetorical figure of the Aztecs in textual and historical interpretations—often more an allegorical sediment than an actual description. The appeal resides in the monstrous character of the example: the uncanny logic that underscores the imagination of a world ruled by sumptuosity and blood rites; the model of a society that does not represses the sacrifice that forms (constitutes) it; the image of an empire for which the aim of accumulation and expansion is autogenic destruction and ritual expenditure. Homicidal and suicidal at the same time, the Aztecs are the case of a society based upon death and faithful to its basis to such a degree as to become ephemeral and be ready to die. By all accounts the figure of sovereignty emerging in this historical imago disturbed the discursive formations that are normative to modern political doctrine, and beyond that, the very structure of political economy all the way to the Marxian “mirror of production.”6 Bataille follows Ariadne’s thread from the subterranean excavation of the labyrinth to the territorialization that grounds the pyramid: above and below the search (desire) is for the Minotaur: the operationform that collapses that which alienates man from animal.The sacrificial contract of ancient Mexico illuminates a system that perpetuates itself in the infrasecond of an act were man is delivered back to inhabit the immanence of the animal.

Mariana Bote y

6

A dense process of inscription inevitably screens textual and historical interpretation of the Aztecs acting as the metonymic trace for Mesoamerican civilizations. The precipitated and violent foreclosure of the historical continuity of these peoples left behind a copious archive of descriptions and artifacts created and classified by the agents of colonial domination. Bataille “reads” the Aztecs from within the protocols of supplementation that form the ghostly or phantasmagoric trace in the text.

Thus in using the term imago the intention is to point to the fact that what is a stake here is an “unconscious representation” of history, an acquired imaginary set rather than an image: a stereotype through which, as it were, the “subject” views the Other.

An imago works beyond mental images; it is experienced also as feelings and behavior, it is both, affective and familial.

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7 Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated

by Robert Hurley. 3 vols. Vol. 1 - Consumption. New York: Zone Books, 1991. p. 46.

8 The chain that links the architectural metaphor throughout the texts of Bataille is critically annotated and explored by Denis Hollier in his book: Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille.

Translated by Betsy Wing. Cambridge Massachusetts, London England: The MIT Press, 1989. p. 48.

9

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, Vol. I. p.49.

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The first explicit elaboration of the Aztec example occurs in “L’Amérique Disparue” (Extinct America), one of Bataille’s earliest articles, which was published in 1928 as part of the catalog for the exhibition “L’art Précolombien. L’amérique Avant Christophe Colomb.” The chain of intertextual play upon which Bataille will elaborate his critique of classic and Marxist political economy returns to the Aztec example in his later work. In chapter 1 of La Part maudite (The Accursed Share), the re-inscription of the Aztec phantasmagoria propitiates the very structure of transgression that engenders a genealogy (heterology) of polyphonic examples for demolishing history by disturbing the synchrony of homologies that instrumental reason had warded as the academic expressive code of the European system of knowledge. As Denis Hollier has pointed out, the attack is directed at the structural mapping of modernity’s subjective formation, which is allegorized in the theme of architecture as a prison—as a symbolic dispositif of authority, control and social ordering. Shaping, enclosing and silencing the subject in its function as a fixed and idealized superego, the architectural metaphor is divested of its idealistic occlusion through the Aztecs, whose “science of architecture enabled them to construct pyramids on top of which they immolated human beings7.” A knowledge that turns against itself, in the example Bataille finds the instance in which architecture is “returned to the destructive interaction that its initial function was to interrupt.” The ritualized spectacular display of death and violence staged atop the ceremonial buildings of the Mesoamerican Polis manifested the sacred logic of the contract that binds the community (a share in a common crime): in Bataille’s description the overlapping of the sacred contract with the social contract sediments in the figure of the Aztecs as heroic barbarians8.

Bataille inverts the stereotype of the wretched Aztecs in a radical operation that re-inscribes them as a model of the “Barbarian,” that is, those who elude “systematic conquest;” a society that finds its logic in pure transgression and aimless dépense. The Aztec war machine was conscious of the enchantment of war and sacrifice to a degree that “wars meant consumption, not conquest.”9 There is a profound unnerving of all conventional readings that attempt a categorization of the historical example:

Toward a critique of sacrificial reason: Necropolitics and radical aesthetics in M exico

If the Aztecs must be situated, they belong among the warrior societies, in which pure, uncalculated violence and ostentatious forms of combat held sway. The reasoned organization of war and conquest was unknown to them. A truly military society is a venture society, for which war means a development of power, an orderly progression of empire. It is a relatively mild society; it makes a custom of the rational principles of enterprise, whose purpose is given in the future, and it excludes the madness of sacrifice.10 Regardless of whether Bataille’s interpretation occludes his own limited understanding of how the separation of military and religious life was inoperative in the Mesoamerican context, and in turn his failure to grasp the messianic ideology that, in the specific case of the Aztecs, propels the very ambivalence of the sacred from its centrifugal containment into a centripetal unraveling, what is truly a stake in his reading must be understood as the launching of a counterattack against a civilizing system dominated by architecture: not only an image of social order but that which guarantees it.11 For Bataille, architecture is always Representation at its most dictatorial ideological idealism; the covering of the site of a crime with a pile of rocks, the hiding and folding of death in discrete monuments, temples and palaces which operate as identical to the space of representation, that is, always representing something else than themselves: “a religion that it brings into space, a political power that it manifests, an event that it commemorates12.” The metaphor of architecture is displaced into that of the construct, the reified presence of a structure that is never to be reduced to the building, and is meant always to expand its semantic field, that is, its symbolic mastery over the social body. The ghostly image of the sacrificial economy of pre-Columbian Mexico strikes a blow in the organic and idealized imago of society, opening up the labyrinth again: working through a negative imago as it were.

10

Ibid. pp. 54-55.

11 Recent interpretations suggest that in the Mexica case what is occurring is a moment of de-coding (abstraction) of the sacrificial system common to the all Mesoamerican cultures. The Aztec war machine is both nomadic and imperial, provisional and in radical dissemination. It is a political instrumentalization of the logic of sacrifice under a messianic ideology that both expands and expends empire: a historicalpolitical construction that suggests the stipulations of a state of exception.

12

Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture, p.31.

The critique of the pyramid?

The critique of Mexico begins with the critique of the pyramid.

Octavio Paz, Postdata, 196913 Octavio Paz published Postdata in 1970. A collection of essays that were meant to be a reflection after Mexico—a further elaboration of The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)— commenting Mariana B otey

13 Paz, Octavio. El Laberinto de la soledadpostdata-Vuelta al laberinto de la soledad.

México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999. p. 305.

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14

Ibid. p.291. Emphasis added.

15

Ibid. p. 290.

16

Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. [Exposé of 1939]” in Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project.

Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. pp. 14-15, my emphasis.

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on recent political developments, especially the 1968 student massacre of Tlatelolco. The closing essay of this small volume, “Critique of the Pyramid,” guards a contentious analogy to Bataille’s reading of the Aztecs. Both interpretations coincide in deploying a strategic allegorical reading of the pyramid and sacrificial logic whereupon to illuminate a manifestation of modern political violence. The discrepancy is interesting, inasmuch as it marks a radical difference in their critical relation to the civilizing project of Enlightenment, the viability of modernity and the notion of progress or development.

Octavio Paz’s essay makes a significant contribution by advancing a reading that clearly situates the phenomenon as if we were confronting a phantasmagoric scene: “It is a Mexico that, if we learn how to name and recognize it, we might one day finish transfiguring it: it shall cease to be that ghost that slips into reality and turns it into a nightmare of blood.

Double reality of the 2nd of October of 1968: to be an historical fact and to be a symbolic representation of our subterranean or invisible history14.” That ghost that slips into reality, the symbolic representation of a subterranean history, Paz underscores the ghostly presence-made-absence of an occult structure that again is given a proper name in the figure of the Aztecs. The cathexis of the historical figuration ciphers a sort of symbolic overdetermination upon the political structure or power structure. Sovereignty in modern Mexico is authoritarian and violent because it expresses a repressed content: it has an unconscious that is Other and comes from the Other. The hidden operation is the Aztec sacrificial war machine: a model of sovereignty that splits in an unbridled movement that contaminates reality, a “perpetual present in rotation” disjointed by a constitutive traumatic memory of an original state of exception.15 Moreover, this is also a history of usurpations—the “origin” is always folded and double—and as such is always at peril and knows itself to be provisional.

However, while Bataille conjures the ghost, extending an invitation for it to prey over idealized humanity and to activate its destructive powers (an uncanny echo of the invocation that Walter Benjamin makes of Blanqui’s image while he was held a prisoner at the fortress of Taureau: “…that humanity will be prey to a mythic anguish so long as the phantasmagoria occupies a place in it16”), Octavio Paz was clearly officiating over an exorcism. Meant as a critical reading, the historical disT oward a critique of sacrificial reason : Necropolitics and radical aesthetics in Mexico

placement that Paz attempts in his argument remains problematic: specifically, the fact that he transfers the very structure of violent domination to the moment prior to conquest and the imposition of colonial rule (explicitly obscuring the critique of modernity, the violence of the colonial process and the destructive historical logic implicit in the expansion of capitalism). The source of the social dysfunction that is expressed in modernity has its origins in a mythical ancient history: the Spaniards are a second usurpation of a first usurpation, that of the Aztecs over the civilizing glory of Teotihuacán. All forms of Mexican power—from that point till the post-revolutionary regime that perpetuated the massacre of Tlatelolco—rotate under this sign. And although he recognizes the presence of native culture as an internal (ghostly) otherness that cannot be extirpated without amounting to a mutilation, although he poetically advances by questioning “Which one is the original and which one the ghost?” Critique of the Pyramid repeats the very movement of “production of knowledge” that Bataille unsettled in his critical annotation to Hegelian dialectics.17 Paz’s essay is part of his Labyrinth series, a body of work that is engaged in producing a “phenomenology of Mexicanidad,” a project that at its core is concerned with spelling an essence that “speaks the universal.” Paz falls victim to the Icarian solution (transcendental movement upwards) that Bataille denounces as a false exit from the labyrinth, a move antithetical to the base materialism that he had argued for at the time of the surrealist debates. Such a critique would need to advance by a different route: namely, the dangerous path of engaging in a reading of the necropolitics of Mexico as part of the reading of postcolonial modernity.

17

Paz, Octavio, Postdata, p. 289.

Necropolitics and radical aesthetics in Mexico

The cyclical mass destruction of humans is an experience that marks the pulsations of contemporary political space.War, poverty, marginality, social violence, racism, political repression are among the zones of its manifestation. Its logic of operation is often organized along the axis of confrontation that emerges from the field of forces at play in the historical formations of empire-colony, production-distribution, territory-disposable population, domination-subordination. The iteration of this structure—which could be defined as the production and regulation of death—gives us reason to believe that the political Mariana B otey

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18 The notions of Necropolitics and Necropower must be understood as a critical development that takes its cue from Michel Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of Biopolitics or Biopower. In his book, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben illuminates to what extent the notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit in the history of western thought and to which degree this definition is in turn determinate by the idea of the sacred and its intrinsic relation to prohibition (taboo). In the context of our discussion what is relevant in this elaboration is pointing to the colonial sphere as the exemplary case of sovereignty as state of exception: Agamben establishes a direct relation that connects a state of emergency linked to colonial war to the creation the concentration camp and experiments that extend it to the entire civil population. The critical implications of his central theses imply a hidden matrix that connects these forms of political control, and the nomos (law) of modernity. See: Agamben, Giorgio.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.

Edited by Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery, Meridian. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988.

19

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40, p.13.

20

Ibid. p. 25.

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paradigm of modernity could be described against the grain from the philosophical definitions of sovereignty, autonomy, subjectivity that preside over the tradition (political doctrine) of the Enlightenment. We are here facing a phenomenon that we could name (following the theorizations of Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe) Necropolitics or Necropower. 18 Normative stipulations ruling over the theorization of democracy presupposed reason as its essential and constitutive topos. Modernity is articulated and organized around a measure of rationality, and it is upon this ground that the notion of sovereignty is expressed as a project based in the struggle for autonomy; that is, in the formation and production of subjects that are created in a process of self-institution and selflimitation. As Achille Mbembe points out in his critical essay “Necropolitics,” there are plenty of examples that impel us to re-think the problem of sovereignty, not as the struggle for autonomy, but rather as the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations19.”

The historical circuits of operation where the phenomenon of necropolitics appears constant and necessary become transparent and obscene in the sphere of the colonial-postcolonial: “Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules. It is not legally codified activity. Instead, colonial terror constantly intertwines with colonially generated fantasies of wilderness and death and fictions to create the effect of the real.”20 It is not a coincidence that it is precisely through a re-reading of Bataille’s theorization of sovereignty that Mbembe advances his intervention into a logic that depicts coloniality and post-coloniality as the territorialization where exception provided the structure of sovereignty, as the space whereupon “the fiction of a distinction between ‘the ends of war’ and ‘the means of war’ collapses.”

In Necropolitics, Mbembe advances the deconstruction of modernity’s romance of sovereignty from the localization of Africa and Palestine. In a similar gesture we could advance a critical emplacement, at once key and disturbed, from Mexico (or to be more precise from “the idea of Mexico”). The critical task implies a re-inscription, or re-reading back, of a colonialpostcolonial dimension onto Batailles’s texts. Here we find a supplementary logic that operates in a discursive and aesthetic register, which identifies the production and regulation of T oward a critique of sacrificial reason : Necropolitics and radical aesthetics in M exico

death as a dispositif (device-war-machine) for political domination and historic ordering. Moreover, following the trace of the Aztec phantasmagoria that inhabits Bataille’s examples, we could intertwine a sort of disturbed genealogy (heretic history) where “the idea of Mexico” is prefigured as a reservoir of the cultural imaginary from which modernity has attempted a return to the multiplicity of confronted concepts of sovereignty that were taking place at its origins.

Both Octavio Paz’s Critique of the Pyramid and Georges Bataille’s description and interpretation of the sacrificial economy of the Aztecs are examples of a textual weaving that, although radically divergent in their final movement, converge in illuminating a fissure. The rational self-definition of the political economy and doctrine of modernity enters a hiatus or cognitive failure in the example of Mexico, and in the paradoxical model of temporality that connects past and present, life and death, politics and sacrifice in the example: these metaphors engender and reflect uncanny doubles, sinister duplications, splinters of a modernity demented by an excess of ghosts emanating from its historical formation and logic. Under this scheme necropower –as a core inscription in the social text of Mexico—appears not only as a reality that auto-generates and reproduces in historical cycles, we will be touching upon a discursive localization (emplacement) that erases (defaces) the limits of representation of violence and prefigures the tools for its critical deconstruction.

The gap that separates “the fiction of a distinction between ‘the ends of war’ and ‘the means of war’ collapses.” The building (architectural metaphor) cracks open into a view of a zone of disturbance folded and doubled within modernity.What we are describing here is an operation of “making uncanny” that is engendered by a critical reading situated at the postcolony: a “making uncanny” that effects itself as the real. We are reading through colonially generated fantasies of wilderness and death and fictions to create the effect of the real. What is a stake is not an essence—as in Paz—that reified radical other consciousness that rotates outside progress, the promise of democracy, and modernity. Quite the contrary, what emerges is a blue print of the colonial war machine as the motor of the capitalist system in its core logic of formation-expansion; that is, what Frantz Fanon named the spatialization of colonial occupation working throughout a symbolic and psychic territorialization. In her Mariana B otey

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installation, What Else Could We Talk About? Teresa Margolles contaminates a Sixteenth Century Venetian palace with traces of violence, death, mutilation and sacrifice. Blood, cloth, dirt, broken glass, tainted water: all splinters of the global war on drugs.“Making uncanny” is the process of a spectral unfolding: a shadow cast by a profound absence, an image of fissioning multiplication—doubled and doubled again—expressing an internal dissimilarity, a constitutive dismembering, and if we follow Freud closely, the source of the terror of castration (decapitation). The contaminated palace wrecks the architectural metaphor: the realm upon which to transpose this space is a labyrinth of ruins (invoking a sacrificial, sumptuous and vertiginous Maudite narrative), a representation that exceeds (is nonassimilable to) symbolic transposition; rather a pulsation and punctuation of the realm of manifestation.

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T oward a critique of sacrificial reason: N ecropolitics and radical aesthetics in M exico

TERESA MARGOLLES Born in 1963 in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. Lives and works in Mexico City.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS What Else Could We Talk About?, 53rd International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale/ Biennale di Venezia-La Biennale di Venezia,Venice, Italy, cur. Cuauhtémoc Medina

2009

Creativetimes, Governor’s Island, New York, usa.“Video otra vez”, Metales Pesado Visual, Santiago de Chile, cur. Patrick Hamilton Teresa Margolles, Los Herederos, Die Erben, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, Switzerland Teresa Margolles, Operativo Part 2,Y Gallery New York, New York, usa

2008

Operativo,Y Gallery New York, New York, usa En Lugar de los Hechos – Anstelle der Tatsachen, Factory, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, Austria, cur. Hartwig Knack Teresa Margolles, arcaute art contemporaneo, Beijing, China Escombro, Galería Salvador Díaz, Madrid, Spain 21, Galería Salvador Díaz, Madrid, Spain

2007

Decálogo, eco, Mexico City, cur. Guillermo Santamarina Herida, Proyecto para Ecatepec en la Colección Jumex, Mexico City, cur. Taiyana Pimentel 127 cuerpos, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany, cur. Patrizia Dander,

2006

Tres minutos, Casa Taller José Clemente Orozco, Guadalajara, Mexico Teresa Margolles, Curating Library, deSingel, Antwerp, Belgium, cur. Moritz Kung Ciudad Juárez, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, Switzerland

T E RESA MARGO L L ES

2005

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Involution, cac Centre d’Art Contemporain de Brétigny, Brétigny/Paris, France, cur. Pierre Bal-Blanc Caída Libre/Chute libre, Frac de Lorraine, Metz, France, cur.

Béatrice Josse.

2004

Teresa Margolles. Muerte sin fin, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, cur. Udo Kittelmann

2003

Crematorio, Galería Enrique Guerrero, Mexico City Teresa Margolles – En el aire (In der Luft), magazin 4 Vorarlberger Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria, cur. Wolfgang Fetz Teresa Margolles, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, Switzerland Das Leichentuch, Kunsthalle Wien,Vienna, Austria, cur.

Wolfgang Fetz, Gerald Matt, Lucas Gehrmann

2002

Fin, La Panadería, Mexico City Aire, Art Palace, Madrid, Spain

2001

Vaporización, ace Gallery, Mexico City El agua en la ciudad, Sala 22, Barcelona, Spain, cur. Eduardo Pérez Soler Grumos sobre la piel, Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, Barcelona, Spain Fotografías y Videos, Espace d‘art Yvonamor Palix, Paris, France

2000

Lengua, ace Gallery, New York/Los Angeles, usa Lienzo, Espacio Contexto, Guatemala Bondaje, Kunsthaus Santa Fe, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, cur. Lothar Müller

1999

Andén, Cali, Colombia

1998

Tarjetas para cortar cocaína, Galería Caja Dos, Mexico City, cur. Armando Sariñana Autorretratos en la morgue, Museo de la ciudad de Querétaro, Mexico, cur. Gabriel Hörner

1997

145

Cadáveres, El Getho, Madrid, Spain, cur. Josechú Dávila

curriculum

GROUP EXHIBITIONS Man Son 1969. Vom Schrecken der Situation, Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburg, Germany

2009

Political/Minimal, Kunst-Werke Berlin e.V. - KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany

2008

7+2 Project Rooms, marco,Vigo, Spain, cur. Gerardo Mosquera Endless Sphere, Center for Contemporary Art, Kiew, Ucrania, cur. Thomas Trummer Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence, University of Southern California Fisher Gallery, Los Angeles, usa, cur. José Roca The Rest of Now, Manifesta 7. European Biennial for Contemporary Art, cur. Raqs Media Collective, Ex-Alumix, Bolzano, Italy Recursos incontrolables y otros desplazamientos naturales, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo muac, Mexico City La sombra de la historia, cgac-Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain Die Lucky Bush, MuHKA–Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium, cur. Imogen Stidworthy Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence, The John and Mable Ringing Museum of Art, Sarasota, usa, cur. José Roca ¡Viva la muerte!, caam–Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Cran Canaria, Spain, cur. Gerald Matt / Thomas Mießgang / Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya Las Implicaciones de la Imagen, Museo Unversitario de Ciencias y Arte, muca Campus, Mexico City Autopsia de lo Invisibile, cur. Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, malba–Fundación Constantini, Buenos Aires, Argentina Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence, McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, usa, cur. José Roca Arte≠Vida. Actions by Artists of the Americas. 1960-2000, El Museo del barrio, New York, usa Emotional Systems, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy, cur.

Franziska Nori/ Martin Steinhoff

T E RESA MARGO L L ES

2007

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¡Viva la muerte! Kunst und Tod in Lateinamerika, Kunsthalle Wien,Viena, Austria, cur. Gerald Matt/ Thomas Mießgang Iberoamerica glocal: Entre la globalización y el localismo, Casa de América, Madrid, Spain. cur. Dennys Matos/ Lorena Peréz Rumpler Six Feet Under–Autopsie unseres Umgang mit den Toten, Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresde, Germany, cur. Bernhard Fibicher/ Susanne Friedli Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, usa, cur. José Roca Cross lake atlantic, galleria enrico fornello, Prato, Italy, cur.

John Duncan ERA, Montevideo, Uruguay, cur. Gerardo Mosquera Grey Water, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, cur.

Robert Leonard Theater of Cruelty, White Box, NuevaYork, usa, cur. Raúl Zamudio 7. Internationale Foto-Triennale Esslingen 2007, Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany, cur. Andreas Baur Rites and Rituals, Herzliya Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, cur.

Dalia Levin Collezione La Gaia, Centro Sperimentale per le Arti Contemporanee, Caraglio, Italy The Art of Failure, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz/ Basel, Switzerland, cur. Sabine Schaschl/ Claudia Spinelli e-flux video rental, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, France Into Me/ Out of Me, macro Future, Roma, Italy, cur. Klaus Biesenbach Otras contemporaneidades. Convivencias problemáticas, Bienal de Valencia,Valencia, Spain, cur. Kevin Power, Ticio Escobar Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia, cur. José Roca We are your future, Special program during the 2nd Moscow Biennial, Moscow, Russia, cur. Juan Puntes, Ethan Cohen Global Feminism, Brooklyn Museum, Nueva York, usa, cur.

Maura Reilly, Linda Nochlin

147

curriculum

Fumus Fugiens, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, cur. Bianca Visser et.al.

2006

Límites-Estrecho Dudoso, ars teor/éTica, San José, Costa Rica, cur.Virginia Pérez-Ratton y Tamara Díaz Bringas Six Feet Under–Autopsie unseres Umgang mit den Toten, Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland, cur. Bernhard Fibicher International 06, Liverpool Biennial 2006, Liverpool, uk e-flux video rental, Arthouse Texas, Austin, usa e-flux video rental, Mucsarnok- Kunsthalle Budapest, Budapest, Hungary Pasión/Provocación–Fotografia y video en la Colección de Teofilo Cohen, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, cur.Victor Zamudio Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York, usa,cur.

Maura Reilly, Linda Nochlin “Certain Encounters”, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia,Vancouver, Canada Las implicaciones de la imagen, Museo de Arte de Sinaloa, Culiacán, Mexico Excess, z33, Hasselt, Belgium, cur. Pieter van Bogaert Un Nuevo y Bravo Mundo, Sala de Alcalá, Madrid, Spain, cur.

El Perro

2005

Indelible Images (trafficking between Life and Death), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, usa, cur. Gilbert Vicario 9. Baltic Triennial of International Art, cac Vilnius, Lituania, cur. Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy/ Raimundas Malasauskas/ Alexis Vaillant Baroque and Neobaroque, Domus Atrium 2002, Salamanca, Spain, cur. F. Javiar Panera Detonantes, Espacio opa, Guadalajara, Mexico, cur. Guillermo Sanatamarina Prague Biennale 2, Section: Acción Directa: Latin American Social Sphere, Prague, Czech Republic, cur. Marco Scotini Eco: Arte Contemporáneo Mexicano, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, cur. Kevin Power/ Osvaldo Sánchez T E RESA MARGO L L ES

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Murmur, International Film Festival of Rotterdam/ Rotterdam Centre for Contemporary Art, Roterdam, Netherlands, cur. Edwin Carrels 2004

Triennale Poligráfica San Juan, San Juan, Puerto Rico Casas en acción, Casa de América, Madrid, Spain A grain of dust a drop of water, Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, cur. Milena Kalinovska, Roberto Pinto et.al.

Produciendo realidad. Arte e resistenza latinoamericana, Prometeo Associazione per l’Arte Contemporanea, Lucca, Italy, cur. Marco Scotini I need you, Centre PasquArt, Biel, Switzerland, cur.

Bernhard Bischoff / Dolores Denaro / Beate Engel Die Zehn Gebote, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, Germany, cur. Klaus Biesenbach Le mystère du kilo d’or. Art Contemporain de Sinaloa, Instituto de México, Paris, France Made in Mexico, ucla Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, usa, cur. Gilbert Vicario Excéntrico, Museo Provincial de Lugo, Lugo, Spain, cur.

J. Lavagne Narcoculture, Musée International des Arts Modestes, Sète, France, cur. Marco Granados Public/ Private, 2nd Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand, cur. Ngahiraka Mason Made in Mexico, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, usa, cur. Gilbert Vicario

2003

Outlook, Technopolis (Old Gasworks), Athens, Greece, cur.

Christos Joachimides iv Bienal de Mercosur, Porto Alegre, Brazil, cur. Edgardo Ganado Kim

Terror Chic, Galerie Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Munich, Germany, cur. Dr. Eva Karcher Corps et fruits, Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris, France In faccia al mondo. Esperienze del ritratto fotografico contemporaneo, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genova, Italy, cur. Matteo Fochessati

149

curriculum

Fuera de campo, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City, cur.

David Perea Stretch, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada, cur. Eugenio Valdez Figueroa and Keith Wallace Des/fragmentar, Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte Roma, Mexico City, cur. David Perea Espectacular, Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City, cur.

Taiyana Pimentel Göteborgs Internationella Konstbiennal, Gothenbor, Sweden, cur. Carl Michael von Hausswolff Bankett, zkm Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruh, Germany, cur. PeterWeibel et.al.

Mexico Attacks, Prometeo Associazione Culturale per l‘Arte Contemporanea, Lucca, Italy, cur. Teresa Macrì Flor y canto, Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, usa, cur. Ivonamor Palix 20 Million Mexicans Can’t Be Wrong, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK, cur. Cuauhtémoc Medina Mexico: Sensitive Negotiations, Consulado General de México, Art Basel, Miami, usa, cur. Taiyana Pimentel

2002

Otredad y mismidad, Galería de Arte Contemporáneo, Puebla, Mexico, cur. Aldo Sánchez Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice, Nikolai Fine Arts, New York, usa, cur. Raúl Zamudio, Entre líneas, Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain, cur.Virginia Pérez Ratón y Santiago Olmo Mexiko-Stadt: Eine Ausstellung über den Tauschwert von Körpern und Werten, Kunst-Werke, Kunst-Werke, Berlin, cur.

Klaus Biesenbach Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values, p.s.1, Long Island City, usa, cur. Klaus Biesenbach 20 Million Mexicans Can’t Be Wrong, South London Gallery, London, uk, cur. Cuauhtémoc Medina Lascas, L’Œil de Poisson, Quebec, Canada, cur. Jorge Reynoso.

Zebra Crossing, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany cur. Magali Arreola T E RESA MARGO L L ES

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vii

2001

Biennal de Pintura de Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador

Escultura Mexicana, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City Hábitat Global, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, cur. Leonardo Ramirez Ventanas, Madrid, Spain, cur. Guillermo Santamarina Muestra de video méxicano, École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Toulouse, France, cur. Eduardo Perez Solder 25x25, Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City, cur.

Adolfo Patiño

2000

Extramuros, Bienal de la Habana, Havana, Cuba, cur. Taiyana Pimentel Cuerpo y fruta, Ambassade de France, Mexico City 00 Paréntesis de una ciudad, San Juan de Puerto Rico, cur.

Guillermo Santamarina Cinco continentes y una ciudad, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, cur.Víctor Zamudio Señales de resistencia, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, cur. Lorena Wolffer Exotismos, iv Bienal de Lyon, Lyon, France, cur. Jean H. Martín

1999

Baño María, Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City, cur.

Ximena Cuevas Bienal de Fotografía, Centro de la Imagen Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City

1998

Foto Construcciones, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Morelia, Mexico, cur. Moises Argüello Bienal Bidimensional, Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City

1996

xvii

Salón de la plástica Sinaloense, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico

Muestra Latinoamericana de Fotografía, Traveling exhibition in Latin American countries 1995

151

Realidad virtual, Galería José María Velasco, Mexico City, cur.

Armando Cristeto

curriculum

TERESA MARGOLLES/ SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY MONOGRAPHS AND CATALOGUES The Art of Failure, Hans-Joachim Müller, Sabine Schaschl/ Claudia Spinelli (eds), Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, pp. 1016, 44, 74-77, cat.

2009

Endless Sphere, Thomas Trummer, Siemens Arts Program, Munich, pp. 130-139, cat.

2008

Las implicaciones de la imagen/ Implications of the image, Ruth Estévez, muca unam, México p. 176, cat.

Manifesta 7. European Biennial for Contemporary Art, Trento, July, p. 92, cat.

21, Carlos Jiménez, Ernesto Díezmartínez, Galería Salvador Díaz, Madrid, cat.

2007

Sistemi Emotivi. Artisti contemporani tra emozione e ragione, Dario Cimorelli, Silvana Editoriale Spa, Milano, pp. 156 - 161 ¡Viva la muerte! Kunst und Tod in Lateinamerika, Thomas Miessgang, Kunsthalle Wien, pp. 13-14, 34-37, cat.

100 Latin American Artists, Rosa Olivares, Exit Publications, Madrid, pp. 302-305, 447-448 “En piel ajena:The work of Teresa Margolles”, Rebecca Scott Bray, in: Passages. Volume Eleven, Andrew T. Kenyon, Peter D. Rush, University Wollongong Australia, pp. 13-50 Phantasmagoria: specters of absence, José Roca, ici, New York, pp. 18-19, 64 “Leichen, Totenköpfe und Skelette”, Bernhard Fibicher, in: Six Feet Under–Autopsie unseres Umgangs mit Toten, Kunstmuseum Bern, Berne, pp. 58, 76-77, 94, 213, cat.

2006

International 06, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, pp. 136-139, cat.

Teresa Margolles–127 cuerpos, Kunstverein Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, cat.

Kreis Kugel Kosmos–Der Ball ist rund, Moritz Wullen, Bernd Ebert, Staatliche Museen zu Berlín, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Berlin, pp. 88-95, cat.

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Collectors 1, Brioschi, Eva, Collezione la Gaia, Centro Sperimentale per le Arti Contemporanee, Caraglio, pp. 150-151, ex. cat.

2005

“Una ética obtenida por su suspensión”, Cuauhtémoc Medina, en: Situaciones artisticas latinoamericanas, Teor/ética, San José, Costa Rica: teor/ética, pp. 105-116. “semefo: La morgue,” Cuauhtémoc Medina, en: Ruben Gallo ed. México D. F.: Lecturas para Paseantes. Madrid,Turner, 2005. p. 341-356.

2004

“semefo: The Morgue”, Cuauhtémoc Medina en: Rubén Gallo ed.: The Mexico City Reader. Madison, Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press, p. 309-326.

“Teresa Margolles”, Bernhard Bischoff, in: I need you, Centre PasquArt, Biel, pp. 55-56, cat.

“Le mystère du kilo d’or”, Hector Falcon, Art Contemporain de Sinaloa, Instituto de México, Paris, pp. 39-42, cat.

Die zehn Gebote, Klaus Biesenbach, Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden, pp. 201-202, p. 208, cat.

Narcochic, narcochoc, Herve Di Rosa, Marco Granados, Mar, Musée International des Arts Modestes, Séte, p. 64, p. 68, cat.

Teresa Margolles. Muerte sin fin, Udo Kittelmann/ Klaus Görner, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Abril, ex. cat.

Public / Private. The 2nd Auckland Triennial/ Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, pp. 102-107, cat.

Made in Mexico, Gilbert Vicario, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, pp. 9-19, 64-66, cat.

2003

“Teresa Margolles”,Teresa Macri, Praguebiennale 1, Peripheries becomes Center, Prague, pp. 400-401, cat.

Outlook, International Art Exhibition/ Adam Editions-Pergamos S.A., Athens, pp. 224-225, pp. 354, 367, cat.

Fuera de Campo, Guillermo Santamarina, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City, cat.

Against All Evens, 2nd International Biennale for Contemporary Art, Göteborg, pp. 52-55, 154-155, cat.

153

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“Teresa Margolles”, Rubén Gallo, Cream 3, Phaidon, London, pp. 212-215, cat.

Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values, P.S.1 and Kunst-Werke Berlin, pp. 196-201, ex. cat.

2002

“Teresa Margolles”. Otredad y mismidad, Ana María Guasch, Espacio Anexo a la Galería de Arte Contemporáneo y Diseño, Puebla, pp. 23-29, cat.

“The unbearable weightiness of beings”, Jean Fisher and Caroline Vercoe, Coco Fusco: The bodies that were not ours and other writings, iniva, London, pp. 61-77

2001

REVIEWS AND ARTICLES Valerie Knoll, “Teresa Margolles. Peter Kilchmann“ en: Artforum, New York, May, pp. 251-252

2009

Lourdes Morales Mendoza, “Vacío Heredado” en: Código Postal 06140, Mexico City, April/May, pp. 12-17 Gesine Borcherdt, “In Berlin wird der Minimalismus politisch, und zwar 32 Mal hintereinander“ en: Monopol, Berlin, No. 1, Jan., p. 106 Amy White, “Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence” en: Art Papers, Charlotte, May 15, pp. 44-45

2008

Leah Ollman, “Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence’ at usc Fisher Museum of Art” en: Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, Oct. 27 Emmanuelle Lequeux, “La jeune scène mexicaine” en: Beaux Arts, Boulogne, No. 294, pp. 86-93 Anthony Downey, “What was lost: Manifesta 7 and the Soul of Modernity“ en: Third Text, London, No. 22/6, Nov. 1, pp.

787-803 Thomas Miessgang, “Viva la muerte!” en: Humboldt, Goethe Institute, Munich, No. 98, pp. 18-21 Ruth Estévez, “Teresa Margolles. Museo Experimental El Eco“ en: Flash Art, Jan., p. 158

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“Viva la muerte! In der Kunsthalle Wien“ en: Kunst-Bulletin, Zurich, No.1/2, pp. 71/72 2007

Claudia Laudanno, ”Art Encounter in Montevideo” en: ArtNexus, Miami, No. 67, Dec., pp. 182-184 Oriana Baddeley, “Teresa Margolles y la patalogia de la muerte cotidiana” in: Dardo Magazine No. 5, June, Spain/Portugal/ Brazil, pp. 60-81 Ivonne Pini, “Fantasmagoría, Specters of Absence” en: ArtNexus, Miami, No. 65, June, pp. 104-106 Simon Baur, “The Art of Failure im Kunsthaus Baselland” en: Kunst-Bulletin, Zurich, June, p. 73 Alessandra Poggianti, “La Panadería, The Mexican Unterground of the 90s” en: Flash Art, Milano, No. 253, March/Apr., p. 69 Mister Motley, “Rode Draad” en: Saskia von Kampen, Amsterdam, No. 13, pp. 34–35

2006

Magdalena Holzhey, “Zwischen Erinnerung und Auflösung” en: Kunst-Bulletin, Zurich, No. 12, Dec., pp. 40-44 Eva Hess, “Der diskrete Charme der Verwesung” en: SonntagsZeitung, Zurich, Oct. 29, pp. 49-51 “Homo bulla - Zum Motiv der Seifenblase als Sinnbild der Vergänglichkeit” en: Bernd Ebert, “4 piezas fundamentales del arte contemporáneo en méxico según Guillermo Santamaria”, Travesías, Mexico, No. 48, April, p. 70

2005

Pascal Beausse, “Teresa Margolles” en: Flash Art International, Milan, July/Sept., pp. 106-109 Julieta González, “Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan - América Latina y el Caribe - 2004” en: ArtNexus, Miami, No. 56, Apr. – June, pp. 70-75

2004

Klaus Biesenbach, “Political Minimalism – narrative Geometry” en: Flash Art International, Milano, No. 237, July/ Sept., p. 89 Judith Raum,“Teresa Margolles - Museum für Moderne Kunst” en: Flash Art International, Milan, No. 237, July/Sept., p. 122 Michael Stoeber, “Teresa Margolles” en Artist Kunstmagazin, Bremen, No. 61, pp. 48-53

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Amanda Coulson, “Teresa Margolles” en Frieze, London, Sept., pp. 122-123 Judith Raum, “Teresa Margolles” en Flash Art International, Milan, July/Sept., p. 122 “mmk” en Tema Celeste, Milan, No. 104, July/Aug., p. 107 Mark Siemons, “Flucht der Verflüchtigung” en: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurt am Main, June 25, p. 39 Michael Stoeber, “Soziale Kreaturen. Wie Körper Kunst wird” en: Kunstforum International, Ruppichteroth, May/ June, pp. 277-280 Ruppichteroth, May/June, pp. 277-280 Pablo Helguera, “Made in Mexico” en: Tema Celeste, Milan, No. 103, May/June, p. 94 Belinda Grace Gardner, “Liebesdienst an Leichen” en: Kunstzeitung, May Jörg Häntzschel, “Das kurze Leben nach dem Tod” en: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, No. 94, Apr. 23, p. 15 Christian Huther, “Der Tod kommt mit Seifenblasen” en: Frankfurter Neue Presse, Frankfurt am Main, No. 95, Apr. 23, p. 2 Silke Hohmann, “Über Leichen” en: Frankfurter Rundschau, Frankfurt am Main, No. 95, Apr. 23, p. 17 Ingeborg Harms, “Bilder aus dem Jenseits” en: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Frankfurt am Main, No. 16, Apr. 18, p. 32 Eva Karcher,“Requiem for the Forgotten by Teresa Margolles” en: Sleek, Hamburg, No. 04, Apr., pp. 158-163 Nancy Rabinowitz, “Made in Mexico” exhibit opens” en: Southbridge Evening News, Southbridge, No. 51, Apr. 1 Paolo Bianchi,“Mensch als Abfall” en: Kunstforum International, Ruppichteroth, No. 168, Jan./Feb., pp. 146-151 Ken Johnson, “Mexican Conceptualists, None Especially Mexican” en:The New York Times, New York, Feb. 20 Paolo Bianchi,“Müll – Der Schatten der Kunst” en: Kunstforum International, Ruppichteroth, No. 168, Jan./Feb., pp. 35-45 Cate McQuaid, “Mex” en: The Boston Globe, Boston, 23 Jan., p. 13, p.18

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2003

Francisca Rivero Lake, “Teresa Margolles” en: Art Nexus, Miami, No. 51,Vol.2, Dec./Feb., pp. 143-144 Hans Rudolf Reust, “Teresa Margolles” en: Artforum, New York, Nov., pp. 199-200 Cuauhtémoc Medina, “El ojo breve / La muerte infiltrada” en: Reforma, Mexico City, July 9 Alessandro Romanini, “A State of Mind, Mexiko Attacks” en: Art Nexus, Miami, No. 49, June – Aug., pp. 153-155 Gerald Matt, “Teresa Margolles” en: Kunsthalle Wien, project Space,Vienna, No. 01 Tom Crowley, “Mexico City on the move” en:Tema Celeste, Milano, No. 97, May/June, pp. 22-2 Almuth Spiegler, “Kurzsichtiger Segen” en: Die Presse, Vienna, April 15 Niklas Maak, “Minimal Mensch” en: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurt, No. 69, Mar. 22, p. 43

2002

Niklas Maak, “Mexico City 2000‘s” en: 032c, Berlin, Winter 02/03, pp. 94, 95 Francisco Casas, “Cadáveres exquisitos, La ética de la muerte” en:Viceversa, Mexico City, Nov., pp. 56-59 “Postcards from the Edge” en: The Royal Academy Magazine, Nr. 77, Winter, pp. 59-61 Itala Schmelz, “Teresa Margolles en La Panadería” en: Código Postal 06140, Mexico City, Nov./Dec., pp. 14-15 Alia Lira Hartmann, “Teresa Margolles exhibe “la niebla del horror” en Mex-Artes Berlin” en: La Jornada, Mexico City, Oct. 30 “Makabre Schönheiten, Junge mexikanische Kunst in Berlin” en: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich, Oct. 23, p. 61 NaiefYehya,“Mexico City.An Exhibition About the Exchange Rate of Bodies and Values” en: ArtNexus, No.46, Oct., pp.

156-158 “Kriminell, pathetisch” en: Die Zeit, Hamburg, Sept. 26, p. 48 Olivier Debroise, “Fin de temporada, saldos” en: Canibalism, Celeste, Mexico City, No. 8, pp. 86-91

157

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Klaus Biesenbach, “Hunting men Hunting dogs, fear and loathing in Mexico City” en: Flash Art International, Milano,Vol. xxiv, No. 225, pp. 82-85 “Unter Menschenjägern - Unamerikanische Triebe” en FAZSonntagszeitung, Frankfurt am Main, Feb. 10, p. 25 Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Zones de Tolérance: Teresa Margolles, semefo et (l’)au-delà/Zones of Tolerance:Teresa Margolles, semefo and Beyond.” en: Parachute, Montreal, No. 104 (México), pp. 31-52

2001

Eduardo Pérez, “Mutaciones. Notes sur la vídeo mexicaine actuelle” en: Cinemas d´amérique latine, Toulouse, No. 9, pp.

105-106 Antonio Zaya, “Puerto Rico OO (paréntesis en la ciudad)” in: Art Nexus, Colombia, No. 39, pp. 115-117 Marco Antonio Hernandez, “Contra el Mexico curious” in: Día Siete, México, No. 108, pp. 18-19 Coco Fusco, “La insoportable pesadez de los seres: el arte en México después de nafta” en: Atlántica, Canarias, No. 29, pp.16-21 María Fernanda Teran, “La muerte viviente en el paraíso perdido de semefo” in: Revista Zugo, Mexico City, No. 7, pp. 24-27 Eduardo Perez Soler, “Reflexivo, irónico, posrelacional” in: Lápiz, Madrid, No. 173, pp. 32-33 Victor Zamudio, “Mexico City: art, aggression and violence” in: NY Arts, NewYork,Vol.7, No. 2, pp. 52-55 Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Recent Political Forms. Radical Pursuits in Mexico” in: Trans 8, NewYork, pp.146-163.

2000

Victor Zamudio, “Arte y Violencia en la Ciudad de México” in: Atlántica, Canarias, Enero.

Osvaldo Sánchez “semefo la vida del cadáver” in: Revista de Occidente, Madrid, No. 201, pp. 131-139

1998

Estrella De Diego, “De la muerte y los demás y otras parabolas modernas” in: Revista de Occidente, Madrid, No. 201, pp. 47-60 Carlos Blas Galindo, “Grupo semefo” in: Arte en Colombia, pp.117-118

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TERESA MARGOLLES. WHAT ELSE COULD WE TALK ABOUT? finished printing in May 2009 in the workshops of Artes Grรกficas Palermo, Madrid, Spain. Typeset in Bembo and Univers in an edition of 2000 copies.